DMA #58: Paul Noth... He Tells It Like It Is

Thursday, midday. Paul Noth is in Milwaukee, where he moved back after 20 years split between the Upper East Side and the Princeton area, and where he now has, as he put it while wandering to another room mid-stream to chase better WiFi, multiple rooms. (We get it, Paul. You don’t live in Manhattan anymore.)

First order of business: it’s Noth, rhymes with both. He’s been letting people say “Nawth” for decades out of Midwestern politeness. Gosh. Consider yourselves corrected on his behalf. If you missed it live, the replay is above. Here’s what happened, with every link we promised on air down the bottom…

Pre-orderers get a signed bookplate posted to them! Just shoot him an email at paul@paulnoth.com with your mailing address and your desired inscription. (A proof-of-purchase screenshot is also much appreciated.)

You know Paul’s most famous cartoon even if you don’t know his name: the flock of sheep gazing up at a billboard of a wolf, captioned “He tells it like it is.” It’s among the most shared cartoons in the magazine’s history; it’s now the cover of his book, and Paul has mixed feelings about its immortality. “It should be a historical document by now,. he said, a little wearily.

Here’s the detail that should be laminated and handed to every rejected cartoonist on earth: The New Yorker rejected it the first time he submitted it. So did they reject his other most popular cartoons, first time ‘round. Paul resubmits. He always has, fortified by a story he’d heard about Saul Steinberg, who supposedly used to take his rejected cartoons, put them straight into a fresh envelope, and post them back to the magazine. (The balls on this guy! I love him.)

Paul sold to The New Yorker in 2004. The cartoon: a White House press secretary holding a torch under his chin like a kid telling a ghost story, while a reporter asks how he responds to critics who say he’s just trying to scare people. He’d worked on that batch for the best part of 2 months under the wing of Matt Diffee, whom he’d met at the Rejection Show and who walked the batch in to Bob Mankoff.

At Paul’s first look meeting, surrounded by his heroes (Gahan Wilson among them), Mankoff greeted the new arrival with two sentences that became his entire art education. The first: “Don’t get cocky.” The second: “I want to see 10 a week from you, even if they’re s**t.”

Paul has done 10 a week ever since, through every all-nighter, every TV job, every book. “It was my art school in a lot of ways,” he said. Like me,