![]() ![]() Kliban saw the ridiculousness of everything. He wasn’t making jokes about the world from within it, it seemed to me, but from far above it. Kliban had a series of books with titles like “Whack Your Porcupine” and “Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head” and his humor completely blew me away with it’s absurdity and imagination and point of view. Dalton on 5th Ave and hang around the humor section looking at cartoon books, and that’s where I discovered B. We lived in Manhattan by that time so I would go to the B. ![]() The late 70s was a time when every gag cartoonist had two or three collections of their cartoons published (I would love it if that time came back. When I was 11 or 12 I read National Lampoon (my parents were very permissive) and Playboy (very, very permissive) and that’s where I first saw cartoonists like Charles Rodrigues and Gahan Wilson and Sam Gross. JD: I didn’t think about drawing cartoons for The New Yorker for a long time. Was it a slow realization that this was the place for you or did lightning strike one day when you saw, say, an Arnie Levin drawing or picked up a copy of a Mick Stevens cartoon collection? MM: What finally drove you to submit to The New Yorker. In school drawing became a way to get attention and approval and at the same time I could never quite get the hang of paying attention in class, so I used to fill up my notebooks with drawings, almost to the complete exclusion of schoolwork. Anyway, I used to redraw Don Martin’s comics, sometimes mimicking his drawings but sometimes putting my own characters in them. I attribute this interest to having always felt alienated myself as a child. ![]() They could have stepped off a spaceship from another galaxy the day before. They weren’t earthy and relatable or lovable – they were odd. Don Martin, the Pythons, Steve Martin – they all had that in common. His stuff had a quality to it that I would describe as “otherworldly.” That was always the feeling I was attracted to. I did read some cartoons but it was mostly Peanuts and a hell of a lot of MAD. My mom took me to see Mel Brooks movies like “Young Frankenstein” and “Blazing Saddles” which I know I was too young to see but she was very permissive about stuff like that. I remember my dad taking me to see the Marx Brothers film “Animal Crackers” when it was re-released to movie theaters in the early 70s, and that pretty much blew my mind. My parents had a sense of humor and so they would let me stay up to watch Johnny Carson if a comedian was on that I liked. I loved Steve Martin and Monty Python’s Flying Circus and George Carlin and Peter Sellers. I watched comedians on TV and my parents would buy me comedy albums. I didn’t read superhero comics and I didn’t like sports and I was indifferent to popular music. Crumb was (the first of many instances in which I will compare myself to living legends and find we have little in common). I had a talent for drawing from an early age, but I can’t say I was especially enchanted by comics or cartoons in the way that a Jules Feiffer or an R. JD: After I picked up the crayons – well, immediately after I probably drew some pictures of Sigmund the Sea Monster or Evel Knievel and then watched The Brady Bunch Goes to Watergate or something like that, but if you mean in the years after that’s different. MM: You say in the New Yorkers film that “the first time I could pick up a crayon, I could draw” - and then what happened? That was happening quite a few blocks away, and thus in a different reality. Not the burned-down post-apocalypse wasteland you see in pictures of The Bronx from the 70s. Botanical Gardens, The Bronx Zoo, and so forth. ![]() MM: So Joe, where in this great metropolis were you born? Dator recently agreed to be part of Ink Spill’s interview series. Though his subject matter ranges far and wide, through past and present, this native New Yorker has said that the cartoons he is“most proud of are the ones that are very specific to this city.” His work is addictive – I bet you can’t look at just one. Since arriving at The New Yorker in the summer of 2006, Joe Dator has done just that. Some are more different than others former New Yorker cartoon editor Lee Lorenz once said that the best cartoonists are the ones that create their own world. (Above: a detail from Joe Dator’s “How We Do It” - it appeared in The New Yorker, September 24, 2012)Įach New Yorker cartoonist brings something different to the pages of the magazine – it’s sort of an unofficial requirement for arriving. ![]()
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