The New Yorker’s
cartoon editor, Robert Mankoff,
believes that 98 percent of the magazine's readers look at the cartoons
first — “and the other two percent lie,” writes Joseph P. Kahn at the Boston Globe. Mankoff also runs the
magazine's Cartoon Bank, wrote The Naked
Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity, and created the
magazine's caption contest, a feature that draws thousands of submissions each
week. Kahn asked Mankoff if he personally wades through the caption contest
entries. Not exactly, said Mankoff: “A computer program sorts them out, then my
assistant gives me 50 or 60, broken into categories. For example, we ran a
cartoon of a car that had crashed into a room where two people are in bed.
Categories might include Bad Sex and Kid Coming Home. I'll pick three entries
and send them to [editor] David Remnick for approval. I try to pick from
different ones, like, ‘I thought our sex life was a train wreck, not a car
accident.’ And, ‘Well, at least he made curfew.’ But it's very subjective.”
New
Yorker cartoons are highly topical, Mankoff said, reflective of the times,
which precipitated this exchange between him and Kahn:
Kahn:
What about poking fun at, say, economic Armageddon?
Mankoff:
Well, we have a cartoon anthology coming out, On the Money, that looks at issues like the stock market and
personal finance since 1925, year by year.
Kahn:
If anyone has any money left, it should sell like hotcakes.
Mankoff:
Yes, although the hotcakes industry is going down the tubes, too. The United States
now outsources all its hotcakes.
Footnit: New Yorker editor David Remnick scoffed at rumors that the magazine is considering cutting
back on its publication schedule due to financial trauma. In recent years,The New Yorker’s bottom line has been
considerably enhanced by sales from the Cartoon Bank, which, when Mankoff, who
invented it, first offered to sell to the magazine, it declined. Later, it
thought better of that decision and reversed it.
Comments