The First Cartoon I sold to the New Yorker

One thing I love doing is strolling down the old neighborhood and pointing out how things are different. Doesn’t matter if I’m alone, I’ll pull any stranger aside and say, “you know, this Pilates studio used to be a hotdog joint,” or “funny thing, this boutique baby clothing store used to be a hot dog joint.” Point is, I miss the old hot dog joint that got closed down.

But there’s one place they can’t tear down, and that’s memory lane, baby! The hotdog joint in my heart can never be replaced, no matter how many health code violations. So take my hand, pick up that hotdog bun from the sidewalk and take a big bite into one of my favorite memories: my first cartoon sale to the New Yorker.

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You’ll hear this from New Yorker Cartoonists: “I always sell the ones I least expect will sell.” That’s been true of a lot of my cartoons, starting with my first sale. I stuck it in at the end of the batch, deemed it “too weird” and sent it in. Here’s all the cartoons from that batch, the last one being the lucky winner.

I’ve shared this cartoon 100 million times, and I do love it. Not just because it was my first, but also because to this day it might be my most personal. I like to think that I have an exceptional skill of turning good thoughts into bad ones. I mean, maybe it’s not that exceptional, in fact it’s probably pretty average. Boring even. Boring and stupid, like me.

Anyway, the story of this cartoon is I met up with my friend Chantel, who was talking about how she liked to time the subway stops with how many pages of her book she could finish. So like, one given stop could be like two pages. She would then count the stop an estimate how much reading she could get done on the subway.

Being an idiot who doesn’t read enough, I couldn’t relate. But I did like the idea of subway stops being a measurement for something, and the signage was a good visual space to place with. So I thought about what I do on the subway instead of read, which was fretting. Nothing like a good fret. And at that time in my life most of my fretting came from social situations. The cartoon was born, deemed by me to be too weird, stuck in at the end of my batch and surprisingly sold. And that’s the story! The end.

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