The Batch
I thought it would be fun to show what is (for me) a week’s work, more or less. Below that photo is another photo of a “batch” — the collective word for the drawings submitted weekly to The New Yorker. The batch is what’s been distilled from the working drawings, or just from a blank piece of paper.
First photo: what you see are working drawings from one week (some pages with just a few words or drawing fragments are in pile on the upper left). Some of the drawings shown are as finished as they’ll ever be, and will likely never see the light of day again. Others are beginnings of thoughts that turned into something I felt were solved well enough to draw up (I don’t submit “roughs” as many if not most of my New Yorker colleagues; drawings that are bought are the same drawings submitted in the batch). Only one of the drawings below was submitted in my weekly batch; the others were placed in a pile. In a day or so I’ll add that pile to a bigger pile of previous working drawings. When that pile gets unwieldy I’ll toss it into a banker’s box. Not sure why I save all these, but that’s how I roll.
I’ve blurred these drawings and reversed them to make them (I hope) unreadable. Half-baked ideas are just as uninteresting as bad baked ideas.
Next is a recent batch (again, blurred, with captions mostly concealed), barley distilled from the above group of working drawings. There are weeks when the working drawings add up to nothing but a pile of working drawings because I have a habit of sending in one-offs, that is, drawings done in one take, without any previous working drawings. In this batch of seven, nearly all were one-offs.
Sometimes I submit work that I’m 1000% convinced hasn’t a chance but I’m not quite ready to banker’s box it. The drawing at the very bottom of the batch is one of those. Before it disappears into a banker’s box (a box that will eventually be stacked on top of a pile of banker’s boxes in a room of piles of banker’s boxes) I’ll unblur it for you:
