October Newsletter 👻 (The New Yorker, Softball, and Graphic Novel Progress!)

Header Image: My first New Yorker cartoon ever!! Thank you Daniel A. for capturing this image. :^)

• I'll be streaming tomorrow at NOON CST on Picarto! I will record and post screencaps on whatever I'm working on both here and on Discord.
• I'm trying to limit the number of projects I work on simultaneously.  🙃 Which is hard. I always have a million story ideas and I want to draw them all.
• This month I'll be continuing work on my next graphic novel while submitting more cartoons to The New Yorker. Here and there, I'll be working on the Check, Please!: Year Four Kickstarter. And once November hits, I'll probably spend a week revising more of the softball comic I'm working on with Mad Rupert!

THE NEW YORKER

Huzzah! I found out this week that my first ever cartoon appeared in this week's New Yorker! AHHHHHH!

In college, I was a staff member on The Yale Record, the oldest college humor magazine in America, founded by Yalies in 1872. Many members of The Record went on to become contributors to The New Yorker, so picture me in 2011, a college sophomore, and obsessed with one day submitting a silly goof to this prestigious magazine. 

Cut to a decade later. I finally got it together and sent out 6 cartoons to Emma Allen, the cartoon editor for the magazine.  To my utter delight, she found one of the six cartoons amusing enough to make it in. Success! I plan on scratching my head for more ideas to submit and I will definitely share the copious duds in the reject pile!

Rejected: Dammit, I will get a chess joke in there if it's the last thing I do!

Here are some works-in-progress that I plan on submitting in a week or so. I need more data, but I think a New Yorker cartoon has to have some element of whimsy and offer a distinct voice....or be so totally impenetrable that you laugh just because!

"As it turns out, removing the part of the brain that causes impostor syndrome is a very simple procedure." 

"If I could just piggyback off, Irene."

 "For the record, this meeting could have been an email." 

THAT SOFTBALL GRAPHIC NOVEL!

The road to making this Softball Graphic Novel has been a bumpy one, but Madeline and I have hit a landmark: We have 112 pages of it penciled! That's like, almost halfway there! I spent the last week of September revising the script and turning in changes to Madeline. Please take a look at these side-by-sides of Madeline's great art and my words.

MY NEXT GRAPHIC NOVEL! (Progress)

September 15th was my deadline to turn in a working manuscript of my next graphic novel. Self-imposed deadline, I should say—but I like sharing my calendar goals with my agent and editor to keep myself accountable.

The most exciting part about turning in a working manuscript of my graphic novel is that I finally got to share it with OTHER PEOPLE. (EXCITING...TERRIFYING...SAME THING...)  Finding and hiring some was my main work task for the third week of September. 

Sensitivity Readers/Authenticity Readers (the terms are slightly interchangeable) are consultants who check manuscripts for unconscious bias and inaccuracies in portrayals of different identities. I highly recommend SRs for publishing projects intended to reach wide audiences. It's quality control! Just like you'd hire an editor to help your narrative make sense, you hire an SR to make sure your characters/portrayals of culture are realistic and fair. 

Here are some of the thumbnails I turned in!

Oh my god, last but not least, I made an Avatar Charity Zine with my friend Gaby! OKAY I NEED TO NOT WORK ON SO MUCH STUFF.

And that's it for me. I'M IN PROJECT HELL.