It’s hard to believe that there was a time when there were no Jack Ziegler cartoons in The New Yorker, now that well over a thousand have been published. But to paraphrase the ancient Chinese sage Lao-Tzu, the journey of a thousand cartoons begins with a single one.
Here’s Jack’s story of that first cartoon.
Shortly before Christmas, 1973, on my regular stop at The New Yorker to drop off new material and pick up last week’s returns and rejection slip, I was surprised to find an almost illegible note clipped to my sheaf of that week’s losers: “Dear Mr. Ziegler, would you mind stopping back to discuss one of your ideas with me? Thank you.”
It was unsigned, but I knew it was from Lee Lorenz, the art editor. After having the note verified by Natasha, the dark, smoldering vixen who was moonlighting as a receptionist, I was let in.
It was below freezing that morning when I left my apartment, so I had on a heavy sweater, topped by a wool sport jacket. By noon, however, the temperature had soared, and perspiration was now dripping off me. I nervously took my seat in the anteroom alongside several other gentlemen—“real” cartoonists (as opposed to me, the neophyte)—all easygoing guys who, unlike me, were quite comfortable hanging out there.
When Lee invited me into his office, he made no mention of my addled appearance, nor did he inquire after my apparently questionable state of health. I sat in the chair opposite him as he pulled my drawing from a fat pile of other people’s work on his desk. It was a cartoon that had made me happy when I came up with the idea. Lee asked if I wouldn’t mind if they bought it for the magazine, and if I’d be amenable to considering a few changes. It was my first exposure to the extremely polite ways of The New Yorker in conducting business with its contributors.
The caption and layout were fine, he said, but some adjustments would be required in the body of the drawing. Could I perhaps make the fellow on the phone older and a tad more Biblical? And the inner workings of the conveyer belt seemed, well, not quite mechanical enough. Just a few lines added onto the finished drawing should do it.
Two weeks later, I received a check for three hundred and five dollars, the largest payment and oddest amount I had yet received for a cartoon sale. When I was paid one month later for a second drawing the magazine had bought, I was shocked to find that my “regular” fee had been reduced to two hundred and fifteen dollars.
“Surely there must be some mistake,” I sobbed to Lee the next day over the phone. After a minute or two, he figured out my problem and told me about “the formula.” The New Yorker, I learned, paid strictly by the square centimeter, i.e., the amount of space a drawing would take up when it got published in the magazine.
P.S. The formula by which the payment for cartoons is determined has since been changed, but cannot be revealed, as it is considered a proprietary trade secret. When I became cartoon editor, I suggested that it be by the dot. Suffice to say that suggestion was not taken.
P.P.S. After Jack sold that first cartoon, Lee Lorenz and the editor, William Shawn, realizing the innovative talent they had on their hands, quickly started purchasing more. However, as Lee relates in “The Art of The New Yorker 1925-1995,” despite the fact that Jack was selling regularly, he was not only not appearing regularly in the magazine, he wasn’t appearing at all.
According to Lee, Carmine Peppe, who presided imperiously over the makeup team that layed out the magazine, had decided that Jack’s work, which often used comic-strip conventions such as a heading instead of the usual gag line, didn’t mesh with Mr. Peppe’s conception of what a New Yorker cartoon should be:
And even when Lee himself told Mr. Peppe that The New Yorker did indeed wish to publish Jack’s cartoons, the stubborn Mr. Peppe remained unmoved. It was only after William Shawn intervened that he finally capitulated. The rest is cartoon history.
Next week: More history, as the cartoonist Michael Maslin tells us about his début.
