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The Cartoon Pad

The Cartoon Pad

Written by: Weekly Humorist
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About this listen

 “The Cartoon Pad” with New Yorker cartoonists Bob Eckstein & Michael Shaw is a humor podcast discussing all things from the cartoon world with interviews with the coolest names in the cartoon world. Michael is one the most renown New Yorker cartoonists of our generation and a master wordsmith. Bob is an expert in bookstores, cartoons and snowmen and a NY Times bestseller, editor and NYU professor.Copyright Weekly Humorist Art
Episodes
  • The Cartoon Pad w/ guest Tom Toro

    The Cartoon Pad w/ guest Tom Toro
    Oct 9 2025
    Tom Toro: Soft Lines, Sharp Jabs, and Jokes that Whisper Before They Wallop! This week on The Cartoon Pad, Bob (in spirit, he's away), Shaw, and Marty welcome Tom Toro—the New Yorker stalwart whose gentle washes and calm, cat-like characters set up sneakily subversive gags. We get into process (ideas first, then drawings that don’t overact), the long grind of early submissions, and the craft of making captions optional without losing the punch. We roam the canon and the shop talk: playing with tropes (the Grim Reaper’s better lines), New Yorker fact-checks in the wild (left-handed infields, mayflies, and a note about lion manes you have to hear to believe), and cover art (those Thanksgiving turkeys in Groucho glasses). Tom also dives into kids’ books (Crocodiles Need Friends Too), where the figures get friendlier but the humor still bites. Plus: Barsotti and Ziegler lore, WC Fields detours, accordion-theft home invasions, and Tom’s new collection And to Think We Started as a Book Club (Andrews McMeel; distributed by Simon & Schuster)—a perfect palate-cleanser between your book club’s 500-page epics. Find Tom at tomtoro.com and on Instagram. Buy his book here
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    1 hr and 19 mins
  • The Cartoon Pad w/ guest Jeremy Banx

    The Cartoon Pad w/ guest Jeremy Banx
    Sep 17 2025
    Bold Lines, Pocket Gags, and a Cat from the ’70s! This episode of The Cartoon Pad, Bob and Shaw beam across the pond to Margate—15 floors up, sea view included—to visit the brilliantly dry and dangerously efficient Jeremy Banx. You’ve seen Banx’s sharp, caption-light missiles in Private Eye, Punch, the Mail on Sunday, and most famously the Financial Times, where he files a daily pocket cartoon—yes, daily—often with about an hour to nail the drawing after the greenlight. No pressure! We talk the craft, the toolkit, and the grind. Along the way: why tiny newsprint murders fussy cross-hatching, how a “pocket cartoon” wedges perfectly where writers ran out of words, and why simplicity isn’t simple—it’s ruthless editing. There’s Brit-vs-Yank banter, a quick detour through British comedy DNA, and a love letter to gag cartoons that travel without captions. Banx also teases current side quests: a book project called “’70s Cat” (think minimal, mischievous, delightfully mew-sic), plus a film script and a novel collab—because one daily deadline apparently wasn’t enough. Come for the shop talk, stay for the chessboard with no legal moves, and leave wanting to throw away half your lines. Find Banx on Instagram/BlueSky/Twitter at @banxcartoons.
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    57 mins
  • The Cartoon Pad w/ guest John Cuneo

    The Cartoon Pad w/ guest John Cuneo
    Jun 5 2025
    Today’s guest is the great John Cuneo—an illustrator so beloved, his sketchbooks should come with a warning label (and possibly a therapist’s number). You’ve seen his brilliant, bizarre, and sometimes blush-worthy work in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Atlantic Monthly. Of course, Michael only wants to talk about the naughty bits. Bob tries to keep things classy. Chaos ensues.
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    1 hr and 34 mins
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