Love is a Fickle Thing...
It is with great pride and anguish that I announce my cartoon is in this week’s print issue of The New Yorker! These long periods of limbo and rejection and waiting for publication really do a number to your self-esteem, believe you me. I begin to wonder if the publication ever really loved me in the first place. I sold this cartoon back in November of 2018. To date, it’s my third to make it in print.
To put that in perspective, I’ve sold just under ten cartoons for print publication: four of them in the last three months of 2018, two in 2019, and two so far in 2020. It was almost a full calendar year between my first sale this year and the previous one. This is where analogies to running marathons come in handy, but even still, it begins to feel like a futile effort.
Part of the exercise of this newsletter is to write more transparently about learning to navigate these waters and chip away at some of the mystery. It’s also a welcome respite from the never-ending stream of rejection. Some of the best resources I came across before ever selling any cartoons were two interviews by fellow New Yorker-cartoonists Jason Chatfield and Jeremy Nguyen. A Case for Pencils is another great resource which focuses more on the technical aspects for aspiring cartoonists.
I talk about failure a lot because that is my best and only qualification. Just statistically speaking, out of hundreds of rejections, I can inevitably celebrate a handful of successes—and so I keep pitching. My hope is that, in some warped way, it’ll encourage someone out there that might want to do this too.
Register to Vote (for a podcast)
Long-time pal, Alex Brizard, and I recorded a podcast “pilot” for the #MyRØDECast podcast contest. In our inaugural 2-minute episode, we revisit one of our favorite animated series of all-time, Avatar: The Last Airbender. We didn’t cover as much we would’ve liked given the time constraint of the competition, but over the next few weeks, we’ll be doing deep-dives on each season. Check out the episode below and make sure to vote. Today’s the last day of voting!
Cheers,
Evan
