The Person Who Taught Me

There is a pervasive myth about artists that, like gray-eyed Athena, they spring wise and fully formed from the brains of their parents and start kicking ass on day one, laying down a complete and cohesive body of work that is wholly their own and will stand the test of time.

Anecdotally, that is horse shit. I’ve found that many artists are like lumpy snowballs rolling down a steep hill on a muddy day in spring, picking up all sorts of dirt and sticks and leaves and candy wrappers on the way down. And for many of us, this is a good thing. We are often very proud of our lumpy, candy wrapper and twig strewn exterior because it is our exterior, and we bumped around quite a bit to get it just the way we like it, thank you very much. 

So for your February enjoyment, some of the pebbles and twigs and people and places that stuck to us. 

-Kendra

Hilary Campbell

Since I was two years old my family has spent one week every summer in a small town on the Northern coast of Oregon. It’s the location of my mother’s family reunion and it remains to be the best time of my life, every single year. The one thing I always have to look forward to. There’s almost nothing in the town but the beach, a run down bowling alley that appears to only be filled with crackheads, a movie theater but no real restaurant that can survive (recently found out it's because of bad plumbing, apparently all over town), and a golf course. My time here throughout my life taught me a lot about the little pleasures in life. And the little jokes you find in the little pleasures of life. Things don’t need to be fancy to have fun and laugh your ass off. My favorite quote from my Uncle Jim is something he said on the beach there years ago as we were playing different games and all the kids were complaining, “It’s not about winning or losing, it’s about killing time.” 

Amy Kurzweil

This cartoon features the influence of several things on my development: guilt, the need to urgently order things online, a pervasive culture of shame, but most notably: Roz Chast. Roz Chast is the queen of the statue cartoon, and truthfully I had to redraw this cartoon because I was told the original looked too much like a Roz Chast cartoon. 

The statue in the middle of a city park – that’s classic Chast. I decided to make my figure look a little more modern, but mostly I just made my cartoon worse by removing the background so now we’re in the middle of nowhere. I really don’t know where a statue is if not in a city park? Neither cartoon sold, anyway. So perhaps the moral of this story is not to fight the influence of your idols, and always make sure your urgently ordered art supplies are made with sustainably sourced ingredients. 

Maggie Larson

I’ve always been drawn to (pun intended) the work of caricaturist, Al Hirschfeld. In a wonderful piece for the New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote about how Hirschfeld captured the musicals of the late composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim - whose work I adore beyond measure (music pun also intended). Brantley describes how Hirschfeld's drawings “seemed to breathe and move in a way photographs never could." Adding, "somehow they even smelled like Broadway to me.” 

I have never drawn a cartoon that smells like something, but I’d sure like to! The economy and elegance of Hirschfeld’s line are so swoonworthy. I know I sound like a dweeb, but if you can’t nerd out about the use of line in a newsletter about cartoons, where else can you? When my drawings are feeling static or heavy, I often thumb through a collection of Hirschfeld’s work I have on my bookshelf for inspiration. He finds the movement and energy in every gesture and detail!

I included this little tribute drawing based on one of my favorite Hirschfeld self portraits and emulated his style as best I could. I’d like to think he’d be cool with me sitting alongside him, dipping my pen into the matching ink well atop my head and applauding his every line (I’d also respect if he was annoyed).

Johnny DiNapoli

I first came across the comedians Mitch Hedberg and Steven Wright in high school, on a new little website called YouTube. I’d sit and watch and giggle to myself for hours at jokes like “24-hour banking? I don’t have time for that.” (I was not very popular). The idea of a ‘one-liner’ was new and hilarious to me, and it was probably the first time I thought about the writing that goes into jokes. Brevity. Voice. Word choice. Stuff like that.

Luckily, I decided to never do stand-up, and instead entered the glitzy world of gag cartoons. But discovering those comedians was very formative for my cartooning. No matter how silly a joke is, I try to craft it as well as I can. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll write something as wonderfully goofy as “Is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus, or a really cool opotamus?”

Ellis Rosen

Sorry to be boring, but like every other cartoonist around my age, Gary Larson’s Far Side had a major impact on my drawing, sense of humor and overall cartooning. When I was a kid I devoured those cartoon-a-day calendars, I would go through a year’s worth of cartoons in one evening. Today I just read collections of his cartoons in books, which are great, but nothing beats those calendars. There was just something nice about laughing at a Larson cartoon and then learning when Arbor Day was that year. 

When I draw a cartoon that feels familiar, 9/10 times it's because Larson drew it already. I’m not the only cartoonist who has this problem. Once I even sold a cartoon and a year later found a Larson one that had run years before that was very similar. 

This is my cartoon: 

I’m not going to post the Larson one here, but the concept was similar: two birds, one of them saying “Last night I had a dream I was walking.” 

The lesson here is that accidentally stealing from The Far Side is an occupational hazard. 

Kendra Allenby

I learned to draw people from three sources: Nelson Faro DeCastro, Stephen Gaffney, and stacks of books from the Brooklyn Public Library. People are the only thing I really want to draw. Everything else I learned so the people have places to be and objects to use and cups to put coffee in. Before the help of these 3 sources I drew people like this:

Which wasn't very satisfying. And now I draw them like this:

Which is way more satisfying. And look at the little apartment I gave them to live in! For me, drawing skills are magical spells. Nelson taught me the spells of drawing feet, perspective, and arm rotation (it's wild). Stephen taught me the spells of bony landmarks, the law of the leg, and what the spine does. The books taught me oodles of spells. I now have a nice little spell shop, but I’m still ravenous for more. This lumpy snowball’s still rolling.

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!

• Order Hilary Campbell’s Murder Book, out now!

• 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: