Cartoonists From The United States

"My favorite thing is Stephen Colbert -- he's a genius. It's great to watch Colbert and think: How does he keep that pace up? That's an amazing amount of work. He's really doing something special. This particular election, it keeps you sane [to watch him], when watching TV news makes you want to throw out your television. ... This [election] has become like a reality show that I'm way too invested in."

"It's not hard to formulate an opinion on things. It's hard to make the viewer or reader [feel] validated. You've got to give them the jokes. Funny is a rare gift.... Early on, I erred on the side of message-driven. Those are the mistakes you learn from. The second season of the show, we tried to make that adjustment."

"there’s an old saying that a cynic is just a heartbroken optimist. If you don’t care, then there’s not even a reason to be cynical."

"As I grew up I developed an interest in Garry Trudeau, and that's what took me into the direction of being a syndicated cartoonist."

"Well the only way for you to know (my thoughts on political questions) would be through The Boondocks. I decided a long time ago to stop engaging in the conversation. If I had anything worthwhile to say, I should say it in the work."

"I think I'm a better writer now than when I started. I certainly know more about producing and working with actors. You take every single bit of it into the next project."

"I went in knowing the show couldn't be the strip, aside from the topicality. Those jokes don't "land" at all on television. We didn't re-create the strip on TV -- we wanted to keep the characters the same but make it stand on its own. That's hard -- we certainly didn't get it right away. We struggled with Huey for a long time. Granddad just worked right from the bat. A lot of those Season One episodes were really rough. ... That first season was rough. it almost killed me and everyone around me."

"Everyone sits at home with their political opinions. The important thing is making it as funny as possible and knowing when to pull back on the message for the sake of the message...But it can never just [be about the jokes] for me. I'm not like a funny person. I'm not like a comedian. I have things I want to say. ... Bill Maher does find a nice balance between the jokes and tackling the serious issues. So few outlets [offer] those issues in a serious fashion."

"This generation of young people ...music and pop culture has been pretty anti-intellectual. That's a hard thing to overcome."

"Satire is the least commercially viable form of comedy. ... There really is a distaste for being preached at. People have a very low tolerance for it -- newspaper audiences have a way higher tolerance for it than others. But it's tough on TV."

"Up until the mid 1990s, everything was a pen-and-ink drawing, dipping an old-style crow quill pen into an ink well, then painstakingly going over a pencil drawing, then waiting for it to dry, then erasing it, and then touching it up if need be. And then somebody at the paper would take a photograph of it. If you made a mistake, you had to start over. Now there’s Photoshop, so it’s very different. The hard part is coming up with the idea. The drawing is nothing. It takes an hour to pencil it, ink it, erase it, put it on the scanner, and Photoshop it. But sometimes the gestation period of the idea takes years. You know, people say, “Oh, how long does it take to do that?” It takes some time between one hour and 68 years."

"there’s a whole group of cartoonists — especially younger cartoonists — who think that labeling anything is really hackneyed and old style, and who just roll their eyes and groan. But I really like heavily labeled things for complex issues."

"my first memory in life was three years old: my dad took me to see Star Wars and it's not just the first movie I remember, it's my first memory. If you ever watch Boondocks, a lot of times it does become more of an action comedy than just a pure comedy. I've always had a passion for all that"

"My issues (with cartooning) were totally about: one, I just burnt out on the strip and the deadlines were brutal. Two, I didn't feel like there was much of a future in print. I thought I needed to quit because I saw the newspapers slowly going away. I didn't want to be caught off guard. I felt more comfortable being a screenwriter, and as I learned how to become a producer, it seemed like a more natural fit for me than cartooning. I still do animation, and I think animation will always be a part of what I do, but I'm trying to do more live-action stuff and I think that's really going to be my focus."

"I had gotten really good at just shutting it all out because you couldn’t possibly get any work done and track all of this trouble you were getting into and who was saying what."

"the Tuskegee Airmen who were heroes to me most of my life."

"You go to Comic-Con and see a cross section of everybody. It used to be niche, and now it's so enormous that it's hard to categorize. But ultimately, the epicenter of who's creating this stuff still ends up being the comic book companies, the Hollywood movies or whatever. All of that is very much white male-centered."

"I AM A PUZZLE I AM SOLVING"

"HOW TO READ A BOOK 1. READ IT 2. CHANGE A LOT 3. REREAD IT"

"Because a capitalist economy compels perpetual growth, no reforms or adjustments can make it sustainable."

"It's a world that accepts people more for who they are, and whoever you are, at this point, you can find your thing."

"If you're a gentleman and you're wandering around in a garden and you're inspired and you write a haiku, that's real creativity. But if you have to make 1,000 cakes to sell, you're not going to put your soul into it. It's a matter of scale. I think great art is often the gentleman writing the haiku, but in order to be an artist you also need to be able to make 1,000 cakes in an afternoon."

"Humor is like a good eye for design, it comes when you have a strong sense of proportion along with the grace to step back and not take every little thing too seriously."

"I think that’s the thing that happens in my life that is closest to art and so I tend to make art about it. I also really love nostalgic writers. Two of my favorite writers are Proust and Nabokov, who are all about lost childhoods and loves that could have been."

"if you care too much, then you can't tell a story that moves. You can't be funny. If you're too close to something, sometimes you can't make it light or snappy."

"I’m not interested in details. I’m interested in the power structure and some strong feelings tend to be pretty universal."

"I think a movement of women coming forward and saying we’re not what society says we are should also be a men’s movement. I wish men would be evaluating themselves. I see a lot of defensiveness in the bad men and a lot of ‘I’m not going to talk about myself, let’s only talk about women’ in the good men and that’s kind of a shame."

"(On one page you wrote, “if you intend to create a world – you need to leave the real world behind”) I think my mom believed that. I think both of us deep down have this feeling that either you can have your art or you can have your life. I don’t think that’s really true. I think you can have both."

"I don't know a lot of cartoonists who laugh a lot. I think when we hear a joke we just get still like a dog who smells an animal. It becomes about isolating the part that's funny and unexpected and thinking more about that. You get spiraled into the nuances of what makes something funny and who thinks it's funny."

"I love them! I was reading Miss Manners for a while (that was Judith Martin). I watch The Steve Harvey Show sometimes, and I love Judge Judy. I watch Kathy Lee and Hoda (this is only at the gym, so it’s only in the winter, when I’m running on a treadmill!). Since I wrote this book I’ve been really into talk radio and podcasts in which people have mundane conversations. I just want to hear people talking about their lives."

"I so much think of the Torah as just a story and, like, a beautiful window into the way people thought thousands of years ago and the way people were thousands of years ago."

"The reality of how America functions is it's hard to be an artist, period. It's really undervalued work. You have to convince so many people to like what you are doing before you can do it all the time. That's a real barrier, and it's scary and seems impossible. For a long time, I had, like, three strips a week running on various websites and I wasn't getting paid for any of it. The Nib was the first paid work ever got. It's important, I think, to step back and think, "Oh man, I managed to do this." Now I'm doing it full time. And it is unserious and unprofitable, but at least I'm happy with it."

"I think I don't write fiction because I don't really know how to invent characters. I just know how to put myself into a character. So even when I read the Torah, I can't really fathom an old man with a beard Creator. I can only fathom kind of a childish, sweet, very flawed person taking a lot of joy in making things and then feeling really angry at herself for not making something better."

"The shadow represents my strangeness and my creativity—my soul, which I used to run from in hopes of learning how to fit in."

"I had complicated feelings about Judaism. I went to Jewish schools and synagogue and youth groups and summer camps. I’d always been an outsider as a kid. I was really shy and a little weird, maybe Asperger’s-ish, and I was really happy to get away from the suburbs when I moved to the city from New Jersey for art school. New York was a much more open-minded place, and the world of art seemed to like me for being unusual. I never rebelled against Judaism, though."

"My grandma gave me the “Bintel Brief” book that she had—this collection of letters that was published in 1971—that’s when all the jadedness fell away. I was transported...The book (“Bintel Brief”) is a collection of short stories based on letters written to the Yiddish advice column “A Bintel Brief” that ran in the newspaper the Forward beginning in 1906. The letters were very intense—they were by new immigrants to the United States from Eastern Europe, and they deal with a lot of life-or-death issues—but they are also funny, weird, and sweet."

"I think that’s when I realized that my favorite thing to write is about my life, but with some fictional things thrown in. I think that’s a good thing to do with comics because I think the line between fiction and truth is blurred in comics in a way that it is isn’t in writing because in writing with magical realism it’s really obvious that you’re lying. In a comic, you could just like draw a ghost there and you don’t need to explain why it’s there. It’s a lot simpler and less involved"

"It’s a story about these quiet stories women pass on from generation to generation. It’s a thing women do because we aren’t historically the writers or the artists, so our stories are more personal and quieter...At least in my mom’s generation and earlier women were pushed by society to channel everything in their being into being a good mom and a good wife and making a smaller world for their family."

"I like having an audience. I don’t think I ever work when I don’t have an audience, which is one of my great failings."

"I’m surprised that people relate to my stuff. I always thought of myself as not that relatable and maybe in person I’m not that relatable, but it warms my heart that people can relate."

"There have been many times in my life when I’ve chosen art over people, but like my mom, I thought it was a choice. I think that’s a very romantic notion and it’s a good notion to put in books, but it’s not a good one to live by. I think seeing people does broaden your world a lot and art will come back when it’s ready. Even if you walk away from it for a minute."

"I don’t think having a hard time working on something means it was a bad project."

"I think of myself as very consciously following in the footsteps of Roz (Chast) and Liza (Donnelly) and more recently Carolita Johnson and Emily Flake. I do think of myself as a woman cartoonist in a historically men’s world. But very nice men."

"I realize I don’t like to draw any character and then I realized you don’t need to make them look like anything. They just need facial expressions. That’s how it feels to be a person. You don’t know what you look like, you just know what you’re feeling."

"Comics was the thing that I always wanted to be able to do."

"I would love to see more of us (women of color and other marginalized voices) in mainstream comics. When it comes to webcomics, we’re KILLING the game. Mildred Louis, Wendy Xu, Ariel Ries, Gisele Jaboteh, Shannon Wright, Bianca Xunise, I mean we’re knocking it out of the park. But when it comes to mainstream print, it’s different. I think in order for that to change we need more WOC writing and illustrating more than just other POC characters. Put one of us on Iron Man. Have a WOC creative team for Justice League. Let me see more of us writing for ALL characters and from that is where the growth begins."

"I'm hard-pressed to think of a thing that happened in politics that is purely just comedy, because people's lives are at stake. I think the worst kind of political cartoon is just, like, "Look at this thing that happened." Like, "Here's a drawing of a news event with nothing to say about it." No point of view, nothing to say. That's not funny to me. What is funny to me is a point of view. It's something to say that is interesting or surprising about the subjects. Like, what is bad about Trump? 'Cause there's a million things, right? I think what's bad about Trump is the system that produced him. I try to think much more about the root causes of things and less about the aesthetic differences that I have with a politician. The jokes that are just like, "Oh, Trump's hands are small" are less funny to me. It's a little easy to poke fun at a person; it's harder and more interesting to poke fun at a structure. Because when you see Trump do something, it's not just him; it's hundreds of thousands of people enabling his policy-it's a whole support system there. For me, it was really clarifying when Trump was elected. A lot of the reaction, especially the more center-left, was like, "Oh no, Trump has dropped out of space, like from a meteorite. He's this rogue figure!" That's distorting everything he is. You can draw an extremely straight line from where the Republican Party was at with Reagan to Trump. I think it's more interesting to talk about that stuff."

"NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE EVERYTHING."

"at the moment I’m completely obsessed with Kamala Khan."

"Sean Galloway, Chris Sanders, Dustin Nguyen, and Brittany Williams!"