Posted 4:18 p.m. Friday, May 30, 2014
[caption id="attachment_4453" align="alignright" width="350"]
A self portrait by Mark Thompson.[/caption]
A career in cartooning is a test of perseverance.
UW-L alum Mark Thompson, ’84, had two years of submitting 10-15 cartoons a week before getting his first published in The New Yorker in 2010.
“The most important thing for anyone to learn if they do anything creative is to accept rejection and failure,” he says. “If you’re willing to put up with it, keep trying and you have talent, you will succeed.”
One of his favorite cartoons is the first one The New Yorker bought — a sketch of Santa Claus in a locker room with his reindeer and some reporter microphones in his face. Santa says, “Those were some nasty headwinds over Connecticut, but, you know the team and I just put our heads down and took it one house at a time.”
Getting a first bite from The New Yorker was “thrilling,” says Thompson. “It is a great reward when you see your cartoon in the magazine,” he says. “Then you never want to stop.”
To date Thompson has had seven cartoons published in the magazine. He’s kept a steady pace of submitting 10-15 cartoons a week since he started trying to get into the New Yorker in 2008.
A self portrait by Mark Thompson.[/caption]
A career in cartooning is a test of perseverance.
UW-L alum Mark Thompson, ’84, had two years of submitting 10-15 cartoons a week before getting his first published in The New Yorker in 2010.
“The most important thing for anyone to learn if they do anything creative is to accept rejection and failure,” he says. “If you’re willing to put up with it, keep trying and you have talent, you will succeed.”
One of his favorite cartoons is the first one The New Yorker bought — a sketch of Santa Claus in a locker room with his reindeer and some reporter microphones in his face. Santa says, “Those were some nasty headwinds over Connecticut, but, you know the team and I just put our heads down and took it one house at a time.”
Getting a first bite from The New Yorker was “thrilling,” says Thompson. “It is a great reward when you see your cartoon in the magazine,” he says. “Then you never want to stop.”
To date Thompson has had seven cartoons published in the magazine. He’s kept a steady pace of submitting 10-15 cartoons a week since he started trying to get into the New Yorker in 2008.
How did your desire to be a cartoonist develop?
I’ve always loved it. It’s been something I’ve done since I was a kid in elementary school. At UW-L, I occasionally wrote cartoons for the Racquet.How did you start a career in cartooning?
It’s something I always wanted to do, but I was working other jobs. When I turned 40, My wife and I moved from the Minneapolis area to Seattle and adopted two children from China. I started cartooning when I was a stay-at-home parent. In 2007 I moved back to the Cities and I started creating cartoons full time — submitting 10-15 cartoons a week. The problem with waiting as long as did in life is that publishing is changing so fast and everything is going online. The number of publications that pay for cartoons become fewer and fewer each year. When I was growing up there were magazine cartoons everywhere and you could submit to a lot of publications and make a living. Now I don’t think you could make a living.How do you get your ideas?
I think everyone has a different process. Generally, you take parts of your life and let it sink into your subconscious. If you let life happen, when you sit down to create cartoons, you just let those moments come to you. I fill up blank sheets of paper with different ideas and do quick sketches.What makes a cartoon funny?
For The New Yorker, you send submissions in to two people, the cartoon editor and the magazine’s editor, who decide, so it depends what they think is funny. It could come down to the mood they are in when your cartoon arrives. From my point of view, I concentrate more on “slice of life” things — common things people run into in life that everyone can identify with. One time I was cleaning my kid’s room and listening to Brian Greene talk about entropy… explaining how the universe works and what happened after the big bang. As time goes by, the universe gets more disordered. After listening to this, the ideas crossed paths in my brain. (One of Thompson’s New Yorker cartoons features a mother in her child’s completely disordered room saying “I blame entropy.”) I also like to do bizarre or off-the-wall ideas — cartoons that maybe you won’t get the first time you read. View the seven cartoons UW-L Alum Mark Thompson has published in The New Yorker.