On Signatures, Style and Branding

Hello!

I want to begin today by thanking everyone for their emails and comments in response to my query last week. You were all very helpful and I feel like I’m getting closer to understanding my mission statement for this blog. Right now I’m thinking it’s “a hard-hitting investigation into the dark underbelly of cartooning.” Or maybe “A deep-dive into the corruption that shaped the cartooning world.” Do those sound about right?

Perhaps I’ll save that for a future, award-winning podcast. For this newsletter, I received a lot of feedback that folks like the sort of behind-the-scenes-how-the-sausage-is-made stuff I write about here. That to me signals that perhaps this newsletter could be a, how should I put it? I guess like a behind-the-scenes-how-the-sausage-is-made newsletter. Specifically for cartooning.

Anyway, I’m still figuring it out. In the meantime this segues nicely into to today’s topic: Branding.

One nice thing that happens when you sell cartoons to The New Yorker is that you get to say “I’m a cartoonist for The New Yorker” at parties, and people sometimes reply “oh, cool.” That is better than “Oh, huh," which is the response you get when you tell them “I’m a cartoonist” without mentioning the magazine. The magazine legitimizes in a way that is simultaneously empowering and diminishing.

It’s empowering because everyone’s heard of The New Yorker, the brand, the history, etc. You get to attach your name to that brand and pretend that you are equally as important. But this comes at the expense of your own name. When The New Yorker shares your cartoon in the magazine or online, very few people think “oh that’s an Ellis Rosen cartoon,” they think “that’s a New Yorker Cartoon.” Because it is. Hell, even when a cartoon isn’t a New Yorker cartoon, some people think that it is because the black-and white one panel captioned cartoon is so synonymous with the institution.

The thing is, I’m not actually a New Yorker cartoonist. I’m not employed by them. None of us are. I draw cartoons and they might buy one from me this week, and one day they may never buy from me again. I’m a freelance cartoonist and if I want to build my own name, I can’t rely on a giant established name like The New Yorker to do that for me. This is a problem every cartoonist building a name for themselves faces.

So what do we do? We go on social media. We write newsletters, we do all that, fine. But the big thing we do is we lean into our style. Style works as a shorthand for name. It’s an immediate and powerful presentation of the self. Style is a dagger that punctures the broad-stroked definition of a New Yorker cartoon, causing unmistakable individuality to bleed out onto the page. A casual reader may not know the name of a brilliant cartoonist like Drew Dernavich, but they absolutely know his signature wood-cut style. (That goes for all of us, by the way. Drew is one of the better known cartoonists. I used him as an example because his style is immediately recognizable.)

Style is built, but its’s also innate, I think. I don’t really know. The tools we use are part of it as well: my drawing style can change drastically depending on the size of the brush I wield. Better artists than I can chime in about this. This kind of art theory makes my head hurt, but what I’m getting at is this: I am very insecure about my style. I have issues recognizing it and I’m not sure I could really describe it. I’ve written about how I’m inconsistent and I’m often of two minds about stuff. I feel the same way about my style.

Sometimes it feels like a trap, like I’m suddenly confined to drawing a certain way. I felt this way in early 2024. I was bored with myself, with my drawings. So I downloaded a new brush set and experimented and found one I really like and have been drawing with it ever since. Has my style changed? I don’t know! I already told you that I can’t recognize it! In some ways I think it has. You tell me:

But maybe not. I dunno! I’ll don’t think I’ll ever know. I don’t know if the differences are mostly superficial because the tools are different, or if the tools are causing me to draw in a fundamentally new kind of way. Not to mention that hopefully I’m always growing and getting better as an artist. Hopefully. But there is one thing that absolutely has changed: My signature.

For ten years my signature has been the one that is featured on that top cartoon, the same one that I use to signoff at the end of each these newsletters. Signatures, like style are important shorthand for displaying individuality. It’s literally your name in your style. In my case, it’s a bad signifier of my actual name, as it’s just my first name. I chose style over substance in this case. Another fun fact is, I’ve only drawn it once. I just import the same signature picture into every cartoon I draw. Until recently.

Around the same time I was growing bored with my style, someone asked me for a signed print. I had the same weird dumb thought always have when I sign art: do they want it signed like I sign my cartoons or signed like I sign a check? The answer is that they never care and I’m overthinking it, but overthinking is what I do best.

Anyway, the ordeal got me thinking about my signature, my style, my brand, and all these questions of self-identity and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I just decided screw it, I’m going to draw my pictures and my name however the hell I want and not look back. Now I sign my drawings like I sign my checks, (but still without the last name) and move on to the next cartoon.

There is this nagging voice in my head, saying “what about your brand? Shouldn’t you keep the signature, the style, the recognition?” I don’t know, maybe I should. But I’ve come to really despise seeing myself as a brand, or as a hustler, building my image, always working and crafting my iconic look, acting like those obnoxious Fiverrs ads from a few years ago that would send me into a rage whenever I got on the subway. Whatever brand I have, I can’t let it control how I work. It’s just not fun.

I am inconsistent. I am messy. I am an artist. I don’t want to be anything more than that and I don’t think I would be capable if I tried. So I’m just going to keep dicking around with my style and signature and do whatever feels right in the moment and hopefully the end results will speak for themselves.

Or you can speak for me! Let me know what you think about this stuff. Chances are you understand better than I. Chances are, I’ll find myself disagreeing with what I’ve written and change my mind. Regardless, I’ll probably have more to say about this and there will most likely be a part 2. If you have anything to add, let me know! Also, you know, like and subscribe. Tell a friend about the newsletter. I’m always grateful for stuff that, and for you, dear reader.

Ok I’m done! Thanks for reading!