About a week ago, after having the violent realization that I’ve been doing everything wrong, I came across a blog written by a guy named Jason Chatfield. As it turns out, Chatfield, comedian/vice president of The National Cartoonists Society/cartoonist for The New Yorker and Mad Magazine, is a productivity machine that knows the failure epiphany I was currently experiencing, in the biblical sense.
Job search service The Ladders talks to Jason Chatfield about avoiding procrastination.
Pitching is a consistent feature of Chatfield’s day. Without knowing it, he echoed one of the things I’ve always found the most difficult about it: “How do I get this idea across without my colleagues finding out that I’m a loser-idiot?” Chatfield expounds,
“Pitching should be a death-row alternative for murderers. Every Tuesday at 11 AM, I go in person to the World Trade Center and pitch 10 drawn-up ideas to the Cartoon Editor of the New Yorker and inevitably get maybe one in ten put through to the Editor in chief. The odds of getting a cartoon in the New Yorker are crazy. Last year I pitched 387 ideas and they bought 12 (that’s pretty good for the New Yorker.)”
above: On April 30, 2019 Ginger Meggs introduces a new character.
“I have a daily comic strip that goes out 7 days a week to 34 countries, translated into different languages. Over 12 years I’ve figured out what the editors and readers do and don’t like, through the slow process of feedback and development. So I have a ‘comic strip’ editor in my head,” said Chatfield.
As a Big Name Cartoonist and Vice-President of the National Cartoonists Society
and an Associate Director of the NCSFest, Jason will be there later this month.
An amazing talent and all-round nice guy. I really don’t know how he does so much – syndicated comic cartoonist, stand-up comedian, ace caricaturist, podcaster… the guy’s a machine!