Random Batch of the Week

Hello. Writing about cartoon batches the last two posts had me thinking, what if I just shared some random batch of cartoons, tell the story of that particular week. So now, Random Batch of the Week will be a new ongoing segment for when I can’t think of anything else to write about.

This is the part where I remind you to subscribe if you haven’t!

Up to this day I have submitted 281 batches of cartoons to The New Yorker over the past ten years. To choose this week’s batch I asked my wife to pick a number from 1 to 281 and she responded, “Ellis, I have told you a million times not to burst into my office asking me a stupid question during an important work presentation,” so I waited a bit until her PowerPoint was done. She sighed and said “222.”

222! A fine batch. First Submitted to The New Yorker on Jun 26, 2023. Five toons total. This is an interesting batch because I sold most of the cartoons in it, but none of them to The New Yorker. There are not many places that buy cartoons anymore, usually it’s NYer or bust, but this lucky batch managed make me some cash regardless. It helped that this was during my six month gig doing weekly cartoons for The Washington Post. (I’ll write about that one day, and if I’m feeling impish, about how certain readers of that paper loudly hated my guts.)

Beware, this segment will have some shop-talk! Some inside baseball. The ins-and-outs of the biz (that’s short for business).

On to the toons!

Ok this toon unsurprisingly sold nowhere. It falls under this category in my head, that’s like, “I have a concept that I want to explore but haven’t figured out the right joke yet.” The concept is that I’m a sloppy schmuck who gets stains on all of his clothes, pretty much right after I buy them. I feel like this is relatable but given the faces people make when I say “Isn’t this relatable?” I might be be on my own. I might try playing with this concept again one day.

This one has got a story about how brave or stupid I am, depending on how you look at it. After it was rejected from The New Yorker, I tried selling it to The Times, this British publication that recently started taking cartoons. The word going around was that cartoonists were just sort of naming their price. They responded saying that they liked this toon and asked how much I wanted for it. I named a price that felt fair to me and they said sorry, that’s too high. So now I was in this situation where I could either go back and be like “just kidding, you can pay me anything you want. I’ll take the dirt under your shoe,” or walk away. Like I mentioned, this was during my WaPo stint, and I was making good enough money at the time so I walked away.

The good news is I ended up selling it to Alta, for slightly more than I asked for at The Times. The bad news is that I can never come crawling back to The Times, where my peers are raking up dough selling multiple toons in a batch there.

This one also sold to Alta! Alta comes out four times a year and if you're lucky you can sell one or two of them a season. I made enough money from this cartoon to be able to afford about half the cost of one soda from a hotel mini bar.

This one got colorized and sold to The Washington Post. Not much to say on it. Some people think that it’s a comment on abstract art. It’s not. If anything it’s about power structures I guess.

This one also went to WaPo. I like this one. I like drawing animals (or insects) smoking or drinking. It also presented an interesting challenge: flies are very small, but the fly had to be big enough to seen talking with a human. I could have done, like an extreme closeup, but I wanted the fly to fit in with the rest of the environment, and make sure that it looked like his drinking buddy could hear him. Below is my original version of it, which I never submitted anywhere:

Too big. Why is the fly human-sized? Works for Cronenberg but not for this toon. Also, not cute. When you make an animal (or insect) drink and smoke, you have to make them cute. So I made the the new version, which is still a gigantic fly, but hopefully small enough that it doesn’t make you ask “why is that fly so big?” I don’t know, maybe it does, but it’s cuter, anyway.

And that’s the story of Batch 222! Let me know if you like this segment and want to see more. Please suggest any random numbers between 1 and 281! Please subscribe to this newsletter! Please live a life of joy and kindness!

Thanks for reading!

-Ellis