Alternative Selves

ToonStack 6

Hello! My name is Amy Kurzweil and I will be your fearless editor this week. If you know me, you may know that one of my greatest joys in life is plumbing the depths of human identity. Let’s sit down and talk for four hours about your deepest yearnings and profoundest fears! (I may or may not have been raised by a therapist.) Lucky you, with me at the helm, this week’s newsletter requires the ToonStackers to BARE THEIR SOULS! (Why do I always want to write this as bear your soul? What is the bear in my unconscious?). Anyway, WHO ARE YOU REALLY ToonStackers?? Post a cartoon that features an alternative self: it’s you or almost you. Reveal an unknown thing about yourself (but not too many things, let’s not scare away the readership…)

Johnny Dinapoli

I was a VERY anxious kid. Anxious about school, anxious about getting in trouble, and most of all, anxious about getting in trouble at school. I like to think I’ve mellowed a bit since then, but I still dream the occasional “I’m taking a test I didn’t study for and it will certainly ruin my life forever” dream. The kid in this cartoon has two things I wish I had as a kid: flippancy and a dog.

Ellis Rosen

I love this cartoon. It is the first cartoon I sold to the New Yorker and it remains the most “me.” I dream of the day the Olympics finally recognizes “turning good news into bad” as an official sport. I would win Gold every time. I would be the champion of the Emotional Collapse Triathlon. Well, okay, maybe I wouldn't be that good. Sometimes I wonder if I’m really succeeding at being truly self deprecating or if I’m just acting self deprecating because people like self-depreciation. Maybe that’s obvious. It probably is obvious. In fact, people probably see right through me and think I’m a fraud. Ugh. I hate this cartoon. 

Hilary Campbell

I like to imagine that if I was a cavewoman, I would find any reason for it to be happy hour. I’d also maybe start a cult? Years later they would discover records of me and write big click-baity articles like “World’s First Cult Leader Was a Woman!” with lots of details about how I made everyone laugh at my jokes and anyone who wouldn’t dance was ex-communicated.

Amy Kurzweil

Something about me is that I used to, for a living, teach dance in New York City and New Jersey Public Schools. I sort of miss the days of broken boomboxes in Newark basements and auditoriums filled with screaming children in the Bronx (go Bronx Math Panthers), but also I completely don’t recognize that past self and her font of energy. Obviously, I also used to live in New York City with this shower. When this cartoon came out in The New Yorker a few years ago, I received messages from all my many, many roommates, pleased to see our apartment fixtures immortalized. Now I finally have the insulated bathtub of my dreams. If you don’t, yet, have the bathtub of your dreams, try leaving New York City. (Or maybe we can swap my California bathtub for your NYC apartment.) 

Kendra Allenby

This is me.

I love Christmas Trees. 

EXCEPT I would also buy one in December, to tide me over. 

Navied Mahdavian

If you’ve been to any kind of fitness class, watched a pilates video, or lived with my mom, you’ve probably been told to “engage your core” at some point during a workout. Or in my case, while drawing cartoons or complaining about why I’m not rich and successful yet. In high school, I was actually voted “Most Likely Not to Use His Core.” 

But do you actually know how to engage your core? According to IG user @ThisIsNotNaviedsMom (who recently commented “You’re not using your core properly” on a cartoon of mine), there are three steps: Suck in your belly, clench your fists, and push with the power of 10,000 suns. Face getting hot? Keep going! Drop of sweat? That’s the stuff. Vision going soft and blurry--almost there! By this point, you should find yourself regaining consciousness. Congratulations! You’ve successfully engaged your core. 

Carolita Johnson

This is what I wish I could do sometimes -- send an alternate self to take my place at day jobs!

Sofia Warren

A few years ago, I started a comic strip called Proust & Panda, about a Marcel Proust-ish character named Proust living with a panda named Panda. Panda does things like make plans but then not follow through; Proust does things like go off in a pompous Quest For Beauty and wind up locked in a meat delivery truck. Most of the art in these strips makes me cringe (I drew it years ago on shoddy equipment), but the characters are both me, and I. . . I love them.  I still draw them periodically when I need to sort out thoughts, and I found them especially good companions in early pandemic, when I was living alone in the country and my only neighbors, the horses next door, stopped taking my calls. If I had my druthers, by the way, I’d draw strips all day every day—I love serialized stories!

Emily Flake

For over a decade, I did a weekly strip called Lulu Eightball. It ran in a handful of alt-weeklies, and never made much in terms of money or notoriety - but over the 10+ years I had the strip, I learned, for better or worse, not so much “how to write jokes,” but how I myself write jokes. The adorably low stakes meant I felt the freedom to do what I pleased - and apparently, “as I pleased” was writing four-beat jokes about, among a million other things, Edible Arrangements. Lulu served as a not-at-all veiled alter ego for me for her entire run, and this strip was inspired by the Edible Arrangement my mother sent when I told her I was pregnant - a step, for me, into a whole ‘nother self. Also, I’ve been trying to get an ortolan joke into the New Yorker for years, with no success. I don’t know what’s wrong with me either.

Jason Adam Katzenstein

I wrote and drew a book about my life with obsessive compulsive disorder, called Everything Is an Emergency. I was trying to untangle thorny parts of my identity, the relationship between my anxiety and creativity, my thoughts and myself. In therapy I was encouraged to take my recurring OCD “themes” and turn them into separate characters. Here I am playing four of these characters. I contain multitudes.

Thanks for the bear of your souls, ToonStackers. And thanks for reading, readers. See ya next week. Multitudinously yours,

-Amy & ToonStack

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For Your Pleasure: Cartoon Extras

• Amy Kurzweil’s (hi that’s me) next Patreon class is May 9th. Join her Creative Community and bring your mom!

• Visit CAROLITALAND! Join Carolita Johnson on Patreon!

• Check out Emily Flake’s humor writing residency, St. Nells!

• Enjoy diary comics from Hilary Campbell on Patreon!

• Be sure to check out Shelby Lorman’s newsletter, Please Clap!

• The same goes for Sofia Warren’s advice newsletter, You’re Doing Great!

• Sign up for Jason Chatfield’s free weekly toon newsletter!

• See more cartoons from Ellis Rosen’s weekly Junk Drawer!