Toonstack-iversary
A Year of Toons
Happy Sunday, dearest readers! I know, I know. It’s not just any Sunday. It’s the Iranian New Year (Nowruz Mobarak!), but more importantly (don’t tell my mum I said that), it’s the one year anniversary of Toonstack! I know, I know. There were some of you who said it couldn’t be done. “No, no,” you said, “It’ll never work,” you said. “That’s not a laptop, it’s a waffle maker,” you said. Well, we promised you a megazord™ of cartoons, and we delivered dammit.
And as folks are wont to do on anniversaries, when they stare dreamily into each other’s eyes and say things like, “I already watched that episode without you,” we’ve decided to celebrate one year of Toonstack by celebrating each other. We’ll laugh, we’ll cry; we’ll share our favorite cartoons, and we’ll gush. Cause we’re cartoonists—but we’re also kinda friends.
Toonstack isn’t my longest relationship, but it’s definitely my funniest.
So, happy Toonstack-iversary to you all.
- Navied <3
It was VERY difficult for me to pick my favorite cartoon drawn by my dear pal Ellis Rosen. He is so prolific and absolutely hilarious on top of being a wonderful person. (Wow, does it sound like I’m trying to make Ellis feel really good about himself, but also really want him to think that I, Hilary, for sure am his best friend? You caught me!!). I am always impressed by how Ellis knows how to turn anything into a gag cartoon. His mind just thinks in cartoons. It’s like there’s a little machine in his brain called “How To Make It Even Funnier” and that thing is always at work. I have so many favorite Ellis cartoons, from the “Enlightenment and… Pizza By The Slice” to literally every cartoon he’s drawn about a dog, but I had to choose “Ceremony Welcoming Light Jacket Season” because I remember it literally made CACKLE. Something about this drawing and that coat is so funny to me. The seriousness of the people works so perfectly to create the joke that we all know actually is a celebratory part of the year. It just happened in New York a few days ago and you better BELIEVE I was ready to throw a party. What I love about Ellis’ work is his ability to turn the mundane into the mystique. As a true New Yorker, he knows how to gripe about the little things in life (Ned Helped Out, Frank the First Curmudgeon of Spring), but in this cartoon we actually find him not griping, but… happy as hell.
There are rules in life. An order to things, if you will. Go on green, stop on red. Hang toilet paper over and not under. Put your pants on one leg at a time (how your underwear gets on is your own business). My favorite cartoons pull the proverbial curtains back on life and reveal the order of things, and then subvert them. “Chess Halloween” checks all the boxes for me cartoon wise (see what I did there?). Chess is a game of rules. And everyone has their role, from the pawns to the rooks, which are actually towers and move for some reason (I never said the rules make sense). But what if the rook wanted to move like a knight (which for some reason moves like an L) or the humble pawn wanted to be a king for a day (Pixar, I have your next movie idea!)?
There’s also a wonderful insularity to the world of “Chess Halloween.” It’s as if the chess pieces can’t imagine costumes non-chess related (Halloween costume idea: slutty rook). It’s got layers.
Like a lasagne. Or Amy. Or an Amy lasagne.
I’m lucky to count Amy among my closest friends. She’s one of the smartest people I know (and endearingly never gets cultural references). And her cartoons often reflect that.
But like Amy, there’s also a sweet, lightheartedness to her best cartoons (e.g. “If you give a mouse a french cookie” and “The very stressed caterpillar”) and a simplicity in execution that “Chess Halloween” has in spades (oops, wrong game).
One wonderful thing about cartooning is that you get to hang out with cartoonists, and you get to see the batches they send in every week to the New Yorker. JoDiNap, (that's what people close to Johnny DiNapoli call him.) He shows me his batch every week and every week his batches are slam-dunk-home-run-goaaaaaaal! (JoDiNap likes sports.) His sensibilities, his humor, his drawing style are so rich and so unique and streamlined to perfection. Nothing is wasted in his cartoons. Every line is there for a reason, the caption always perfectly solved. JDN (that’s what people close to JoDiNap call him) is an absolute master of the craft. He’s also a super swell guy!
Take this classic cartoon above. Two elements: cuckoo clock, person reacting. That’s exactly all the information we need; any more would make this cartoon less funny. The looks on both the person and the bird are so expressive, while also maintaining the exact amount of New Yorker subtlety. The picture alone is funny and then you get to the genius caption. I have never before seen a caption that repeats itself and it is so much funnier because of it. By mimicking the repetition of a cuckoo clock bird, the reader simultaneously reads it with the silly voice of the bird, contrasted with the heavy and emotional toll of this bird's existential crisis—said twice. That, combined with the woman’s understated concern and surprise, makes this one of the smartest and sophisticated cartoons in the history of the magazine. Classic J.
I want to tell you a secret about Sofia Warren. It’s not that she grew up in the wild, or that she wears cool hats or sports a very trendy haircut that looks smashing on her, or that we once drew cartoons on the tablecloth at Manhattan’s fanciest restaurant together. The secret is that Sofia may present herself here as a gag cartoonist —and ok duh she is great at that — but what’s really the deepest truth about Sofia according to moi is that she is a born sequentialist. (In cartoonist parlance, that means multiple panels instead of just one, try to keep up.) This may seem like a trivial distinction but it is not. Sequentialists see life moving before them, they draw quickly with feeling and are always looking for the telling details that unfold throughout a scene, the little things that people or pandas do that make you go, oh, I know that person, that’s a real person doing a really specific quirky thing I recognize so well… until the absurdist twist comes (Sofia’s signature) and makes the whole scene both true and hilarious. If you read Sofia’s advice column, or follow her on instagram, you know what I’m talking about. Episodes of life just flow from her pen, and the scenes culminate in goofball perfection that just makes me want to live in her cartoon world. When I’m around Sofia, I feel myself turning into fluid pen strokes and, in fact, I was extremely happy to see myself turned into a cartoon character in her book (ok that page may have been cut, but I was at least in one draft of the book, you heard it here first!)
I love this panda cartoon (an episode of the brilliant Proust and Panda series) so much that I had to order it as a print. How does Sofia know I always have emails to respond to? And that I also always have Hebrew songs stuck in my head, which are, to me, nonsense words because someone decided to teach me Hebrew but not what it means? If only all of that obsessive mind churning culminated in the horah.
At the risk of reducing the complexities, nuances, and indescribable nature which forge our irreplicable personalities into a single-panel cartoon, may I be so bold to say this cartoon IS Navied Mahdavian. Too grand? Too bad, because Navied is a grand ol’ guy, equal parts wise man and bad boy.
The tone and characters he creates in his cartoons are truly among the best, constantly hitting a sweet spot between sweet and irreverent, brainy and silly. And funny! The way Navied’s gags shine through his wonderful, light-touch art? You can feel the joy and care of the cartoonist in the finished cartoon- and he makes it look so easy.
I mean, look at this- we’re in a for-owl-by-owl glasses shop. We got an owl optician and an owl who (who whooo) is going through some sort of identity crisis. The caption and expressions work together so well that it’s not only funny once, but every time I look back between the two owls. I’m invested in how this shakes out. What glasses will they end up with? Is it one of the pairs we see? How many times a day does this owl optician have wannabe badboy owls making the same request? It’s all so so fun, and I love my framed print of this cartoon.
This cartoon’s great. Navied’s great. And he didn’t even have to pay me to say any of this :)
Sing Jason’s cartooning praises? No one is more qualified for this gig than I am. I’ve been admiring his cartooning skills since we were 20 years old, when his comic novella Fuck You was circulating around our college campus. That was a full decade ago!
I find it very difficult to pick a favorite cartoon of Jason’s, in part because he is insanely prolific. This dude thinks, draws, and jokes at the speed of light—and the work he does at warp speed? It’s good. Even when it’s dumb, it’s good, which you know if you follow him on Instagram. I’d be furious at him for making it all seem so effortless, except that he is absolutely one of the best people I know. Absolutely everyone in the cartoonosphere has a story about Jason lifting them up, helping them out, encouraging them, giving the shirt off his back, connecting them to their now- agent, introducing them to their now-spouse. . .
OK, back to the comics. Honestly, my favorite thing Jason’s done is his book, Everything is an Emergency. It’s a memoir about his experiences with OCD, told through words and pictures. It’s sweet and vulnerable and hilarious and full of hope. You just have to read it, if you haven’t. Here’s a little excerpt, which ran when the book first came out:
What I love about Hilary is the frankness, the fun, and the ubiquitous use of wine. But wait…am I talking about her or her cartoons? Sike! It’s both. Hilary does standup comedy, and memoir, and autobiographical comics in addition to gag cartoons for the New Yorker (and lots of other things - where does she get the time?), which is to say the veil between her real life and her cartoon world can be excitingly, enchantingly thin. She is often giving you the real her, wrapped up in beautiful drawings and well crafted gags. Not every artist will do that for you. Hilary’s cartoons are so full of life because Hilary is so full of life, and she’s not afraid one bit to shove that life into the cartoon until it bulges with snacks and cute shirts from the 90’s and snoopy mugs and anxieties and wry asides and person-sized glasses of wine until it is delightfully fit to burst.
There are a hundred million cartoons of Hilary’s that I love so I picked this one.
Flawless comedic timing, a satisfying build, reveals a universal tension of human nature (we forever and deeply both want and don’t want plans at the SAME time!), plus the drawing style looks effortlessly dashed off, while also being completely clear and charming. It’s a theme I’ve explored in my own cartoons and it’s 100,000% times better than what I have come up with. I loved, I laughed, and I loved this cartoon all over again.
Kendra Allenby is the most adventurous person I know. We’ll get to her work, I promise, but I’m talking right now about someone who HIKED THE FLIPPING CONTINENTAL DIVIDE. Mostly cartoonists try to walk around the block and remind ourselves outside exists. Kendra walked from Mexico to Canada. She made some amazing comics about it.
She’s the warmest, nicest, coolest, most generous friend and colleague. We’ll get to her work — sincerely, we will! Cartoonists tend to be the ones who hang out in the corner at the party, but catch Kendra becoming everybody’s new best friend.
Here’s the thing about Kendra’s cartoons: you can see everything I’m talking about in them. There’s an energy in there, an enthusiasm, a sense of movement. Her characters twist and turn, they explore this beautiful world, take part in it, experience joy and create some joy themselves. All of Kendra’s characters are like Kendra, and for this our little cartooning world is endlessly enriched.
BUT WAIT! THERE’S SOME EXTRA STUFF HERE!
If you’ve made it this far, you’re the fanniest of fans. So why not spend some more time with us? Next Sunday, March 27th, we’ll be live drawing the Oscars on Zoom! All you have to do so venmo Hilary $5 @Hilary-Campbell and she’ll email you the private zoom link. Which is basically even more exclusive and fancy than attending the real Oscars itself.
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! And check out her substack! Diary comics, silly things and more.
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: