Christopher Weyant – Magazine v. Editorial Cartooning

Christopher Weyant is an editorial cartoonist for The Boston Globe and Cagle Cartoons, and a magazine cartoonist for The New Yorker (and book illustrator and advertising artist and other graphic endeavors).

Strip Search with London & Chianca recently interviewed Chris with a partial transcript appearing on The Boston Globe’s Boston.com website. Excerpt from that transcript:

You do two very different types of cartooning: the editorial cartoons that people see in The Boston Globe, and the gag cartoons that run the New Yorker. What is the difference in the creative process when you sit down to create either one or the other?

They’re both cartooning, but they’re really different art forms  —  it’s a different pacing, and I think it produces a different effect. With the New Yorker stuff, it’s about everything, social stuff, relationships, and sometimes just silly, funny stuff, right? Which is great. And then sometimes there’s stuff that’s hyper-topical, and we would do that for the Daily. The Daily Cartoon on the [New Yorker] website started with David Sipress, and then Danny Shanahan was the second. I was the third.

>snip<

With the Globe, it sometimes gets a little broader in its scope, because with the New Yorker cartoon there is a difference from regular editorial cartooning in that it’s so in-the-silo — we’re talking to a very highly educated and highly progressive audience and more or less everybody’s on board. And so the humor tends to be a little funnier, because you can make bigger jumps, because we know you know all the information. I don’t have to have the newspaper sitting on the side that says what I’m talking about, just to keep the audience on board.

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