Making "New Yearer"

Still, I liked the idea of putting a cartoon on the cover. My idea for the inside was that I would show a picture of Benjamin and Jeremy reading an issue of The New Yorker with perplexed looks on their faces as they tried to figure out the cartoon. There would be a caption inside reading something like I don't get it. This is supposed to be funny?

So I approached a few actual New Yorker cartoonists at a recent lecture and asked them if they ever do custom work. As it turns out, they will. One thought the general idea was great and was willing to help. However, when we got to the fee portion of the discussion it turned out to be about twice as much as I had budgeted to spend, and by this time I was having second thoughts about the inside of the card, since last year we used a picture of Benjamin and Jeremy with crossed eyes as they tried to decipher a single-image random dot stereogram. I didn't want to be that redundant.

Also, a cartoon idea was beginning to take shape. I've always been fond of the famous Saul Steinberg cover that shows the New Yorker's View of the World – the one which shows Manhattan in great detail and the rest of the world as an afterthought. I thought that our children's view of the year is probably like that. Certain events dwarf all others. My idea was that I would draw (by hand!) a cartoon that showed a child's calendar next to an adult's calendar. The child's calendar for 2007 would be all fun and games and ice cream; the adult's calendar would be taxes and meetings and carpools.

As you might have already guessed, I can't draw. And I also discovered that space is very limiting. It's just not possible to put those two images side-by-side and have anyone understand what it is that they're seeing.

But I realized that maybe less was more. If I designed a good child's calendar, perhaps the caption of the cartoon could be the comparison to the adult one.