No, not the New Yorker

My godson Giacomo, among others, tells me that text is too hard to read when it's white against black, so I'm now experimenting with black against white. (Takes you back to the Sixties, doesn't it?) And my nephew Nathan suggests that I introduce my cartoons to my blog, or vice versa. 


Four years ago, I drew about a hundred cartoons as I awaited  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Jovanovich and Schuster's verdict on one of my manuscripts. I still don't know what came over me; maybe it was turning 60. But suddenly cartoons were popping up all over the place, and I had to sketch madly to keep up with them.


I had tried cartooning when I was younger, but I was too self conscious to hit on a style. Now a style seemed to derive organically from my incompetence as a draughtsman. In any case, I thought some of them were funny, and I ran them by a bunch of my friends who seemed to like them too. Though you never can tell with friends, they emboldened me to send five or six a week to the New Yorker. That the New Yorker, upon whose doors I had once knocked until my knuckles bled,  had recently published a piece by my son Jake suggested to me that perhaps a new era had dawned and that the doors might at long last creak open for his father as well.


On the other hand, I sensed that the cartoons I was doodling belonged, if they belonged anywhere, to the New Yorker's pre Mankoff period. Robert Mankoff has been cartoon editor for quite a long period, and despite certain dependables like Roz Chwast, his selections have often made me feel either awfully dense or terribly, terribly old. I also knew going in that Mankoff deeply resented dabblers in his profession, especially writers who regarded their backhanded scribbles as irresistible.


When I started writing I used to deal with the vicissitudes of submitting to magazines by displaying my rejection slips on the wall. Esquire's was elegant, and the New Yorker's were encouraging and always courteous, and I proudly amassed such a vast display that when magazines began to accept my submissions I sometimes caught myself sighing disappointedly because I had been counting on another rejection to fill a gap in the exhibit.


It took the sting away then, but not this time around. As I lined Mankoff's rejection slips on the wall over my desk, I found them disspiriting, and since the New Yorker is just about the only decent venue left for cartoons, it wasn't as though I had a backup plan. So in the end I shelved them and put away my drawing pad and went back to work.


But now, as Nathan points out, I have my own venue. So here's the first of my cartoons, this one on the subject of free range chickens, the inexplicable subject of my first post. I seem to be greatly exercised about free range chickens. I mean, what's the deal with free range chickens?