The Rejection Collection
Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker
By Matthew Diffee (Editor); Robert Mankoff (Foreword by)
(Simon Spotlight Entertainment, Hardcover, 9781416933397, 272pp.)
Publication Date: October 3, 2006
Categories: Form - Comic Strips & Cartoons
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Each week about fifty New Yorker cartoonists submit ten ideas, yielding five hundred cartoons for no more than twenty spots in the magazine. Arguably the most brilliant single-panel-gag cartoonists in the world create a bunch of cartoons every week that never see the light of day.
These rejects were piling up in the dusty corners of studios all over the country. Sam Gross, who has been contributing since 1962, has more than 12,000 rejected cartoons. (Seriously. He's been numbering every single cartoon he's ever submitted to The New Yorker since the very beginning.) Enter editor Matthew Diffee. He tapped his fellow cartoonists, asking them to rescue these hilarious lost gems. From the artists' stacks of all-time favorite rejects, Diffee handpicked the standouts -- the cream of the crap -- and created The Rejection Collection, a place where good ideas go when they die. Too risqué, silly, or weird for The New Yorker, the cartoons in this book offer something no other collection has: They have never been seen in print until now.
With a foreword by New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff that explains the sound judgment, respectability, and scruples not found anywhere in these pages, and handwritten questionnaires that introduce the quirky character of each artist, The Rejection Collection will appeal to fans of The New Yorker...and to anyone with a slightly sick sense of humor.
Matthew Diffee has been contributing cartoons to The New Yorker since 1999. He was recently singled out by the New York Times as one of the more prolific of the new generation of cartoonists. To date, he has had more than a hundred cartoons published in the magazine. Originally from Texas, Diffee now lives in New York City. This is his first book.
The submissions were not set aside because they were not funny but (for the most part) because they were too funny.
--New York Times
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The Privileges Jonathan Dee Random House |
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The Unnamed Joshua Ferris Reagan Arthur Books |
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Committed Elizabeth Gilbert Viking Adult |
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The Crossing Places Elly Griffiths Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
