Drawing has always been my super power. In grade school, the girls in my class would line up, waiting for me to draw them Snoopy. I even drew a bunny for a classmate. She still has the bunny today!
As a teenager, I once drew a portrait sketch in ink of Pittsburgh Pirate, Dave Parker. My parents took us to Three Rivers Stadium for a Pirates game. During batting practice, my father took the portrait sketch down to the dugout, and, I presume, handed the sketch to Chuck Tanner.
A few weeks later in the mail, I received a baseball signed by all the ‘79 Pirates.
All throughout grade school and high school, I flourished as a sketch artist. I did not draw with charcoal pencils; all I drew with were No. 2 pencils. My father had even built me a drawing table out of poplar. It looks like a drawing table right out of the Renaissance!
In 1992, I attended Butler County Community College. I was expected to study architecture—or how my father put it architectural engineering. Somehow, I got hooked on writing fiction, which was not my fault. It was a required English course. From 1992 on, I wrote fiction, particularly novellas.
I had not stopped sketching entirely. Over the years, I had kind of developed a cartoon character named Shorty. I would draw Shorty on greeting cards for family members.
That was as far as Shorty went—on greetings cards.
My mother, continuously encouraged me to do something more with Shorty, but I made the excuse that I did not have the time to, that there was no money in cartooning—or art, for that matter.
I continued drawing Shorty for fun, or when my mother talked me into it.
In 2015, during the last days of my father’s life as he suffered from cancer, on the drawing table that he had built me I drew portraits of female celebrities like Emily Van Camp and Rebecca Hall.
About a decade later, I sketched what I believe is my best portrait yet—of a friend who enjoys traveling.
Two years ago, I sent cartoons of Shorty via the smartphone to a friend, Lisa. She absolutely loved Shorty, and asked me why Shorty was not published in the local newspaper.
Lisa somehow encouraged me to try and draw cartoons professionally. So, I tried, inspired by such New Yorker cartoonists as George Booth, Roz Chast, and David Sipress. George Booth whose personality and cartooning reminded me a lot of my Grandpa Hanisko.
My first professional cartoon was called How Much for the Tree? followed by Rub Me the Wrong Way.
I submitted Rub Me the Wrong Way to the New Yorker magazine, believing I had a great chance of selling it. To my surprise, the New Yorker rejected it followed by three more waves of rejections.
In 2024, I drew some 100 cartoons. Like the novellas I write, in genres that choose me, the subject matter in the cartoons I draw seems to choose me also, and ideas for cartoons seem to just pop up in my mind. I believe each cartoon, like each novella I write, is a gift.
I will say this, though. I enjoy listening to jazz but although I do not play a jazz instrument, I believe playing jazz is a lot like drawing cartoons—you improvise a lot.
I sincerely hope that the cartoons in blog make you laugh as much as I had drawing them. As a cartoonist, I have one rule: If I do not laugh drawing a cartoon, then it is simply not a good cartoon.
—Matt Janacone