Have I mentioned how much I love the New Yorker?

June 30, 2008

Ta-Daa!

Welcome to The Cartoon Lounge, a brand new blog brought to you by the cartoonists of The New Yorker.

Why a blog, you say? Well, first of all, this isn’t your father’s blog. Your father doesn’t even have a blog. This isn’t even your friend’s blog, unless one of us is your friend. But we’re not—we’re too busy cartooning, and now doing blogs.

Let’s make this clear. This is not The New Yorker magazine. To get a cartoon published in the magazine, we must submit dozens of original ideas every week. The cartoon editor rejects the overwhelming majority of them, and the ones that survive must still make it past the editor and the publisher, and are subject to further fact checking, copy editing, and layout considerations. Getting something uploaded on this blog will be different. For instance, one of us will be eating lunch on top of our computer keyboard, and we’ll set down that half-eaten chicken quesadilla a little too hard, and—BAM!—instant blog post. It will work something like that. And not just weekly, but daily. So, it’s the same cartoonists, but a different process.

And different content as well. This blog won’t be about cartoons as much as the minds behind the cartoons, and also the minds of the other cartoonists who say, “Hey—I thought of that cartoon first.” So it will literally be like hanging out in the cartoonists’ lounge at The New Yorker, but hopefully a little more civil.

What will we be posting here? Words, pictures, drawings, videos, interviews, and links to other Web sites. We’ll have guest cartoonists, and we’ll even have guest editors from time to time who will share their humorous ramblings, such as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

We’d also like to make this interactive, so we’ve got an e-mail address for your feedback which is absolutely free, if you can believe it. We’ll also have contests and quizzes and other ways to elicit the best of what our viewers have to offer. It should be fun. Stay tuned.

So, let’s kick this off with an open question: does anyone out there know a valid e-mail address for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher?

Drew Dernavich

July 1, 2008

RE: Cartoon Lounge Intro

Hey Drew,

I just read your intro—great stuff, really. I just have a few minor changes/corrections. No big thing.

1. You never say “Since the dawn of time” anywhere in the intro. I think it’s pretty much convention to begin any formal piece of writing with “Since the dawn of time.”
2. I may be mistaken, but I thought we had agreed to call this a “blorg” and not a “blog.”
3. In the second graph (magazine speak for “paragraph”) you declare that my father does not have a blog. Well, my father does have a blog. Every day he takes a new picture of our lawn and has my mom Photoshop in the words “You can look, but don’t touch!”
4. It is possible I have had a different experience than the one you describe in the third graph. I submit over 400 cartoons a week and I sell every one of them. What is it is like to have one rejected—do you get some sort of formal note? Please tell me about this (later), as I find it fascinating!
5. Cut the fourth and fifth graphs.
6. Replace the fourth graph with a famous poem about the cosmos—something light.
7. The last line of the famous poem should read: “That is not only my age, but my I.Q. as well!”
8. The fifth graph could actually be replaced with just blank space, to symbolize the melting polar ice caps. Or maybe a video of ice melting? Remind me to think of this later.
9. The sixth graph is great. But I think there is a typo. “It should be fun. Stay tuned,” should read, “It should be funky; stay tuned in.” This is a reference to the drug culture of the sixties and seventies, which our readers will no doubt enjoy, as it will yield to some devilish reminiscences.
10. I’m not sure where it is in your intro, but somewhere I believe you suggest that rock and roll will die at some point. Rock and roll will never die.
11. I think it goes without saying that having cut the fifth graph, your query at the end of the piece no longer makes sense. However, I think that is even more apropos, since we want this blorg to be a place where people feel freed from the humdrum logic they have experienced since the very dawn of time.

Peace,

Zach

Zachary Kanin