Wednesday Spill: An Anniversary

An Anniversary

Ink Spill is celebrating its last year as a teenager. It was nineteen years ago this month that I decided to launch the Spill, a place dedicated to The New Yorker, its cartoonists, and their cartoons, past and present. In these past nineteen years, the Spill has become as much a part of my day as working on drawings for The New Yorker. Sometimes the two overlap, but (way) more often — as it should be — the Spill is about my New Yorker colleagues and their work.

The magazine’s past, now over one hundred years of it, continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. The present is a different sort of gift: I find myself constantly placing the art and artists onto a timeline (sort of like Laugh Lines, the magazine’s online game); I try to understand how today’s artists and their work relate to what has come before, and what it all might mean for the future of The New Yorker‘s art. In my near half century at The New Yorker, (my 50th year coincides with the Spill’s 20th) the observer in me has enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, the challenge of attempting to grasp whatever new cartoon world happens by.

My thanks to each and every one of you who read Ink Spill; I sincerely appreciate your taking the time to see what’s happening here. The site has now had over 60 million hits since its beginning — an exciting gauge of interest about The New Yorker, its artists and their art.

And now, onward into the Spill‘s 20th year, and The New Yorker‘s 101st, already in progress.