Jason Chatfield
- Writer and Editor, Freelance
- Host, Food Network
- Cartoonist, The New Yorker
- Writer, New York Cartoons
New York
Award-winning New Yorker Cartoonist & Comedian // Get a FREE cartoon in your inbox every Thursday👇
Articles by Jason Chatfield
đ Unlocked: DMA#35: Drawing on the Edge of the Authoritarian Abyss with Ann Telnaes & Patrick Chappatte
Hi friends, This conversation is so important for people to hear, so Iâve decided to remove the paywall on the replay. Please feel free to share it with anyone you think might find it useful to hear. Your pal, Join me for my next live video in the app on Tuesday 24th @ 12pm when I speak with fellow New Yorker cartoonist and author, Liza Donnelly. But first, the recap⌠That was the line that stuck with me after yesterdayâs Draw Me Anything.
430. Draw Me Anything, A Substack Live About the New Book & The End of the Political Cartoonist?
Thank you to everyone who has subscribed since the above video went live yesterday. If you’re new here, start here and work your way down. I’ve been writing this newsletter for 9 years (4+ of those on Substack), and I feel like there’s something for everyone at this point. 430 Issues! What an insane, compulsive obsession I’ve developed here. I’ve been enjoying writing and drawing for all of you, and I’ve got a few great new posts in the hopper, ready to publish this coming week for paid subscribers.
429. Rejected Shorts, Purim Sketchbook, & Drawing NYC Mugshots
I just spent days at a conference at the Javits Center; I was hired to draw peoples’ faces on Mugs— Mugshots, if you will. The line didn’t stop from the moment I sat down to the moment I ran out of branded mugs. Who knew this was a thing? Anyway… if you have something coming up in NYC with a conference booth and you want to attract people, I guarantee you’ll become the thing people remember most about the event (apart from the bad WIFI).
428. Official NYC Book Launch Announced, Bezos Kills Editorial Freedom (Again) & A Sketchy Assignment with a Twist!
Before I say anything else, I’m excited to tell you that the official in-person launch event of the book I’ve been working on for the past 2 years will take place in New York City at a VERY iconic mystery institution on Friday, May 2nd. Mark your calendars, and please sign up here so I can send you and your pup(s) all the details about the location! I’ll share more information in the coming weeks.
427. A Marx Brother Birthday at the Algonquin, Democracy Under Siege & The Outsider Art Fair
(Do me a favour and just click the title of this post so it doesn’t cut off while you’re reading it. Email apps are the worst.) I’m still reeling from the documentary I saw last night at the IFC, featuring former Washington Post cartoonist and now Substacker, . The documentary is called Democracy Under Siege and was completed before the election last November. Its prescience is chilling.
#22: Zoe Si
I've enjoyed watching Zoe Si's meteoric rise from lawyer-who-draws to New Yorker cartoonist extraordinaire, and it's been like watching someone skip the awkward adolescent phase of cartooning and go straight to creating work that sets a new tone for illustration in cartoons. I first saw Zoe's work when she was still practicing law in Vancouver (a fact that makes me feel like I've accomplished approximately nothing with my life).
426. Dogs in Beds, A New Aussie Pub in NYC, & the New Yorker Centoonial!
I’m still recovering from the epic weekend that just passed— between the Substak Bestsellers event, the opening of a new Aussie pub in New York (Old Mates), and the epic 100th-anniversary celebrations for the New Yorker’s cartoonist cohort, my sleep score is now lower than federal government employment rates.
The New Yorker Cartoonists Centoonial Party
This is the final post celebrating the New Yorker’s Centenary Week— one epic blowout party to round out a century of cartoonery. Read my other post on the anniversary here. February 22nd, 2025 TriBeCa, New York There's something distinctly New Yorkery about celebrating the centennial of its most iconic magazine at a secret underground club in Tribeca, where bookshelves open to reveal secret rooms, and cartoonists collide with debutantes.
Small Circles: On Drawing Numismatists and Finding Your Own Kind
January 16th, 2024Upper East Side, NY 4:49pm A man in a puffer jacket the size of a studio apartment was mouthing the words to 'The Power of Now' on the F train, his lips forming each syllable with the determination of someone trying to summon Dante himself. Fitting, given that the 42nd Street Times Square station at rush hour is essentially the tenth circle of hell - the one reserved for New Yorkers who thought they could make it to the Upper East Side in under an hour.
425. New Yorkers ❤️ New Yorkers, Eustace Turns 100, SNL50, A Sheep on Stage, My Top 4 Cartoons & More!
Do me a favour and just click the title of this week’s edition— it’s a long one, and the email apps cut it off halfway, which is kind of a pain. This week is the 100th anniversary of the New Yorker Magazine.
3 Covers to Celebrate the 100th Birthday of Eustace Tilley
February 17, 2025 New York, NY It was on this day in 1925 that the plucky little upstart magazine, conceived by a married couple in their apartment, first appeared on Manhattan newsstands. The discrepancy between the actual release date (Feb 17) and the cover date (Feb 21) is due to a common publishing practice: magazines often use future cover dates— Publishers want their magazines to appear “fresh” for as long as possible.
Sketchbook: Live Drawing the 2025 Westminster Dog Show in New York
February 8th, 2025 The Javits Center, NY The Javits Center during Westminster Dog Show Weekend feels like what would happen if the Madison Square Dog Park merged with Fashion Week. Everywhere you look, there's another impeccably groomed creature being hurried along by a human who looks like they haven't slept in weeks. This is my first time at the show, so I’ve decided to live-draw the day to really soak it all in.
424. Oh Mary! Oh Gary! Oh My Dog!
I hope you don’t mind me emailing you twice in two days. I’ve been busy. This week I got to live draw the Westminster Dog Show in New York, which has been an eye-opener, to say the least. (Also a leg-raiser.) Everything you imagine it to be, it is. If you’ve seen “Best in Show”, you know what I’m talking about.
Huge Announcement! Cover Reveal for Our New Book About Dogs...
Friends, I’m writing this to you from the 2025 Westminster Dog Show, which has taken New York by storm this past 3 days. I’ve been live-drawing the show and immersing myself in the dog world even more than usual. This is my happy place. I'm thrilled (and slightly terrified) to announce my and Scott’s new book: "You're Not a Real Dog Owner Until..." —a collection of over 100 cartoons about the beautiful chaos of being the parent of puppers and doggos of all stripes.
423. I Join the Type Writer Party, AI vs. Friction, & The Metropolitan Review
Whew, what a year January was. Trying to write cartoons about this administration has been like drinking from a fire hydrant— but instead of water, it’s a torrent of dog feces. I looked back at some of the cartoons I did for the New Yorker in the first Trump administration to see if things were quite as unhinged as they are now— I’m sad to say, they were.
The Launch of The Metropolitan Review
January 31st, 2025 New York, NY The thing about being at a literary magazine launch in 2025 is that it feels both wildly anachronistic and somehow right on time, like finding a perfectly preserved speakeasy just when you've gotten tired of craft cocktails served in Mason jars. In an era when peoples’ attention spans are shrinking to the size of Trump’s pinky, it seems optimistic to be investing in something that requires people to read more than nine words before switching tabs.
Waking Up Portraits: Amanda Knox on Resilience
Since 2020, I’ve been lucky enough to work with the team behind the Waking Up app, which, after 10 years of meditation, has accelerated my knowledge and practice way beyond anything I could ever have fathomed at the starting line. You don’t know what you don’t know, I guess. (Then you know it. You know?) All that is to say, every course on there is helpful. Exploring consciousness, mortality, the human mind and beyond with the best thinkers in their field, all in one place.
You’re Not a Real Parent Until These Milestones
On Television “The Idol” Is All Smoke and Mirrors The kinky hookups between the protagonists, played by Lily-Rose Depp and the Weeknd, are wince-inducing, but hardly scandalizing in the way that the HBO show intends them to be.
Stop looking at Screens on Sunday.
No emails. No texts. Definitely No Socials. Give your eyes a break. I've noticed more and more amid the army of post-pandemic remote workers, the tendency to 'get ahead for the week' or 'catch up on last week' during their downtime on Saturday and Sunday. I can sympathise with the need to triage the torrent of correspondence to keep it at some semblance of manageable levels. The thing is: email breeds email. Also, you stare at a screen non-stop every day of your life. For most of the day.
Daily Cartoon: Friday, January 6th
“Do we have a Speaker yet? Do we have a Speaker yet? Do we have a Speaker yet?”
What are Collective Illusions and how do they form?
What are those? Collective illusions occur when most members of a group privately reject what appears to be the widely accepted group norm. This phenomenon has also been referred to as pluralistic ignorance, but the Rose explains that he prefers the term collective illusions because it's not so much a matter of people not knowing what others think; rather, it's an issue of being convinced that we know and being wrong. How does Social Media help us form Collective Illusions?
The only thing that was in our apartment when we moved in was a large old rolltop writing desk...
I sat at that desk for weeks on end drawing and writing and vanishing into my own little world. It was left there by the deceased previous tenant who happened to be the poet laureate of the Lower East Side. There's something magical about the desk. I fixed it up with an inordinate number of screws and old nails that I'd found around the place just to hold the thing together long enough to survive the next deadline.
What is your Time Worth?
This is an extract from Day #5 of NO-Vember: the 30-day challenge to teach you how to say NO to the right things. "The more you add - the more you're opening up to negotiation. Just leave it as close to the 'no' as possible." We put ourselves in an awkward position of over-explaining why we can't do something.
The Curious, Deceptively Simple Ritual of Professional Artists
This weekend I was wandering around the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum in Columbus with fellow cartoonist Maria Scrivan. We were shamelessly drooling over the original artwork on display by Charles Schulz. The wide-ranging exhibition was celebrating what would have been "Sparky"'s 100th birthday. A photo of his pristine, minimalist studio caught my eye, and I noted to Maria how clean it looked. "Oof.
At the Comedy Cellar
First published in the New Yorker The New Yorker has been sending their cartoonists out into New York to eavesdrop (or as I've been calling it, "Eavesdraw") on its inhabitants, and publish their findings, verbatim, in their collection "Overheard in New York". * I perched myself at the Comedy Cellar & Olive Tree Café in Greenwich Village** - my favourite place in all of New York - over the course of two months and scribbled down what I saw... and overheard. Verbatim.
Overheard in New York: Getting Laughs at the Comedy Cellar
Cartoonists are eavesdropping all over New York. See here for more.
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, August 11th
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Book Review: Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite: The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes
Book Review: Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite: The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite: The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes Hardcover – October 5, 2021 Genre: CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT / Animation ISBN [hardcover]: 978-198955-546-0 Pricing: $24.95 USD / $29.95 CAD Release date: October 5, 2021 Distribution: Baker & Taylor Publisher Services (worldwide) University of Toronto Press (Canada) Page count: 375 Television critic Jaime Weinman has written a weighty tome...
Questions That New Parents Hate, Apparently
So, when do they get interesting? Does the body grow, or will the head shrink? Has she learned any new tricks recently? What’s the next level she’ll unlock? Crawling? Texting? I can curse in front of it, right? Sorry, her. She’s not going to remember. And “fuck” isn’t really a swear word anymore, anyway. And it definitely won’t be by the time she’s, like, a real human. It’s like the C-word—we’ll take it back. Do I not get credit for not saying the C-word out loud?! Can you take a photo of me holding her?
New! Ginger Meggs Masks: (4-pack) Ginger, Minnie, Tony & Mike!
Australia's favourite boy Since 1921. Ginger Meggs is a comic strip published daily in over 120 newspapers in 34 countries at GoComics.com It is one of the longest-running comic strips in the world.
Vote on the funniest finalists for the New Yorker Caption Contest (#756)
Last week's New Yorker Caption Contest was a real eye-opener. I had no idea how many hundreds of thousands of people were so passionate about it still - and on nearly every continent! My inbox is ridiculous right now... thank god for Google Translate. You can go through and judge which of the following three entries are the funniest by clicking the image below.
Vote on the funniest New Yorker Caption Contest (#756)
Last week's New Yorker Caption Contest was a real eye-opener. I had no idea how many hundreds of thousands of people were so passionate about it still - and on nearly every continent! My inbox is ridiculous right now... thank god for Google Translate. You can go through and judge which entries are the funniest by clicking the image below. I hope yours wins! Tagged: cartoons, new yorker, caption contest
The story of the "Keep it open" cartoon published in this week's Airmailz
There are very few cartoons of mine that I have ever fought for, insisting the joke was worthy of publication. More often than not, a rejected cartoon just isn’t a good fit, isn’t well-enough executed, has been done in some form or another (and probably already purchased), or just doesn’t work for the publication’s tone. But….
My cartoon is this week's New Yorker Caption Contest (#756)
Footnote from The New Yorker: Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit your caption , we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Finalists for this week’s cartoon will appear online June 1st and in the June 7, 2021, issue of The New Yorker. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To read the complete rules, click here.
Ricky Gervais and Sam Harris' New Podcast Absolutely Mental
Earlier this year I was approached to work on a project Sam Harris was making with Ricky Gervais. It was a big surprise and a huge privilege. On the back of the mini-episodes Sam had been releasing on his podcast with Ricky, dissecting philosophical quandaries and cracking wise, I was told they were keen to develop something bigger together: A limited audiobook series, downloadable as one binge-worthy show named Absolutely Mental.
New Yorker Cartoonist Jason Chatfield
Big shoutout today to Ginger Meggs cartoonist (1984-2007), painter, TV-host, actor and all-round legend, the late James Kemsley. Kems gave me the opportunity of a lifetime to carry on the Ginger Meggs torch, and I hope he'd be happy with where Ginger is today. He was the one who took Ginger from an ailing Sunday strip in the newspaper to a full colour daily comic, syndicated in multiple languages all around the world. He brought Ginger up to the modern-day and carried ginger into the 21st century.
Video: Exclusive First Look at New Book for the Sydney Writers Festival Family Day!
G’day, Meggsie fans! Here is my video for the Sydney Writers Festival Family Day - I wish I could have been there, but we’re so pleased author extraordinaire, Tristan Bancks is in Sydney to launch our brand new book celebrating Ginger’s 100th Birthday! See all of the fun of the Festival over at Tristan’s blog at: https://www.tristanbancks.com/2021/05/sydney-writers-festival-family-day.html
Release Week: Ginger Meggs 100th Anniversary Book with Penguin Random House releases May 4!
To all my Meggsie fans, you will be aware we’ve been plotting away for years for our 100th-anniversary celebrations for Ginger Meggs. This coming week will be packed-to-the-brim with big announcements and special coverage of the book, and celebrations of the Ginger Megs centenary. Make sure to follow all of them over at the official Ginger Meggs blog: gingermeggs.com/blog
New NFT Just listed on Portion.io
First Name Last Name Email Address Cancel any time. I respect your privacy. Thank you! Be sure to use the promo code SCOTCHBATHSUNDAY for free shipping on your first order.
Bruce Eric Kaplan's New Yorker Cartoon in Yes Man
I was zoning out to Jim Carrey’s 2008 film, “Yes Man” on Netflix this weekend, when I noticed a small detail in the corner of one of the shots of the main character’s fridge.
Artist Spotlight: Tom Fishburne (Marketoonist)
There aren't enough days in a lifetime to share with you all the artists that have inspired me at one time or another, but each week from now I’ll be turning my drawing table lamp and spotlighting an artist you might like if you enjoy my work. Some of these artists are friends, others are heroes, some are (bafflingly) both. Some are well-known, some are just starting out their careers. I hope you enjoy their work as much as I do.
Artist Spotlight: Mort Drucker
There aren't enough days in a lifetime to share with you all the artists that have inspired me at one time or another, but each week from now I’ll be turning my drawing table lamp and spotlighting an artist you might like if you enjoy my work. Some of these artists are friends, others are heroes, some are (bafflingly) both. Some are well-known, some are just starting out their careers. I hope you enjoy their work as much as I do.
Artist Spotlight: Ann Telnaes
There aren't enough days in a lifetime to share with you all the artists that have inspired me at one time or another, but each week from now I’ll be turning my drawing table lamp and spotlighting an artist you might like if you enjoy my work. Some of these artists are friends, others are heroes, some are (bafflingly) both. Some are well-known, some are just starting out their careers. I hope you enjoy their work as much as I do.
Children's Book about Bitcoin Now Available on Amazon & Apple Books
5 years ago, my friend Naomi Brockwell and I collaborated on a children's book about Bitcoin for young kids. It explains cryptocurrency in a very simple and understandable way through the story of a young schoolboy who gets bullied on his way to school. You can buy it on Amazon or Apple Books. Here’s a little teaser video about the book:
Snappy 100th Birthday, Al Jaffee
Today is Al Jaffee’s 100th Birthday. The creator of the MAD Fold-in and the Snappiest of answer-ers to Stupid Questions has hit the tonne, and he’s still as brilliant a member of the Usual Gang of Idiots as ever. You can sign up to a very special event to celebrate here Or by clicking the image below. Happy Birthday, Al. (I made a birthday card, below.) Tagged: cartooning, al jaffee, MAD
Artist Spotlight: Mort Gerberg
There aren't enough days in a lifetime to share with you all the artists that have inspired me at one time or another, but each week from now I’ll be turning my drawing table lamp and spotlighting an artist you might like if you enjoy my work. Some of these artists are friends, others are heroes, some are (bafflingly) both. Some are well-known, some are just starting out their careers. I hope you enjoy their work as much as I do.
Out with the old, in with the nothing. - New Yorker Cartoonist Jason Chatfield
Originally published at www.jasonchatfield.com on December 5, 2013. In 2007, blogger Dave Bruno initiated something called 100-thing challenge. The conceit of which was people had to look around at all their things — everything they possessed in their home or otherwise — and see if they could limit their possessions to a total quantity of 100. At the time I thought it was the most reductive new thing from the neo-minimalism movement encouraged by people like Leo Babauta and Joshua Becker.
Who Writes the Words for Ginger Meggs?
The single most frequently asked question I get about Ginger Meggs is: Who writes the gags/stories? The short answer is: Me! The slightly longer answer is; Producing a daily comic strip (in my experience), is separated into three parts: 60% is writing, 20% is drawing (the fun bit), 20% is business and syndication. The writing is the most time-consuming and difficult part of it.
- Jason Chatfield - Medium
New York-based Australian Comedian & Cartoonist for the New Yorker. Obsessed with Productivity Hacks, the Creative Process, and the Oxford Comma.
The Last Time
Every day for the past 13 years I’ve kept a digital diary of what I did that day. It’s part daily review, part ‘separating the days for each other’, part written memory to aid my faulty in-built one. It sends me an email asking, “What did you do today?” I reply. It goes into a secure cloud-based platform and gets stored.
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