Just a Small Town Toon
Gather round the Toonstack!!!
It’s your best friend Hilary here, of course you know that because you’re looking right at me and you know me very well. We grew up together, remember? Wait… seriously? Literally can’t believe you’re acting like we didn’t go to pre-school, middle school and high school together. I know EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU. I know where you got your first kiss, I know you stole from Rite Aid all the time, and I know you peed your pants in homeroom, but then started a “water fight” to cover it up. Ahhh yes, you cannot hide from me, friend.
If you can guess, I am from a small town. My dad is the town doctor and growing up, you couldn’t go anywhere without someone knowing your Dr. Campbell’s daughter. Or, without knowing, your Dr. Campbell’s patient. I grew up between patios and porches, everyone always finding out what happened to their neighbor that day. If not their neighbor, someone their neighbor knows a few blocks over, who’s son is getting married pretty suddenly, and we all know why. You cannot escape small town gossip, even if you move all the way to New York. Just last week, I heard some wild news about a girl I once knew, and before I could tell my mom, two other people had already told her. Some people say gossip is a bad thing, but I recently found out that it’s also scientifically a part of what made us human. I’ll be using that defense until my grave!
Sometimes it still really shocks me that I live in New York. I wake up thinking, “wait, I don’t know what the guy across the street even does for a living!” Isn’t that so wrong!? I love waiving hi to strangers, knowing the waiter at the local diner, going to the same summer concert where the entire town shows up because they’re so excited to dance to a country cover band. I’ve been able to carve out a little bit of that feeling in Brooklyn, but there’s just nothing like the feeling of a hot dog on the Fourth of July in a small town where everyone knows all the stupid shit you did as a kid and they loooove to tease you about it. But listen, not everyone feels the way I do. Read on to find out what the rest of Toonstack really thinks about small towns.
Small towns are the greatest. My affinity for them probably stems from the fact that I was born in a small town parading as a city. Give me a train ride to New Paltz, Tarrytown, Hudson or a roadtrip to Williamsport any long weekend and I’ll find the best (and worst) coffee, thai food and probably lose a day in the local bookstore. When I do comedy on the road I get to see the best and worst small towns in America. And god help me if I overhear local small town conversation at the town watering hole… that’s when the notebook comes out, ready for some EavesDrawing.
This is what happens when I put a “small town” character in a cartoon. My teen years were spent living in Boonville, population 850, and hanging out with guys like this at our hang-out spot called “the gravel pits” where we drank canned beer until the town sheriff, Keith, drove by and told us to pour it out–into the gravel. They all drove around in dusty pick-up trucks with shotguns, and lived in flimsy houses held together with wall-to-wall carpeting. I would have done just about anything to fly the hell out of there on a magic carpet. My education saved me, and now I live in a place that’s more likely to have Persian carpets. I can’t gloat about it, though, because now I'm a fish out of water all over again in a different place.
A lot of my experiences with small towns have been as a smelly backpacker, hitchhiking in to get clean and get fed. Their tiny libraries, their parks and benches, their walkable streets, their ice cream, their restaurants and their coffee - I love these towns with the passion of a thousand million suns. Coincidentally, that’s also the number of cups of coffee I drink while in town.
As a city kid all I know about small towns is from movies, TV and Stephen King books. Which is a lot actually! For instance I know that all small towns are haunted, either from an actual supernatural creeper or in some boring metaphorical way. All small towns harbor some sort of secret, whether that's hidden gold or something more boring, like a metaphor for hidden gold. All small towns don't like outsiders who stumble across said secrets, whether physically or in some metaphorical way, which is quite boring actually. Small towns are either awesome or are a boring metaphor for being awesome. Much simpler to live in a city.
I’ve lived in or nextdoor to major cities all my life (shoutout Boston), so when I moved recently to a relatively small town on the California Central Coast, I thought life would be something like this cartoon. I’ve always relished the anonymity of cities – I just love being able to get hopelessly lost in a sea of strangers, sob openly on the subway and have nobody care – I thought small town life would mean dodging frenemies and having to say hi to your neighbors before 4pm (which is the ideal time after which I’m comfortable using my voice to talk to other people). But luckily, as it turns out, small town life does not mean people know your name. Maybe it’s the pandemic, or maybe it’s the fact that even small towns still have more people than you can meet, or maybe it’s that many of us still spend most of our time in virtual space, but I can walk into a bar here, recognize nobody, and it’s like I never left NYC.
(Sidenote: When I moved to this small town, I kept telling people I was living in “the suburbs.” But apparently, in order for something to be a suburb, it needs to be just outside of a city. Who knew?? For me, this whole country was either a city or a suburb, unless it was rural farm land, but apparently there is this other class of thing, which I guess is: the small town. Sideside note: have you ever stopped to think about how much of this country is strip malls and parking lots? It’s a lot.)
For Your Pleasure: Cartoon Extras
Have you checked out cartoonstock.com? Thanks to New Yorker cartoon editor emeritus, Bob Mankoff, this is the place to license and buy prints and merch of the best cartoons in the world, from The New Yorker, Wired, Airmail and...ToonStack!
Take a drawing class with Kendra at the 92Y
Order Send Help! a desert island cartoon collection by Ellis Rosen and Jon Adams, out now!
Join Hilary Campbell with comedian Jena Friedman to chat about true crime this Wednesday!
A recent interview between cartoonists Evan Lian & Sarah Kempa!
Pre-order Sofia Warren’s book, Radical!
Amy Kurzweil teaches cartoon classes 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!
See more cartoons from Ellis Rosen’s weekly Junk Drawer!
And hey, we always would love it if ya: