Fwd: From the Desk of Bob Mankoff - February 3, 2010

Dear Cartooniacs, People often ask me about my upbringing, and if there was anything particular about it that made me become a cartoonist. To that, I could reply, "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." But I don't, because if you want to know the truth, that is the first paragraph of J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in The Rye" and has absolutely nothing to do with me, except that I first read that book back in Miss Grunefeld's eleventh-grade English class, and have been hoping ever since that I could work it into something I was writing, or maybe slip it into a therapy session with an unsuspecting analyst. I was so taken with "Catcher" that I set a course to read all of Salinger's work, even if it took me a day and a half. "Hapworth 16, 1924" slowed me up a bit, but, eventually, emboldened by my accomplishment, I vowed that I would many years hence become a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and draw the only two cartoons about J. D. Salinger that would ever appear in that magazine. And I did:

Cheers,
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