Picture This: Live Cartooning + Comedy, Saturday April 27

This week’s show is the 8th Birthday for NYC!

Picture This! combines my only two employable skills: stand-up comedy and drawing quickly.

I started out drawing and performing on Picture This! back in 2013 during the Melbourne International Comedy Festival when it was still a new show finding its feet. I would race off stage from my own hour-long stand-up show across town to jump in the saddle and draw for a slew of guest comedians who would pass through on their way to the bar - it sort of became the unofficial comic hang of the festival; seeing which big names would show up for a spot.

Fast forward 11 years and Picture This! holds 2 shows every month; one in LA, and one in New York— usually at Union Hall in Brooklyn. The generous folks at Wacom supplied us with new Wacom Mobilestudio Pro tablets to draw on, animating the comic’s set on stage while they interact with the drawing. If you get the chance, I highly recommend coming down for the next show. You can find out more about Picture This here.

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Photo credit: Noah Everhart (@enemypixels on Instagram)

New York Cartoons Becomes Featured Substack Publication 2nd Year in a Row

The New Yorker's 98th Birthday Party (A recollection on the Eve of its 99th)

In celebration of the New Yorker's 98th Anniversary, Writers, Fact-Checkers, Art Directors, Editors -oh! and Cartoonists, crammed into the World Trade Center together for the first time in 3 years.

Editor’s Note:
I’m publishing this journal entry on the eve of the New Yorker’s 99th Birthday. I didn’t publish it at the time because I hadn’t quite collected my thoughts or feelings about the event. The notes I made on the night are the hasty scribblings and sketches of a madman, but I finally managed to make some sense of them.

I’m sad to say that a large number of the people I was in the room with that night have since been fired by Conde Nast, or have left of their own accord for one reason or another. Many of the magazine’s best and most influential cartoonists died in the ensuing year, including Ed Koren (April), and Sam Gross (May) shortly after we lost Lee Lorenz, Sempe, and George Booth; all giants in their field. I think Emma Allen has had to write more cartoonist obituaries than any Cartoon Editor in the magazine’s history.

The New Yorker itself has gone through a lot of changes since that night, so I’m glad we had the opportunity to get together when we did.

The following is a grammatical mess. Apologies. I don’t have an editor. Regardless, I hope you enjoy the read.

Is There Something In This Returns!

Big news! My long-time podcast and writing partner Scott is having a baby. In even bigger news: we’ve ended our 4-year hiatus! After a pandemic and several other small events, I’m excited to share our newest episode is up: It’s the first in the new season of “Is There Something In This?” where we come up with cartoon ideas for the New Yorker and other publications. You can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and take a look at the new episode by clicking the button below:

Picture This: Live Cartooning + Comedy, Friday November 25th

Tonight’s show is the last for the year, so let’s make it the best one ever!

I’ll be hosting and also drawing for the hilarious Griffin Newman!

Picture This! combines my only two employable skills: stand-up comedy and drawing quickly.

I started out drawing and performing on Picture This! back in 2013 during the Melbourne International Comedy Festival when it was still a new show finding its feet. I would race off stage from my own hour-long stand-up show across town to jump in the saddle and draw for a slew of guest comedians who would pass through on their way to the bar - it sort of became the unofficial comic hang of the festival; seeing which big names would show up for a spot.

Fast forward 10 years and Picture This! holds 2 shows every month; one in LA, and one in New York— usually at Union Hall in Brooklyn. The generous folks at Wacom supplied us with new Wacom Mobilestudio Pro tablets to draw on, animating the comic’s set on stage while they interact with the drawing. If you get the chance, I highly recommend coming down for the next show. You can find out more about Picture This here.

Waking Up Portraits: Amanda Knox on Resilience

Since 2021, I’ve been lucky enough to work with the team behind the Waking Up app, which, after 10 years of meditation, has accelerated my knowledge and practice way beyond anything I could ever have fathomed at the starting line. You don’t know what you don’t know, I guess. (Then you know it. You know?)

All that is to say, every course on there is helpful. Exploring consciousness, mortality, the human mind and beyond with the best thinkers in their field, all in one place. Waking Up has become the biggest digital repository of immortalized wisdom in the world. A vast, virtual library of thought, conversation, practice and tools. It’s my desert island app, hands down.

Amanda Knox just joined with a fantastic series on resilience. Give it a listen below.

Artwork by Jason Chatfield

I hope what I have to offer here can help you feel less trapped in your own life. You can download the app from the app store and find my series of lectures in the Life section. Or follow this link:https://t.co/qSMKl4zxM4

— Amanda Knox (@amandaknox) November 15, 2023

See me streaming on HBO Max this Holiday Season!

The streaming rights for TV show I co-hosted for the Food Network have been sold to HBO (Max!) and will be streaming on your many, many screens this month, just in time for the Holidays! I’ll post an update closer to the Premiere. (Sadly I don’t get paid twice for this one…)

Editor & Publisher: “It’s no laughing matter. Austerity, consolidation and platform disparity undermine cartoons and comics”

Preview of article by Rob Tornoe | for Editor & Publisher, 26th October, 2023
Please read the full article here

While no major newspaper chains in the U.S. have pulled the plug entirely on comics sections, publishers have been willing to make wholesale moves involving comics and puzzles they wouldn't have dreamt of doing in previous years for fear of alienating more of their declining print subscribers.”

Ginger Meggs is an institution in Australia, where the beloved comic strip — about a “red-haired larrikin” living in the suburbs — has run in newspapers nationwide for over 100 years.

But that relationship between generations of Australians and the newspapers that have long published the comic strip was instantly severed when the two major chains down under — Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia and Nine Entertainment — decided to eliminate all comic strips.

News Corp. was first to the party, ending the funny pages in over 100 Australian newspapers in September 2022 to focus on games and puzzles, citing “changing readership habits of our audiences.” Nine Entertainment, whose chain of 100 newspapers includes the country’s most-read broadsheet, the Sydney Morning Herald, did the same thing in August.

It wasn’t just “Ginger Meggs” that was impacted. Other long-running Australian comic strips —“Swamp” by Gary Clark, “Snake” by Sols (real name Allan Salisbury), “Insanity Streak” by Tony Lopes, and “Beyond the Black Stump ” by Sean Leahy — all came suddenly face-to-face with a future where not a single newspaper in the entire country published comics.

“We all in one day got laid off, along with the entire comic strip industry,” said Jason Chatfield, who has been writing and drawing “Ginger Meggs" since 2007. Even Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese weighed in, calling it “just another step in the decline of modern media.”

Apart from it being a short-sighted decision to cut costs, Chatfield said the most frustrating aspect of the ordeal was the refusal of editors over the years to bring “Ginger Meggs" and other Australian comic strips onto the web along with other content from the newspapers, as readers transition from print to digital.

Ginger Meggs, a comic strip that had run in Australian papers for over 100 years, was recently eliminated, along with all other comic strips, from the two major Australian newspaper chains, News Corp Australia and Nine Entertainment.

“We begged from day one that News Corp and Nine Entertainment bring the strips online with the Sudoku, the horoscopes, and the crosswords and puzzles they had ported to the app,” Chatfield said. “They just didn’t. There was this stubborn reluctance that absolutely wasn’t grounded in any logic whatsoever… I was just summarily ignored.”

Cartoonists and syndication companies in the United States are keenly aware of what happened in Australia and what it could portend for comic strips here. While no major newspaper chains in the U.S. have pulled the plug entirely on comics sections, publishers have been willing to make wholesale moves involving comics and puzzles they wouldn't have dreamt of doing in previous years for fear of alienating more of their declining print subscribers.

In March 2021, McClatchy Group consolidated their comics and puzzles into one standardized page that appears across all their properties.

Lee Enterprises followed suit in September 2022, unifying their comics and puzzle offerings across their 77 daily newspapers and reducing the number of comics in their dailies. The Omaha World-Hearld reported that “a number of comic strips that we've been providing readers for years are no longer published in the paper.”

Continue reading at: https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/its-no-laughing-matter-austerity-consolidation-and-platform-disparity-undermine-cartoons-and,246312

Picture This!: Live Cartooning + Comedy, Friday October 20th

Last month we SOLD OUT, so be sure to book early!

The show combines my only two employable skills: stand-up comedy and drawing quickly. This weekend I’ll be drawing.

I started out drawing and performing on Picture This! back in 2013 during the Melbourne International Comedy Festival when it was still a new show finding its feet. I would race of stage from my own hour-long stand-up show across town to jump in the saddle and draw for a slew of guest comedians who would pass through on their way to the bar - it sort of became the unofficial comic hang of the festival; seeing which big names would show up for a spot.

Fast forward 10 years and Picture This! holds 2 shows every month; one in LA, and one in New York— usually at Union Hall in Brooklyn. The generous folks at Wacom supplied us with new Wacom Mobilestudio Pro tablets to draw on, animating the comic’s set on stage while they interact with the drawing. If you get the chance, I highly recommend coming down for the next show. You can find out more about Picture This here.

Photos by the amazing Mike Bryk

Appearing at New York Comic Con 2023

Next week is New York Comic Con at the Javits Center!

I’ll be at booth #4106 for the National Cartoonists Society from Thursday, October 12th through Sunday, October 15th.

I’ll be selling signed books and taking drawing commissions. Stop by and say G’day!

Watch Me in One Of the World's First Films Shot Entirely on the New iPhone.

Apple invited my favourite NYC director, David Ma, to come to Cupertino for the launch of the new iPhone15.

He flew back to NYC on a redeye with a couple of the new phones that night to write, cast, shoot, direct, and edit a short film in just five days. It just dropped on my birthday!

We shot it at a 3-Michelin-star Korean BBQ restaurant, Cote Korean Steakhouse on 22nd Street over 2 days, where I went into a full-blown Wagyu trance (I might just be the world's most inept pescatarian).

I owe a big thanks to the incredible team* that had me be part of this —and for letting me use my actual Australian accent on screen for the first time in 9 years. It was so much fun to make. I prefer the working title of “Meat Cute”, but here, in all its glory is…

ComicLab Podcast Episode w/ Sarah Andersen

Comic Lab (Live!) Podcast

On the final day of the Reubens in Jersey City, I got to join Dave Kellett and Brad Guigar’s live podcast, where special guest Sarah Andersen was sharing her extensive experience as a comics creator. We covered a lot of territory: from Sarah’s fascinating creative process to my very stupid Scotchbath Sunday ritual.

Comic Lab is a podcast about being a professional comic artist.

It’s a podcast about making comics — and making a living from comics! It's half shop-talk, half how-to, and half friendship. WE SQUEEZED IN THREE HALVES. It's tips and tricks and all the joys of cartooning as a pro. So pull up your drawing chair, put on some headphones, and join us while you draw!

(The full episode drops in the morning.)