newyorkette

I forgot to let you know that I had a cartoon published in The New Yorker last week! It’s not that I like to toot my own horn, but I love to tell the stories behind a cartoon that has struggled a little to get onto the pages of TNY. Formerly rejected in several versions of itself, this cartoon was finally bought after a few re-draws and several re-workings of the caption. (The accepted caption is actually the first version of the caption that I went back to).

Once I sold it, illustration editor Owen Phillips (now at Mens’ Vogue), who had been placed in charge of making sure the cartoonists didn’t slack off—no missing fingers on hands, no blobs in the place of feet, no weird proportions that could just as easily have been not weird—made me re-do the arm on the bride several times. (I’m going to give Owen the Golden Arm award!) He didn’t like the arm being one continuous line on the outer silhouette. I, of course, did like it. Particularly because continuous lines are hard to achieve with the kind of pen you need to dip into ink several times a minute, like the one I use.

Then, once I’d redone the arm to his satisfaction, he noted that the peripheral figures (best man, and maid of honor) weren’t as nicely drawn as in the first, bad-armed, drawing. I decided to push my luck, and pleaded with him that chances were there would always be a shifting of good points every time I re-drew it, and that the peripheral figures were just that—peripheral. He magnanimously let me keep this last version. (Phew!)

So, please note the line break near her elbow. It took all my self-restraint to pick up that pen and start again where I could have kept going and not wasted any ink or movement of my own elbow! And thanks Owen, for making this cartoon very pretty. We miss you! (But you look so good in a tie!)

For an interesting variation on the campfire story of The Golden Arm, see here.

(image: carolita johnson)

Okay, I know it’s a very silly cartoon. Of course, this is why it was rejected. But I love him. I named him Nick after The Thin Man’s Nick Charles, played by William Powell. I’m a big fan of The Thin Man movies.

But mostly I like it because it’s something I often say about myself. That is, I often say that if I started drinking to forget, I’d soon forget to drink. Because I’m that absent-minded. There’s no hope for me becoming an alcoholic, alas! Not until I have a personal assistant to remind me to tipple, anyway.

(image: carolita johnson)

I’ve always thought it was odd that there were women out there in the world (I read about them in the New York Post) complaining about sports usurping quality boyfriend/husband time from them. Why not watch the game together? I’m 50/50 about it: sometimes I enjoy the game, and sometimes I enjoy a nap during the game.

Any comments, baseball fans?

PS: ABC’s press on the special “Chicks & Giggles” edition of The Rejection Show, here. (I was having technical difficulties, so wasn’t available for interview along with the other brilliant girls, but you see a bit of me in passing.)

This self-portrait didn’t make it into the show. And my hair actually looked much better than this, thanks to Randall from Ultra, and a few well-placed snips of the scissors before the show. Thank you Randall!

The Chicks & Giggles edition of The Rejection Show was an experience I’ll never forget. Everyone was great, everyone put it all out on a limb, and I felt honored to be amongst:
Carolyn Castiglia (rejected from The White Rapper Show), Wendy Spero (of Microthrills), Desiree Burch (Comedian, Host of SMUT), and Negin Farsad (Comedian, MTV, Sirius Radio).
And of course, Jon Friedman, who is a man, and his “Why Michael Winslow is mad at me” story.

My audience was very kind to me! Thank you, kind audience! (I was very nervous!)
I created that act especially for the Chicks & Giggles merging with The Rejection Show, so it was all new. It was also only my second time speaking in front of an audience!

If you missed it, at least part of the show was recorded, and will be up on ABC’s website soon (I’ll link to it when it’s up). And I’ve put all my drawings from last night up on my flickr page, here: Ape-Face and Me.

If you know how to use flickr, you know what to do. If not, just click on the first thumbnail image to the right of the large image, and it will open up with the text that goes with it. To see the next image, click the right-hand image in the little box to the upper right of the opened image. The next one will appear with text, and so on and so on.

Comments welcome, as always!

Links:
Chicks & Giggles.
The Rejection Show
Ape-Face and Me, on my flickr page.

^{A version of my rejected “spring break venus” cartoon. Back by popular demand. (image: carolita johnson)}

I was perusing my site meter this morning, as I am wont to do now and then while waiting for the caffeine (or is it theine?) in my tea to take effect, when I noticed something that made my eyeballs perk up (insofar as eyeballs can perk): a reader from Israel! Wow, I thought. I wonder what brought me an Israeli reader? Surely not my silly stories of Ape-Face. So I looked further, and found that it was the result of a google:

Meanwhile, my Saudi Arabian readers continue to find me through more serious googles like this:

I’m happy for whatever brings people from anywhere outside the walls of my apartment to newyorkette, so to all my Middle Eastern readers, a hearty:
As-Salaam-Alaikum!
Shalom aleichem!

My “Spring-Break Venus” seems to be a hit amongst my Saudi readers. To them I say, guess what? It’s for sale! I’m a starving artist, and you’re obviously a patron of… why don’t we just say: the arts! How about it? It will be worth even more in the fall, when the final version of it appears in a brand new book of rejected New Yorker cartoons, Matt Diffee’s “Rejection Collection”! Stay tuned.

This is how I imagine God gives out the halos in doggy heaven. (Image: carolita johnson)

Well, it’s Rejection Thursday, and this is one that I’ve been told is a little “too Walt Disney-ish.” It’s not too newyorkette-ish, so here you go!

Comments welcome, as always!

(image: carolita johnson)

I’ve tried to force this one upon The New Yorker long enough. Of course this is one of those cartoons that I have personally chortled over many a time. Maybe they figure that’s pay enough for me. My friend Crawford is always reproaching me for laughing at my own jokes (like he doesn’t do the same! ha! double-ha!), and since he doesn’t appreciate my sense of humor, I see no harm in enjoying a little mirth on my own. He, after all, doesn’t have to pay for it, like The New Yorker does. (When they feel like buying a cartoon, that is!)

This one’s for all you birds and bird-watchers out there. Yes, I know, they’re not really anatomically correct mockingbirds, but they are mocking, and they’re birds!

^{Yes, I’ve used this before, but it does make me feel perky to look at it. (image: carolita johnson)}

Click here for Good Morning World! If you’re from my generation (well, I was really young when this Levi’s commercial came out), then it may make you feel so nostalgic as to bring a tear to the eye. For me, it brings back memories of Saturday Morning cartoons, Abbot & Costello, Get Smart (reruns, even back then)... sigh. But even if you’re not from my generation, I bet you’ll sing it all day if you listen to it! I think it was the original quirky Levi’s commercial.

^{(Click on the image to reach the cartoonbank.com)}

The second sign says, “Non-Employees really ought to wash their hands, too.” (Sorry, the cartoonbank shrinks them so that sometimes you can’t read text inside the cartoon, so I enlarged it a bit, which made it a little fuzzy.)

I’m sick as a dog, having caught some kind of cold or flu from one of my lovely clients (one of the hazards of the job, and bound to happen sooner or later when you deal with so many different people), but the spoonful of sugar helping me draw my batch today (had to crash last night, the fever took over), and maybe even finish it on time, is the above cartoon, sold over a year ago, and finally published this week!

It was the result of a hallucination one day in a restaurant restroom. I could’ve sworn I saw a sign just like the second one in the cartoon, out of the corner of my eye. Also, this cartoon had been rejected several times when I finally thought re-drawing it more nicely might help. And it did.

Paranoia, hypochondria, too much coffee, and a little diligence: all these things contribute to the creation of a cartoon. That should raise my morale enough to drag my butt to midtown today for a one-hour fitting at least.

(image: carolita johnson)

Happy Bastille Day! It’s French Independence Day! Yes, I know all about the Nazi Occupation, we all like to make fun, but the capitulation was the government’s, and the French people had “La Résistance!” That was nothing to sneeze at, and as you can see from their national anthem (translation here), they’ve got a history of bloodthirstiness that perhaps they prefered to leave behind in favor of verbal argument, French bureaucracy (a weapon of mass destruction in itself), and few well-placed bullets. I’ve always favored a combination of diplomacy and subversion myself, having been deeply affected by some graffiti on Canal Street and West Broadway twenty years ago that exhorted me thusly:

“Don’t despair! Subvert!”

(If anyone has any pictures of that, I’d love to have them.)

I did the above drawing (brush & ink, and pastels), and it’s second version here, for a French calender my friend Sergio was doing a couple of years ago, called “Jet Lag.” The principle of the calender was that it started in July instead of January (thus the “lag”). I think the idea was that there’s always someone looking for a calender in July but can’t find one (?), in any case I was happy to contribute. But it was rejected on the grounds that Read the rest of this entry »

(image: carolita johnson)

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I’m eating meat when the forensics scenes come on during CSI, and I find it a little off-putting. Many a meal has been spoiled this way, particularly when they include squishy sound effects. I try to avoid these crime scene investigations shows during dinnertime, but the problem is that I dine at very irregular hours, and I actually have no idea what time these programs come on the TV, which I usually have playing in the background while I eat, read, or work.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I haven’t been posting many cartoons in the last week and a half. The reason is simple. The cartoon department has been on vacation for the last two weeks, putting us cartoonists out of sight and out of mind. So I took the opportunity to forget about cartooning myself for a while. I’ve been reading, writing, watching the World Cup, socializing, or busy with non-cartoonist jobs, going to the beach, planning the next six months of my life, thinking about buying a taser, and making much use of my new airconditioner! (Taser is being considered for my next possible move, to a dodgier neighborhood, not for my social activities, never fear. And yes, I know they’re illegal. But so are strung-out junkees.)

^{Men, too, like you to look them in the eyes and not just ogle their breasts. (Image: carolita johnson)}

In the interest of equal exposure, here’s my male breast cartoon, freshly rejected. It’s actually a scan of a photocopy, so there’s a little less subtle shading going on here than in the original, but it loses nothing in the translation. I’m going to submit it again, possibly with a slightly modified caption, but thought I’d share it with you for now.

Personally, I have nothing against man-boobs, and find a nice rack to be esthetically pleasing on the right male body. It suits some men very well, and others not as well. So I drew these to look as sensual and intriguing as possible.

It’s going to be a nice, hot, beach weekend! So, girls, do unto others…

^{Click on the image to get to the cartoonbank.com’s page.}

This is a first for me (a cartoon in the magazine three weeks in a row!), so I celebrated by doing some bartender training tonight. I finished my batch early, so I even stayed an extra half hour to have an aperetif afterwards, at The Bubble Lounge. Tonight I learned how to pour Grand Marnier for two counts with my right hand, while pouring brandy with my left hand for six. I also learned how to make a Mojito, an Expresso Martini, a Sidecar, and practiced my champagne uncorking. I’m pretty good at that, can do it with practically no noise at all.

Anyway, back to the cartoon. It was originally handed in once with a different caption, something snarky about one of these broads needing counseling for having no problems. It was rejected, naturally. I’d drawn it inspired by a sixties bikini ad I’d seen on the “inspiration” wall during a fitting at Peter Som’s about two years ago! Then, the next week on my way to drop off a new batch, I had a flash of inspiration while looking at an unnaturally fit much older woman on the subway downtown to the magazine. When I arrived, I dug the reject out of the reject pile (miles high), changed the caption, and sent it straight back in. It sold! I was afraid it had been killed (since I sold it so long ago and never saw it printed), so I’m all the happier today.

I might add that this is one of a series of breast-appreciation cartoons I was working on at the time. I guess doing bra fittings will make you really think about breasts in all their shapes and sizes, and I was always on the look-out for a great pair to draw at that time! Also, since I had to put on some weight for this client, I needed a well-padded but not too chunky image to aspire to. I was quite enchanted with their very slightly rounded tummies, and healthily curvy thighs and hips, which women used to wear proudly before deathly skinny became such the rage.

I dedicated it (mentally) to a lady we used to call “Robocop” for years when I used to do showroom at Jean-Paul Gaultier’s in Paris. It was obvious she worked out to terrible extremes, and would come in every new season with some new work done on her face or body, new boobs, new jaw, new cheekbones… We could swear she even had implants in her calves. She tended to wear skin-tight black leather that showed her bulging arm muscles. She was a sweet, sweet lady, with a slightly Kewpie Doll face, making her the more unnerving to look at. One season she didn’t come back, having died on the operating table during yet another procedure. We called her Robocop, but with tenderness, really. I never knew her real name, but I hope she’s perfect now wherever she is!

Meanwhile: Retirement age will someday need to be 85.
Related newyorkette posts: “Reject du jour: The untucked dress shirt and the original bikini girls”

^{And Rejected Cartoon of the Week as well! (image: carolita johnson)}

Anyone who passes through the bowels of Times Square 42nd Street Station knows who these people are. I suspect they hang out in malls as well, and not just in New York. They’re those weird, culty Dianetics people. They offer you a free stress test, where they hook up your finger to a clunky sort of playstation with a gauge on it, and ask you questions that make you laugh, and then say, “Did that question make you nervous?”

I know because I tried it once, to investigate. Every time I see them, I wonder if it’s going to be me or someone else to do what is being done to them in my little cartoon. Rejected twice, I think this one will be someone’s birthday present, because I have a fondness for it, probably because I live it every day in my imagination…

^{(This one’s for all you cat lovers out there. I like cats. They’re smart!)}

This one’s a three-time loser! I don’t know, is it too insulting? My personal criticism of the drawing is the proportions. I’d have the cat a little bigger and show a little less of the guy, basically tighten up the focus. But for some reason I’ve been too obstinate to re-draw it as a rough submission. Maybe some day! In any case, here you go. Throw tomatoes, or kitty litter!

^{(click on the image to link to the cartoonbank)}

Got this cartoon in this week’s The New Yorker. Sold last winter, the caption has been slightly modified by suggestion from my editor (originally had been: “Look honey! I got a brand new huge red bow for our car!”).

I still have the list of alternate captions, ten in all! (He thought it was too wordy. I thought, then why waste more words talking about it? But I’m absolutely amenable to criticism, and was very happy to get it sold and off my hands, since I’d been thinking of doing this gag for at least two years! The more concise caption works very well, I think.)

The car had originally been a dented heap, but we didn’t think readers needed to be hit over the head with the gag. So I re-did it. And there you have the life story of a published cartoon.

I’ll post a rejected cartoon tomorrow, for you to throw rotten tomatoes at, at your pleasure.

Today is 666 day! The world is supposed to end, and frankly, if it does I’ll be pretty annoyed I paid my rent on time.

But if it doesn’t end, I’ll be attending the Rejection Show tonight with a fellow fit-model, a gorgeous size 8. Size 6’s can make friends with size 8’s, you see.

Barring Apocalypse, you may still be able to get tickets to The Rejection Show, which was co-created by my colleague and cartoon friend, Matt Diffee, and Jon Friedman. Check out the upcoming.org link to your right in the sidebar. Among others, there will be two fellow TNY cartoonists amongst the rejectees, shamelessly displaying their failures.

Afterwards, we’ll all go out and dance the Apocalypso!

(image: carolita johnson)

Okay, this is one cartoon I’ll have to put a silver stake through! It’s had it’s third try this week. It just keeps coming back! It’s the un-dead rejected cartoon! (Possibly what Bob Mankoff has started thinking, though Zach, the assistant cartoon editor seems to notice these things even more).

I actually know nothing about jobs with benefits because I avoid them like the plague. But this cartoon is what I imagine it’s like negociating one. I dug this one out of the pile because I’ve been thinking about getting a “real job” lately, which of course is never gonna happen. I promised myself I’d go to South America and help dig irrigation ditches or teach literacy, rather than ever work for someone making exponentially more money and working exponentially less than me again. Just a matter of principle.

(There are, after all, people who deserve my sweat and tears more than my last boss did. And he was a nice guy! Put up with my dog pooping right in front of him—several times—on the office carpet, and everything!) (And yes, I believe my dog, who was always the epitome of intestinal self-control, pooped thusly on purpose to make a statement about my employement benefits.)

And speaking of bosses, I was shocked to find out that The Who’s “Don’t get fooled again” is apparently the number one conservative rock anthem! How can that be? That cynical last line (“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss!”) seemed to be a warning never to be content to be employed again! I never understood it to be a comfort to conservatives. How odd! But check out the top 50 conservative rock songs according to this article in the National Review and you’ll see it’s true. (Though The Stones’ “You can’t always get what you want” was no surprise).

Well, I have only my own size 6 bee-hind to blame. I didn’t turn in a batch this week because I wrapped it up a little before my car came to bring me to the airport at 3:45am Tuesday morning, and the fax machine went on strike. “Change toner,” it glibly sneered at me from its LCD display.

(“Damn you, fax machine!”)

I finally found the toner (where I’d put it so it would be “easy to find,”) but by then it was too late, as the car had arrived. The machine needs to be fed one page at a time, or else it gets all constipated. I considered leaving it to fend for itself, but images of a paper blockage, a short circuit, and flames bursting… it was too much. I decided to save it all for next week. Now I have the weekend off! (Technically. I will probably still do more cartoons anyway.)

But here’s one cartoon (above) I sent in last week even though batch day was cancelled. Extra-credit, anyone? Inspired by you-know-who, and this article. There is some debate as to whether he actually said “perch” or “large mouth bass,” as in this transcript. Some say he lied. (The President? Lie?) Read the rest of this entry »

The coffee series. My coffee-dream-come-true. Again, a rejected, “too cartoony” TNY spots submission. Don’t worry, I see what they mean and agree. Back to the drawing board!

If only!

*^{“Animate Objects: The coffee cup,” by carolita johnson.}