My new book, due out in November, will be sold in the great store Anthropologie!!!

I do a cartoon every week for womensEnews.org.  Its a place for me to be political in a more overt way than The New Yorker sometimes likes its cartoons.

Sarah Palin.  I imagine many women aspire to look like her. But the same women may hate her politics. What to do?

I am loving exploring the world of graphic narrative.  Recently, I wrote a short story graphic narrative about growing up and Narrative Magazine published it.  You have to log in to see it.

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/image_gallery/72570

I found this photo (link below) yesterday while researching for my upcoming talk at the Norman Rockwell Museum.  Love this. I can identify Steig, Addams, Saxon, Hamilton (the only guy with brown hair). The others are hard to see or I don’t recognize their faces. Michael Maslin also posted it on his site, Ink Spill

http://www.corbisimages.com/Enlargement/U1727254-4.html

I used to do the cartoonist lunch every Wednesday. Now I join the group on Tuesays every so often. The regulars when I was going early in my career (in the early 80’s)  were Roz Chast, Jack Zielger, Mick Stevens, Sam Gross, Bob Mankoff.

I live in Rhinebeck. It’s hard not to pay attention to all the hoopla over the wedding of Chelsea Clinton to be held here today. The town is bustling, full of  camera crews, journalists, and visitors from who-knows-where. So far, the only celebrity spotted “hanging” in town is, of course, Bill Clinton, who graced the fans with his presence at a local bistro, Gigi Trattoria.

It is a town that is home to a variety of people–families who have lived here for generations, farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, artists, writers, cartoonists, weekenders from NYC and cows. Not to mention chickens, horses and goats. Thinking about all the secret service that are blanketing the area, I came up with the cartoon below. Then did another version with a different caption. The local paper, The Daily Freeman, has published the first version online.

And I wanted to try to do one that did not use the word “Rhinebeck”, and came up with this:

Last week, I got a cartoon okay-ed by The New Yorker, which means my editor emailed me and said they wanted to buy a rough cartoon that I submitted that week.  This one was political, and they wanted to run it in the next issue, which meant I had to do the finished drawing and email it to them by the next day. I love it when this happens…it has happened a few times for me. Maybe I’m a frustrated journalist–I love the buzz of news and reporting and commenting.

The issue I drew about was the McChrystal firing. The drawing (link in the magazine here) I share with you below. The idea of a general’s medals being for things other than bravery, etc, is not a new one for me. I have tried it before in cartoons that did not sell. Medals for not saying the word peace, medals for driving a hybrid….but this time, I used the format again and it was the magic formula. Cartoonists often do this– rework settings, formats, words with new ideas.

Not that this came easily. In my head and on the many pages of paper on my desk, I tried numerous different approaches to the McChrystal affair before I drew this one. There are countless ways to get at a subject, the key is to find a way to poke fun in a manner that will allow the cartoon to last beyond the immediate circumstances.

(copyright The New Yorker Magazine and Liza Donnelly)

Cartooning for Peace, and a journalist from the Italian newspaper Republicca, invited me to contribute a drawing about freedom of the press. I learned that in Italy recently, the issue is in hot debate. The government passed a law prohibiting the publication of wire tap transcripts, and many in the country are up in arms. Here below is the drawing, and here is a link to the online newspaper (if you want to see my drawing, scroll through the slideshow. It is on the homepage at the moment).

I met Helen Thomas last year at a conference called “Women and Power” at Omega Institute.  We were presenters on the same panel about women and the media. She was funny, gracious, kind, opinionated. Among her many bon mots, she said (and I love this) that”If you want to know what’s happening in the world, read the comics.” (paraphrase, but close).

My feeling is that as we get older, we women learn to lose our inhibitions in many ways. Helen Thomas represents that clearly. We realize that being careful is not all that it is cracked up to, that being nice at the exclusion of ourselves should not always be the most important quality to have. Her comments on Israel and the Jews, however, went too far in my estimation. She is, of course, allowed her own opinion, but even she realized after the fact that what she said was not right. Her emotions got the better of her–I am not sure if it was because of her age. Maybe after years of being asked questions, she let her inner editor fall away when she shouldn’t have.

I am sorry she will end her career on this note…if in fact her career is ended. Maybe she should do stand-up. Sarah Silverman has shown that raw comments get a laugh from many. In my cartoons, I try to be uninhibited but thoughtful, not hurtful, and not provocative as in pushing people’s buttons. I want to be like Helen Thomas, but not as she was last week.

The cartoon below was done last week (June 10, 2010) and has run in numerous online sites, starting with womensenews.org, then dscriber.com and now salon.com It’s getting a lot of comments, mostly in the form of dialogue between the commenters on their own opinions. As long as the comments don’t get nasty, dialogue is what we need.

Amanda Stern’s Happy Endings Music and Reading Series is an institution in New York. She has received numerous positive reviews and awards for her funny, entertaining monthly event. She brings together three authors and a musical group each month to Joe’s Pub, and it is a wonderful evening. I met Amanda last year, and we talked about doing a New Yorker cartoonist evening, and it’s finally coming to fruition this month. I helped her find three cartoonists, and she found a musical guest.  It should be a wild evening. The unexpected thing is that each author has to do a “risk” of some sort. Stay tuned: I will hopefully post a video of what happens.

Cartoonists: Drew Dernavich, Carolita Johnson, myself

Musical guest: Jeffrey Lewis

link:  http://www.joespub.com/component/option,com_shows/task,view/Itemid,40/id,5165