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lot of location-specific assignments, where they would
send me to a restaurant to draw the inside or send me
to the High Line. If you look at the illustration work, I
think it gets more specific to New York.
Did working at The New Yorker and getting those types
of assignments allow you to feel more comfortable
living here?
It definitely helped. I basically moved to get married and
start a new life here. So working for The New Yorker
helped a lot with the introduction of me to my in-laws.
To them, The New Yorker meant something. I wasn’t just
a cartoonist; I worked for The New Yorker. And I get to
know things, people, and locations by drawing them.
This was before I had kids, so I did a lot more walking
around and drawing in sketchbooks. Some of that was
on assignment, some of that was just something that I
did because when you don’t have kids you have so much
free time. That was, I think, serving two purposes. It was
easing me into these new surroundings, which were a little
overwhelming. I don’t think I achieved it but I think
it was a vague attempt at getting a mastery or comfort
over the unease that I was feeling. It was also a very blatant
attempt to look like a real artist to my wife—the guy
who is walking around with a sketchbook and drawing.
That’s not something I normally do very much.
Some of the covers you have done for the New Yorker
have become iconic pictures of a city that you were
just wrapping your head around when you drew them.
People might not even be aware that, for much of your
early career, you were thought of as a California artist.
I still feel like a California artist. I’ve lived here a long
time now but I still feel like I’m a Californian that’s been
transplanted here. I feel like I have a little bit more authority
when it comes to setting stories in California and
writing about those people and locations. “Killing and
Dying” didn’t require a lot of research. If I set that here, I
would be like, “I don’t want to screw up because the real
New Yorkers are going to know.” They are going to rake
me over the coals if I get one detail wrong. And I don’t
know if that will ever change. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel
like some authority and to have the confidence to write
about and draw New York.
Which is odd, because there are people who think of
you now as specifically a New York artist.
I’m always blown away when I see bootleg versions of my
New Yorker covers in Times Square, or something like
that. There’s a long tradition of people coming to New
York from somewhere else and pretending to be locals.
Was there trepidation in writing so directly about your life?
I think to some readers this will look like the easiest
book for me to put out. Or that I just took pages out of
Tomine at home. Photo by Susan De Vries.
Is it difficult to dredge up memories, some of which,
as presented in the book, were quite embarrassing
or humiliating?
There’s a certain amount of research that was required.
My memory is not perfect when it comes to dates and
details. In some cases, it involved doing some math and
looking up old journal entries. I’ll be the first to admit
that the book gets more precise and accurate as it gets
closer to the present day. The earliest stuff in the book is
vague, very filtered memories. I tried to be forgiving of
myself if it wasn’t journalistically precise.
Was the move from the West Coast to the East Coast
reflected in the work?
I think there is a lot of that emotion and atmosphere in
“Shortcomings.” That was a book I started in California
and finished in New York, which coincidentally is reflected
in the subject matter. I also started doing a lot more
work for The New Yorker when I got here. I was doing a