The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity [Hardcover]

Robert Mankoff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2002

Only people like that buy books like this...or write them."

So says Robert Mankoff—and he should know. As cartoon editor of The New Yorker, and one of its most gifted contributors, he spends his life pursuing that elusive thing called creativity, and inspring it in others. If you've ever wondered where great ideas come from, or yearned to channel your creative energies, or just wanted some pointers on how to get those artisitic juices flowing—this book was written for you.

Along with some help from his well-known cartoonist friends, Mankoff takes you on an entertaining words-and-pictures journey through the art, craft, and zen of cartooning, along the way providing lots of personal anecdotes about his development as an artist, and about life at the world's most urbane magazine. But you don't have to be an aspiring cartoonist to appreciate The Naked Cartoonist. Mankoff's wisdom, and his practical yet whimsical approach to the creative process, are designed to benefit anyone who has ever stared at a blank piece of paper or canvas and dreamed of transforming it into something truly original (and maybe even commercial).

What's so funny? Mankoff knows best. He also knows how you can find your own personal voice and mesage, how you can learn from the masters of the past, how you can transform a current event into a comic tour-de-force...even how you can incorporate telling lies and taking naps into your daily work routine—and justify it.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cartoon editor of the New Yorker since 1997, Mankoff has a license to be silly. This combination memoir, how-to, abridged history, manifesto and IQ test (Inanity Quotient) on the art and pseudo-science of gag panel cartooning puts that license to the test-with fine results. Much like Scott McCloud did in Understanding Comics, which examined the nature of narrative comics, Mankoff breaks down the creative process of the gag panel, offering a succession of thoughtful (dreams are "analogous to what cartoonists do when they're awake") and generally amusing insights into the craft. There's also a more or less coherent argument about the role of the subconscious mind in cartooning, in which he uses Magritte, a baseball, a tomato and Andy Warhol's soup can to explain it all for us. Still, his explanations aren't nearly as much fun as the cartoons themselves, by Mankoff and by fellow New Yorker cartoonists Roz Chast, Mort Gerberg, Jack Zeigler and others. Mankoff can be overly cute, but mostly offers smart, practical and funny ideas about how to make funny cartoons for a living. In fact, Mankoff argues that magazine cartoonists are the most creative people in the world: "If a scientist comes up with one new idea a year, he's a genius. If a cartoonist comes up with only one new idea a day, he's looking for other work." Mankoff offers such minutely and intensely considered examinations of the mechanics of cartooning that for all we know he may be right.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Description

Learn how to be a more creative thinker in this one-of-a-kind book from the cartoon editor of The New Yorker.

Through insider knowledge, inspirational wisdom, and useful examples, the man who chooses those cartoons (and contributes many of the funniest ones himself) answers the question, "How can I be more creative and funnier?", and others in the first book to use cartooning as a means of exploring the creative process.

"Everything I need to know in life I learned from cartoons," says the opinionated, eccentric and devastatingly funny Bob Mankoff in this entertaining journey through the art, craft and Zen of cartooning. With the help of many other well-known cartoonists, Mankoff discusses, dissects and depicts such topics as:

- How to develop your creativity and your natural talents

- How to find your own particular voice and message

- How to learn from the cartoon masters of the past and present

- What a cartoon is (and what it is not)

- What makes a good cartoon work

- How to market cartoons-and more.

Featuring lots of art-drawings, photos, panel cartoons and doodles-on every extravagant page, this breezy yet info-packed book also includes lots of Bob's personal anecdotes about his development as an artist and smart aleck, and about life at the world's most urbane magazine.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers; First Edition edition (November 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1579122361
• ISBN-13: 978-0762896660
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #165,051 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

The New Yorker is an award-winning weekly magazine featuring reporting, criticism, commentary, fiction, poetry, and renowned single-panel cartoons. It has won more National Magazine Awards, the magazine world's equivalent of the Oscars, than any other magazine. Its contributors have won numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. Robert Mankoff is the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, and a cartoonist in his own right. He is the editor of many collections of New Yorker cartoons, including The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What Goes Ha Ha Ha Ha Plop?, November 6, 2002

By 

Shaun Hawkins (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity (Hardcover)

Me, laughing my head off as I read this book. But this book also filled my head before I laughed it off. I thought it would be a hilarious collection of some of the best New Yorker cartoons, and it is, but it's also a complicated theory of creativity, humor, and art. The author keeps things light, but there are some serious points made as he investigates the links between cartooning, dreaming, surrealism, and so on.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Here for the Holidays, December 4, 2002

By 

Dennis Coles (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity (Hardcover)

As a longtime reader of the New Yorker -- and, more importantly, a longtime reader of its cartoons -- I was happy to see that the cartoon editor of the magazine had written a book. To be honest, I expected more about the inside dealings of the magazine: the idiosyncracies of famous cartoonists, the backstage intrigue that led to my favorite cartoons. That's not exaactly what this book is. It's more a solo performance by Robert Mankoff, who writes at great length about his own internal creative process. This was offputting at first, but by the end of the first chapter, I was hooked. He has an engaging voice and a real talent for illustrating his ideas (as you would expect), so the result is a pretty wonderful guidebook to human creativity and humor.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Cartoon Collection, July 24, 2006

By 

D. Rahmel "Dan Rahmel" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity (Hardcover)

This book fails at the stated task -- showing a process of generating cartoon and general creative ideas -- but succeeds nonetheless. Although I read the book cover-to-cover, I didn't find it very educational about the process of creating new ideas or even evaluating existing ones. If you define comedy as `I'll know it when I see it,' this book doesn't do much to expand beyond that. There is a brief section near the end where the author describes (with examples) the order of punch lines, but that's about it.

Nonetheless, the book is chock-full of cartoons from the New Yorker that are exceptional in their breadth of humor and subtlety. You may learn only a few things from the text, but you'll get a lot of smiles from the cartoons.

If you want to create cartoons and don't know where to start, I would suggest picking up "The Cartoonist's Workbook: Drawing, Writing Gags, Selling" by Robin Hall. Hall's book is excellent at providing the mechanics of cartooning. Mankoff's book then acts as an excellent companion volume of real world examples that strike the funny bone.