ESCHER CARTOON
Timing is everything. The New Yorker is publishing a cartoon of mine in their March 11 magazine. The digital version came out Monday. Tuesday we had a Facebook outage. People panicked. They thought they had to reset, re-log-in, re-verify, etc. People experienced the exact loop my cartoon illustrated. Crazy timing.
To write a cartoon, I think about a personal experience and hope it might be universal.
A while back, I tried implementing double-verification on Facebook. I was supposed to re-enter a password I couldn’t remember and reset that password with a link sent to an e-mail I didn’t use. It was a loop. It was a loop I figured a lot of people experience. How could I express a common experience? A loop. What’s a visual representation of a loop? Escher’s infinite staircase. It fit nicely. I faked the staircase from memory and drew it and sent it, with a a bunch of other cartoons, to the cartoon editor at the New Yorker. I get an OK. I spent a week trying to redraw it
They’ve had my Escher password-paradox cartoon since last December. They ran just as the Facebook outage hit. Perfect timing. Luck.
On another note, I’m working on a story collection about growing up with a ‘king of the hippies’ dad. He ran a commune in Northern California. I’m going to start sharing pages from the book in the ‘paid’ subscriber section of the newsletter.