The Cartoon Pad w/ guest Tom Toro

 

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 McNeal; 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