All Boxed Up
a meditation on the rectangular containers that make up life and art
Dear readers,
I believe it was Jerry Seinfeld who best articulated our quest for the perfect box: “once you find it, you’re in it.” Amy K. here, greeting you from inside a cardboard box. I’m not dead yet, just mid-move, and I’ve got boxes-on-the-brain.
When you’re moving, it’s not just that you’re on the hunt for boxes, salivating at the smell of fresh cardboard in the morning, it’s that everything looks like a box. New apartment: new box. Old apartment: old box. Closet: box of clothes. Fridge: box of food. Bed: cozy, open-air box. Books: boxes of ideas. Roommate/life-partner: box of thoughts about how you’re boxing the books incorrectly (what does one do with all the little gaps? well apparently you’re supposed to wrap up miscellaneous items in newsprint and fit them in…). Self: box of resistance to boxing. Life: box of time! This newsletter: one long rectangular box of cartoons about boxes, physical and metaphorical. Enjoy!
-Amy-in-the-box
P.S. Speaking of boxes, sometimes things actually do come out of boxes, like my new book in this unboxing video! (preorder below)
Hilary Campbell
I drew this cartoon when I kept thinking about breaking up with someone but was too scared to do it, so it only felt safe to draw about breakups and then hide those cartoons in my office.
Zoe Si
Remember the good old days, when your worth as a human being was so easily quantified by how many boxes of stuff you managed to process in the middle of the night? Me, too (fondly!).
Johnny DiNapoli
I don’t know what Schrödinger's deal was, or why he felt the need to possibly kill a hypothetical cat, but my scientist friends assure me his cat-box thing is good and important. Speaking of dead cats, if you’ve never seen it, I recommend checking out the oddly endearing pet cemetery documentary Gates of Heaven.
Sofia Warren
You have a thing, and it’s that thing. But you put the thing in a box? Now there’s mystery. Now there’s process, discovery! I, a triple Gemini (sorry sorry sorry), need everything to be more than it is, and a box, in occluding a thing’s thingness for some time, prolongs the possibility that the thing is maybe all things, or maybe a dead cat.
Kendra Allenby
Most problems don’t fit neatly into boxes. Unless you squish them in juuuust right. I drew this cartoon for a meeting between members of the Afghan government and the World Bank. Some people in that room wanted to end the meeting with a nice neat box. But don’t we all want that sometimes
Amy Kurzweil
It wouldn’t be a box-themed ToonStack without one of my many Jack-in-the-box cartoons (it’s a thing with me.)
ToonStack NewsStack
Amy Kurzweil’s new book, Artificial: A Love Story, is available for preorder!
So is Navied Mahdavian’s graphic memoir, This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America
Amy’s first cartoon here is from the fantastic collection of desert island cartoons edited by Ellis Rosen and Jon Adams: Send Help: A Collection of Marooned Cartoons
Check out Jason Katzenstein’s Patreon!
Amy Kurzweil teaches cartoon classes on Patreon! Sign up now to get the recording of every past class!
Be sure to check out Shelby Lorman’s newsletter, Please Clap!
The same goes for Sofia Warren’s advice newsletter, You’re Doing Great!
See more cartoons from Ellis Rosen’s weekly Junk Drawer!
SEND IN THE BUTTONS…