Jason Chatfield is an Australian-born cartoonist, writer, and stand-up comedian based in New York City. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker and MAD Magazine, and he is the creator of the popular Substack, New York Cartoons. 

Whether he’s sketching in his Manhattan walk-up or performing on a comedy stage, Jason’s work explores the beautiful, imperfect reality of life and art.

I am a cartoonist, writer, and stand-up comedian. I grew up in the sweltering heat of Perth, Western Australia, but I now live in a sweltering fifth-floor walk-up in Manhattan. I spend my days writing and drawing for The New Yorker, running a Substack called New York Cartoons, and actively avoiding eye contact with tourists in Times Square. My journey mostly consisted of drawing silly pictures in the margins of my school textbooks, realising I had absolutely no marketable skills for a normal corporate job, and leaning so hard into the cartooning world that it became a career out of sheer necessity and survival. I also do stand-up comedy, mostly because drawing is a deeply isolating profession, and occasionally, you just need a dark room full of strangers to immediately validate your neuroses.

There is no muse quite like the looming threat of a New York City rent payment. But on a sensory level, it is the smell of a freshly sharpened pencil, or the very specific scratching sound of a flex nib on some toothy watercolour paper. That, and the relentless, aggressive rhythm of a sanitation truck violently throwing metal dumpsters against the pavement outside my window. Oh, and my dog Morris, who sleeps under my drafting table and frequently farts. It is a very glamorous life.

If there was one quote that lives rent-free in my head at all times, it's "He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch. (Jean Luc Godard). It's a more concise version of the "Man In The Arena" speech that Teddy Roosevelt gave. It reminds me to stay consistent with my values and be bold with my decisions.

I was actually a massive dunce about them for a very long time. For the first two decades of my career, I was strictly an ink and paper (and Wacom tablet) guy. I arrogantly assumed a pencil was just a pencil. Then, about 6 years ago, I kept hearing my peers wax poetic about the Blackwing 602. My friend Amy Kurzweil did an entire graphic novel using only Blackwings and then made a necklace out of the little nubs once they couldn’t be sharpened anymore. 

Out of sheer stubborn curiosity (and desire for my own stationery-based jewelry), I finally bought a box. The moment the graphite hit the paper, I realized I had been actively depriving myself of joy for twenty years. The darkness of the line, the way it holds a point, the weird rectangular eraser, it completely changed how I sketch. I went from a hardened sceptic to an absolute fanboy overnight. I bumped into a Blackwing rep at the Shoppe Object event in NYC a little while back and couldn’t help but heap effusive praise on everything they’d done. I later got to see a Blackwing collab close-up when they worked with my team at the Waking Up app. The perfect pairing of mindfulness meditation and mindful creation.

I am incredibly particular about my gear. A Process Junkie, if you will. If I am working in analogue, it is the Blackwing Matte (in my fave colour, green), a Hunt 101 Imperial nib, and Higgins ink. If I am working digitally, I use a Wacom Cintiq or an iPad with Procreate. I draw a lot of portraits of people’s dogs in my new book, so I always use a blackwing for that. I also use the Blackwing Blue for outlines before I ink, and the Blackwing Red for building out character designs, expressions, poses, and everything in between (and best believe I use the pencil extender when it gets down to a wee nub.)

Oh, and are you kidding me? The Blackwing Pen! I use it every day. I wrote about it here, but it probably goes without saying that I went absolutely bonkers when I discovered Blackwing went ahead and made an even better pen than most pen companies.

We live in a frictionless digital deluge where every tech company is trying to automate the creative process. (Gross). I’m not a fan of drinking from a firehose. Slowing down means actively refusing to be a meat-puppet for an algorithm. It means learning the absolute fundamentals with physical ink and paper. If you draw a bad line with a dip pen, you cannot hit undo. You have to draw that exact line forty-five times until you get it right. You need those neural pathways to form. Slowing down is valuing the physical mechanics of the craft over the sheer volume of output. It is choosing the struggle because the struggle is where the art actually lives.

Substack - www.newyorkcartoons.com/subscribe

Instagram - @newyorkcartoons

Website - www.jasonchatfield.com