My Favorite Setting

Drawing Visual Metaphors

Each individual cartoonist has their preferred things to draw. Some call them “tropes,” “devices,” “visual metaphors,” “cliches.” Frankly, none of those words fit what I’m talking about. I grew up an avid follower of Charles Schulz’s strip Peanuts, and he had a few visual settings he would use repeatedly. Snoopy’s dog house, Charlie Brown and the football, Lucy’s Psychiatric Help stand, there are many. I loved the way he combined humor, politics and philosphy in his drawings. It heavily influenced my work; I was drawing at an early age as I read his wonderful missives in the newspaper.

My favorite spots to create and say things in a drawing are the Sabrette stand, the swing and the sandbox. I ran across this first drawing the other day and it seemed a fitting sentiment for now, even though I probably drew in ten years ago (and who knows what was going on when I drew it!). Following that one are more in the same setting — you can almost understand when some of them were drawn by the content I was expressing. The second one was my first Sabrette drawing in The New Yorker, and my second political cartoon for them. It was drawn in the 1980’s when NYC was a more dangerous place. The Vet Your Date one was drawn during the early years of computers, before cell phones. I find it fascinating to look at cartoons — not just my own — as a way to understand the past.

That all these sellers are all men is interesting. I think I may have purposfully chose them to be men because they almost always…