Hello, and welcome to a new(ish) segment called “The Origin of a Cartoon.” I put the (ish) there because technically I have done this before, in an early post about my “Ned Helped Out” cartoon. But when I wrote that, it was a one-off. A visionless exercise in time-killing. Pure folly. An afterthought. But now, you see, it’s a segment. A proud tradition passed down from post to post. An entry for the historical record. A sepia-toned still from a Ken Burns documentary your uncle is watching, pointing at the screen and saying to himself, “that right there? That’s history.”

A one-off? Nothing, forgettable. A segment? Well my friend, that’s what the finest newsletters are made of.

Or maybe not, I don’t know. We’ll see how it goes. Honestly, I’m not sure how many cartoons I can actually do this with. Anyway, today, we’re going to discuss the story for this cartoon:

I shared this cartoon fairly recently. It’s old news, I know. But, ah, you see, for this most prestigious segment, I’m going to share the sketches and the journey this cartoon took to get from my sketchbook to the the pages of The New Yorker, the April 13th, 2021 issue.

It started here:

The initial idea all hangs on the word “replace.” I had been thinking about that word within two separate contexts, and I was trying to marry them in this cartoon. The first context was that old chestnut, “human jobs are being replaced with robots.” It’s an old gripe, a trope even, but it’s one that seems to get closer to reality every year.

The other was context with the phrase, “I’m replacing my floors with (whatever.)” I don’t know where I heard that. I wasn’t replacing my floors. I’ve never replaced a floor in my life. But I heard it, and I must have heard it a bunch of times, because it became PCF (Potential Cartoon Fodder) to me.

So both phrases were buzzing through my head, and I had the thought “hey, the word “replace” is in both of them, let’s mash ‘em together!” Great, except the only problem is the cartoon doesn't make any sense.

My next thought was, “Maybe if I actually show the floors it will make more sense.”

That was a good idea, the cartoon is about floors, so floors should be in the cartoon. It did not, however, help the cartoon make more sense. The problem is that despite the word “replace,” the two concepts have nothing to do with one another. I had to pick one angle. “Replaced by robots,” was the trite option of the two, so I went with the wood thing.

I don’t know from wood. I don’t know why any one floor is better than another. I don’t know why I replaced “reclaimed wood’ in the first two drafts with “hardwood floors.” in this next version. I just knew, perhaps through social osmosis, that “hardwood floors” is a thing, a desirable thing, and that’s all you need to know as a cartoonist. We who know a little about a lot. Now that the new focus of the joke was hardwood floors being desirable, and not jobs, I had to take this cartoon out of an office setting.

From there it became a question of scale. Scale, or more specifically, the contrast that scale utilizes, is such an important concept in cartooning. When in doubt, think very big or very small. I went with big, as big as it gets, a nice comfortable spot for cartoonists. I had to get God into this cartoon.

And there you have it. that’s basically the cartoon. I showed this sketch to my buddy Benjamin Frisch, who suggested that I change “all of creation,” with “the vastness of creation,” and I agreed, because ‘vastness’ really underlines the massive scale that this cartoon is working with. “Vast” is a great word too. I do love a good “V” word. Anyway, I drew it up, feeling pretty confident about it, and New Yorker bought it.

I’ve said it before; some cartoons come to you immediately, some take a few stabs. I like selling the ones that follow this kind of journey, it feels like your hard work paid off. Also you can write about it for future blogs. And that concludes our first(ish) installment of The Origin of a Cartoon. Let me know if you like it or if this segment should be doomed to a mere two-post series, falling short of that historical importance i mentioned earlier. Thanks for reading!

What Else…

• I helped judge Cartoonstock’s caption contest last week. Here’s a video of me and the other judges going through the entries and discussing what makes a good caption.

That’s all! Thanks again!