 I'm not a hero. It is our pleasure to have Harry Bliss with us here tonight. He's a person who everyone I told that Harry Bliss is coming to us, oh, I love him. So we're very happy to be here. I'm very happy to be here. I'm very happy to be here. Harry Bliss is an award-winning cartoonist and cover artist for the New Yorker magazine. His daily self-titled daily cartoon Bliss appears in newspapers internationally and he's the founder of the Cornish CCS Fellowship Residency of Graphic Novelists and he lives in Cornish, New Hampshire. Thanks for being here, Harry. Yeah, thank you for being here. Let's see, oh, we got the thing going too. Remember that episode of Brady Bunch where Cindy was on the game show and she froze and she just looked at the camera? Was it Brady Bunch? Am I right? So I'm gonna do that right now. So I have some slides, like 57 slides and I'll go through them fairly quickly and talk about some of the cartoons. I'd like to do a Q&A at the end, but if anyone has a question about one of the cartoons, I'll just say, hey, Harry, and I'll answer it. So I said thank you for coming out already, right? Yeah, I really appreciate it, I really do. It means a lot to me. Yeah, well, they're paying me, so yeah. It's a gig for me, but I would've done it anyway. I haven't done this in a long time, so I did it last year in South Europe and I was saying I used to go to elementary schools all over the world, I've been to Dubai and Moscow and St. Petersburg, Singapore and Bucharest, all sorts of places, but I don't do that anymore, so I miss it. Anyway, this is me and my siblings. My sister's a painter in Philly. My brother Charlie's a wildlife artist. My brother John's an educator in Rochester, New York. That's from 1970. We were all on the show called The Electric Company when we were kids. That's not true. I'm lying, I'll do some more lying later. I came from a family of artists. Is there any way to turn these lights up, just these? Yeah, and my dad was a graphic designer for, it's okay, for many years. He was a painter and my uncle Leon, Uncle Ken, my uncle Harry, that's my dad. And they're all gone now. My dad, I lost both my mom and dad this past summer. He was 93, he had a pretty good run and he really wanted to get the hell out of here. He really did, so. But the gene was passed on to all of us kids and siblings for that matter. I have two cousins, Phil and Jim Bliss, who are illustrators, Annie, who's a phenomenal pottery, a ceramicist, I should say. This is an early, I was obsessed with Picasso when I was 12, 13. I was just obsessed with all the kind of isms, impressionism and post-impressionism, even romanticism. I went through all this, so. And I was a pretty rotten kid and I got into trouble, I burned buildings down. I was, not really, but I did kind of burn the neighborhood down on accident, the backyard of the neighbors. So I got into trouble, but art really saved me. It was the one area that I could go to where I had control. If you grew up in a house with a lot of dysfunction, which there was, I think it was in the drinking water, in this lower middle class suburb, upstate New York. But yeah, making art is a way to control what's going on in your world. So anyway, I was in doing some Cubist work here. I later went on to art school, and this is a watercolor I did when I was a junior at the Philadelphia College of Art, which is where my parents went, and it was then called the Philadelphia Museum School of Art. They met there in 1958. But I did this for a student competition cover design for Print Magazine, which is a graphic design magazine. And I placed third in the competition. It's an international competition, and this was a watercolor I did of these Dutch tiles of this painter having this kind of euphoric moment when you paint that comes a moment in the process where you have a bit of euphoria, where you're like, ah, that's it, that's it. That's the living room, oh, God, of my parents' house, which is now owned by someone else, and all of that is gone. But these are my parents, some of the paintings, my mom's painting, my dad's. Just cluttered, cluttered with books. When I left art school, I waited tables for a long time in Philadelphia, 12 years. I bust, I clean the kitchen, dishwashing. I got my girlfriend pregnant and we gave our baby up for adoption. I was on welfare, so I had a really eclectic and interesting time. But around 1994 or five, I started getting work for the first time, for the illustration work. And the gigs that I got were doing book covers. And I got a lot of mysteries. In fact, I got pigeonholed in doing mysteries for St. Martin's Press. It was a great gig, because I would get the manuscript in the mail that sent it to me, and I'd get it, and they'd pay me, oh, they're 1200 bucks. It was good money. It's good money for me. And this was 94, 95. That was like three, four months rent. But I'd take it to the 16th Street Bar and Grill and catch a little buzz and drink this, and read the mystery. But after a while, they got so formulaic, I didn't really, I got sick of reading them. So I sent them to my mom and I gave my mom 50 bucks. But then she went to art school, so she's a voracious reader she was. When she would send notes, she would kind of art direct me. She's like, well, this takes place, the woman's killed by a butterfly guy. So it's a flapper dress and there should really be butterflies in the cover. I was like, mom, stop, enough, let me do it. This was actually the very first book cover I did by Douglas Kiker, who was a NBC News correspondent for many years. And this artwork was lost. Usually when you do illustrations, you get the artwork back. They send it back to you. I did this in 1991, I think. And 22 years later, they sent me the artwork back. I couldn't believe it. It's like, we're going through our files, this was for Random House. Going through our files, we found this and thought, better late than never, they wrote. This is done for Philadelphia Magazine. Watercolor, sorry. Yeah, these are watercolors. This was for Philadelphia Magazine when I was living in Philly. It was a full page piece about Amish children, young adults when they reach a certain age are allowed to sort of make a decision whether they want to stay in the community or smoke pot and don't listen to radios. What is that called? What's that? Runs spring on? Yes. Thank you. So here he is listening to a Walkman. Another mystery. You can see there's this influence of Vermeer here on this one. These were hard to kind of do. Difficult paintings, but anyway. This is a cartoon, speaking of Amish people. At a certain point, I was living in Nyak, New York. I'd finally moved from Philadelphia and I got a little apartment in Nyak and I was a little boy, little son, my son Alex and his mom relocated. We weren't married and I was following him around so they didn't want to be far away. I was in a rare bookstore in Nyak and I was looking at a book of Charles Adams cartoons I always loved growing up. Loved Charles Adams. Appreciated the drawing and the wit and the kind of sardonic, dark humor. And I was looking through it and at the time I was doing book covers and I thought I could probably do this, you know? And I recall back that people said to me you should try submitting to The New Yorker. And I didn't really have any idea of the cachet that magazine. I didn't really know. Anyway, went home, knocked off eight or nine samples over the course of two or three weeks and eventually got a gig, a letter from the cover editor saying this might be a long shot but why don't you try doing some cover sketches? And I did and first I was published as a cover artist and then about a year and a half later I started submitting cartoons and this was an early cartoon. This might be 2003. I was trying to think, like I had the idea, the Amish midlife crisis came first. I thought there's something there. And I thought, what kind of car would they get? They'd trade in the horse for a cheetah. This was an early rejected cover of, I believe there was a Haitian immigrant outside of Manhattan and a borough was shot many, many times. He's unarmed and Mayor Giuliani was the mayor at the time. And this was kind of based on my being inspired by of course the incidents but also Sergio Aragonis who's a great Mad Magazine cartoonist who did these kind of shadows where it would have the dog and the man walking and the shadows would be completely different. So this is watercolor. This is kind of mixed up. This is watercolor I did not that long ago. I live in Cornish, New Hampshire now. And my wife has a house in Burlington. So I come back to Burlington every now and again to just check in with her. And it's a kind of an interesting marriage. That's really small, okay. I can't, I'm not gonna mess with it but it's really tiny. Okay, I'm gonna go back to it. But it's the New York Public Library Lion and it has the, a little pigeon feathers in its mouth. A little tiny bit of blood. And that came from just being in Manhattan and walking by those statues and having pigeons there and just thinking that line would completely eat them in a second. This idea came from being in an art museum and watching people not really take in the art but they were sort of wanted to capture the capture the culture, you know. And that happens even more. I'm not against taking photographs by the way of paintings with the camera. I do it all the time. But I was seeing people like not really look at the art and it bugged me. By the way, this painting is my version of Norman Rockwell's version of a Jackson Pollock that ran on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post and his cover was called the Connoisseur. Was it called the Connoisseur? But my editor at the New Yorker, Francois Mouly, was like, you should try to make it look just like the Rockwell. I was like, are you high? But in the end I compared mine to Rockwell's and my Pollock is far superior to Rockwell's. So another, I noticed a lot of the covers I do for The New Yorker are kind of celebrating looking up. And I had a great, I worked for Playboy for a while and Michelle Urie was my cartoon editor and she passed away too young but she took me out to lunch one night, and one afternoon I should say, yeah, she took me out to lunch one night. We had a lot of drinks, and so we're walking home and Michelle's like, she wore sunglasses. She actually died of cancer. I didn't know this but she had a cancer in her eye or something. I think she wore her sunglasses anyway but she was kind of a glamorous, cool woman and she put up with a lot of shit from Heffner for many years and she just hung in there. But she took my arm and she said, she goes, look up. And I looked up at the buildings and she's like, look at that. Look at all that architecture. Look what's going on up there. There's a mist and stuff coming up. She said, look around there. People aren't looking up. And that was before self, that was before phones. So she was great, I miss her. I wish these were, these are so small. Sorry. He's got a super soaker. That's 2005, August 1st, 2005. But yeah, that's just a detail of a cover that I did for a publication called Weird Fiction Review. And I love Mad Magazine. I love Jack Davis. So this gave me the opportunity to kind of drop in to Jack Davis's ink work for those old EC comics and is a close up. And I was kind of proud of that. And that's the actual cover right there. These guys come into. Well, it's great. Yeah, buddy of mine designed it, the type, and it's super fun to work on. Yeah, it's fun. This is a illustration for a book I did for my longtime editor, Joanna Kotler, who I love and is a good friend, is a great painter. I did many children's books with her, Harper Collins. And this was the last book that we did, one book we did, I should say. And she wrote it. This is a student edit. It's called Sorry, Not Sorry. And it's a really great children's book about saying you're sorry. I thought it was a fantastic book. And not just, it's great. Because I used to get manuscripts all the time, not all the time, but often enough. I got one from Judy Blum at one point. And I didn't really like it. But this concept of apologizing, I just thought, that's huge. When you say you're sorry and really mean you're sorry to deeply feel sorry, I just thought that it's such a profound thing that I had to do the book. This won't tell you anything about the rest of it. This is a different book. This was written by Katie Camillo. Of course, it's in the German edition. Whoops. So I'm a dog fanatic. I have a memoir coming out about my dog Penny who passed away after 17 years. So sometimes I think there's something wrong with me that I love. I love dogs so much. I do, I fear for my sanity. But anyway, this is called Good Rosie. And this is a nice book too. I love Katie Camillo. There's a real sense of humanity in her writing. This is just silly. It's the lost Bemelehem sketch. I got that on eBay. It's certified. It's the real deal. I remember my cover, editor Francois Moulet, I walked in one day, and she had Xerox. That's her sentence where she's Xerox. I put it on her wall. I was very proud. Oh, these are so small. I'm really sorry. I'm like, I wish I could. Maybe I'll get out of this and just hand do it because this is driving me crazy. Hold on. My nest, bear with me. I got to escape. Hold on. I'm going to go back to, I don't really care. We're here. We're here, right? Are you sure you want to open 71 items? Oh, unselect them like that? Thank you. I'm going to need you. Stay with me. Now what just happened? What? I mean, I don't really care. Perfect. I might need tech help. Does anybody know how to do this? I don't know how to do this. So honestly, this could be a, well, I don't even know how to get back to that now, to be honest with you. Yeah. It's in a folder called Dartmouth that is on the desktop. But as soon as I plugged into this, well, this one, that guy, see how small the cursor is? You can't even see it. That's the idea. Now, if I do that, will it go to the next one now? Well, if we escape here. That's what I tried. Yeah. And if we, no, just. It, as soon as I plugged in, if I unplug it, it'll. Gotcha. It's because it's plugged into this. It's the library's fault. Turn it into a slideshow would be ideal. Right. It won't let us go forward. Right. You want me to find the folder? Dartmouth. It just says tiny. That's it. Why can't we turn that into a slideshow? It's so weird. Libraries. I love libraries. They literally saved my life growing up. I mean, art did too. But libraries, being in high school, public high school, was in the 70s was brutal, absolutely brutal. But I could go to the library and I get picked on. It was quiet. Art books were everywhere. Books with comics in them. And I could go to the library and find peace. It was just like, saved my life. And it was free. I could take books out of the library, under my arm, or the black t-shirt on in the middle of winter in Rochester, New York. And yeah, it just was. And that hasn't changed over the years. That's exciting, whatever happened there. At least I can. So we're down. We'd be right up, right there maybe. No, date created, size named. That's not it. So we're looking. Yeah, that's what we're looking for. Yeah, that's what we're looking for now. So you wanted to go to this one, right? Yeah, the next one, yeah. Small. You want to just sit down? Yeah, I'll just. Harry and I went to college. Yeah, John. We actually went to art school together in Philadelphia. As a craft designer, yeah. This cartoon I really like. Just because I like the clothes are like, people would say. You said meow? Or was it down there? So this is, Gluten recalls a time before their intolerance. This is like a poor fish. He's got a little fish shirt. I forgot if he's got a little fish shirt on. OK, we'll go to the next one. Zooming out. Yeah, it's under it. It's the palm. This is a really hard drawing to do, because I had to make sure it really looked like Shelley DeVall. It was really hard. And then they also, initially, this had the little stems coming off it. And that's not where the pollen comes from. The New Yorker fact-checked that for me. And they said, actually, you have to change it, so I added these. Anyway, yeah. People really like this one. It was an old seven days cartoon. I did an alternate version of this where he's got a metal detector. It's weird, my drawing. I used to do watercolor cartoons for the New Yorker, but I don't do them. They're all under. It's the. Trying to fly by. That guy. Oh, the cursor. Yeah, yeah. Oh, no. Yeah, a brush ink line. Yeah, kind of old school. Just like Charles Adams would do it. I would imagine, yeah. This idea came to me. I was driving from Cornish to Burlington, and there was a, you see them. They're Cooper's Hawk, and they're sitting there, and they look so, they look so badass and regal and just really impressive. And that's where it came from. It doesn't work now, yeah. Yeah, there was some, well, wait, switch to a. Really don't like speeders. Yeah, there came a point in my life where I really, I go slow. Like I drive pretty slow. I mean, if I'm on the highway, you know, if it's wide open and there's no one around, and I'll do 75, whatever. But if I'm driving where there are people, I tend to go pretty slow. I don't know why. Is that an age thing? I don't even know. You don't drive, do you? All right, you had the Nirvana show on. I thought he probably drives. I remember when Nirvana's first album came out. 93 was it? And I was old in 93. I was like 35. That's pretty recent. 2000, no, 2023. Yeah, I was in a bar with a friend of mine and feeling we heard that on the company. And I was like, what is this? You better spill it, Frank, because we got your pale mittens in the next room singing like Lady Gaga. Lady freaking Gaga. So there's a narrative. I like narrative cartoons and where you can kind of, sometimes you can, different captions. You spend more time there. I like the imagining what happened before it and then after it. And it's very film noir-y. I mean, I grew up on old Billy Wilder movies, and this is kind of still thinking about that squirrel. I'm laughing at my own cartoon. I just love that little face. He's just like, how do they do it? They're like little poop. Right. Yeah, I mean, I try. That's kind of the goal. There's a film there, and we're dropping in on some moment, I think. Sorry. I really don't have much to say about that one. I include my journals. I keep a journal, and I journal every single day, every morning, every morning. And it's fill up the journal with things. Yes, I think it's this one right here. And that's Beatrix Potter. I'm not sure what this says, but we better get off this before they read something. Really not cool. Oh, this is a sketch for a cover I did for The New Yorker. We all kind of worked. This was a collaborative effort with Art Spiegelman, his wife, even Remnick pitched in on this. Art Spiegelman had the idea. We can go to the next one, and I think see the finish. But yeah, I think it's right under it, which was great to have all these people. I love collaborating. I'm not one of those cartoonists who I really enjoy everyone shipping in. But yeah, Art's idea was to put the Clorox there. I think at a certain point Francoise said, make. Instead of lurch, we're going to have lurch from the Adams family, because this is very Charles Adams. I mean, that's supposed to be Jared Kushner is there. These are QAnon kids. There's a little portrait of Vladimir Putin right there. And this was, again, Father Time, 2020, COVID ball. It's all in there. On the stocking, it says Donald. It says Donald, Donald, Donald. And I started working with Steve Martin in 20, I don't know. What are we, 24, 2021, 22? He was at a dinner with my cover editor, and he had some ideas for cartoons. And he said, do you know of anybody? And she said, yeah, I know somebody likes to collaborate, Harry Bliss. And he actually knew my cartoons from the LA Times. And then he started sending me some ideas, emailed me some ideas. And that's how it all started, yeah. And that picture, by the way, it was a photo shoot for the New York Times. And he was like, he's walking, he's great, he's just walking. He's like, Harry, I think he goes, I'll show you how to fake laugh on camera. It's like, it's really funny. And I was really, it's like a little less, it's like, but I was just, I was laughing at him. So he was making me laugh. Let's see, what's below that? Oh, that's a fun one, yeah. This was kind of tricky drawing that. I had a friend of mine years ago who said, you suck at drawing guns. And ever since then, I'm like, I got to learn how to, yeah, right, I got to make sure the gun's right. And I mean, they're all kind of fun to draw. This is one of Steve's, I think. I think. This is just to show you what they look like before I add any graphite. It's just a lot. Two hours, yeah, like two hours. They start off in the journal. You go to the next one. They start off in the journal, sometimes as little, like, if he sends me an idea, or I think of an idea, I'll do a little rough of it, and then, yeah, and there's the finish. And so, you know, I'm always thinking, I'm kind of always working, because I'm always, yeah, when you're in your cartoonist, you're kind of, your brain becomes trained to see and hear cartoons. People say, did you ever run out of ideas, and I'm like, no, not a million years, could I run out of ideas? No, it's just a pencil. Yeah, it's actually a mechanical pencil I use. But if you want to go to my Instagram account, there are videos of me drawing, which will really show you, I'm not going to try to explain it. Someone said, you know that fish isn't that terribly drawn. It's hard to draw, crummy. I think Picasso, didn't Picasso say I spent, I've spent my entire life trying to draw like a child. Kind of unlearn what you learn, which is very interesting. That's right, that's actually right, yeah. That's when Steve calls me, I put in Naven Johnson, because that's his name in the jerk. And so he does call time, but when he does call it, just before I answer the phone, I'm like, you have a good laugh on it. There was a sandwich at August 1st in Burlington that I ordered yesterday called The Jerk, and I took a picture of it and sent it to him. Oh, so Steve will have, he has a very specific mind, we all do, but his is very quirky, and this was one idea that he said, you know, I had this idea for a cartoon, it's a overhead shot of a Las Vegas genie convention. And that's like, I would never think of that. And he said, and then he sent me these lines, I think I'm getting a new bottle. What kind of cork do you use? Have you seen the new screw tops? A thousand years, that's nothing. And he had more lines to go and I just, I was like, you know what, I'm not gonna do that. That's too much work. And the next one I like is a page from our first book. This is a, oh, yeah, we can read. So he says, well, Harry, I gotta say, I've been a city boy my whole life, but that walk in the woods was spectacular. I saw a deer, bear, scat, a squirrel, some kind of bird, I think I saw a rhino. I just don't see a downside. There, I got it. What a nasty looking tick. Okay, now you check me. And it's bright ticks. It's like, that's what you gotta do. You go out, you're in the woods, you come inside, you strip your clothes, but that, this I like this drawing, because I think that's kind of what he looks like naked. Those strips to do with Steve, and we did a lot with Penny. That was Penny, here's Penny on the cover. This was my, Penny is the, my wife and I, Sophie had our dog Penny, that again, I, she's been on New Yorker covers, and we had her 17 years, it was a long time to have a dog. And yeah, when you lose a dog, it's you all, if you have a dog and you've lost a dog, it's just crushing. It's just a crushing thing. So, go to the next one. But, and Steve said the same thing. He said it's like the, he said it's the second worst thing that could possibly happen to you. This one was, this one, this one is Steve's too. I, every now and again, I'll draw him in the cartoon. I don't do it very often, but this was, this was, I think you can see, I've like scratched out in the graphite here to get some of that. Steve, he's a huge Winslow Homer fan, as I, and so he, I try to tap into Homer, some of the seascapes. No, this one is, says Barnaby, if by chance the cats are ahead in the bridge game, hold off on serving the smoked salmon bites. Very good, Miss Penny. I like this one. That's, that's very much like Penny. But again, this comes from reading, a lot of ideas I will get from reading. P.G. Wodehouse, eventually. Yeah, it's a miniature poodle, yeah. Kind of a scruffy little, yeah. I'm just thinking of the body bag I have in Cornish that I had to bring her in as the date on it. It was October 11th, 2022, yeah. Did she show up in your drawings before you lost her or after? She continues to show up in the drawings. I drop, yeah, I'll put her in every now and again, yeah. And I have a new dog too. This was Steve's cartoon, this is, I think I sent him the drawing and then he added the, this is completely Tintin on the moon. It's RJ, RJ Tintin on the moon, totally. Does Steve love dogs? He loves dogs. He just got a, he had a dog. In his book, there's a passage about his dog, Roger. He can't, there's, if, we tried to have a discussion on the phone about he was gonna read the passage. I think it's in our book, it's in the first, but he couldn't read it, he started crying. Yeah. Couldn't read it. They just got a new, so this is, this was like, again, this is a very Steve idea. Come on, Penny, I'll teach you how to fly. You cup your hands like this and flap them up and down. And it's, and then anyway. Oh, here comes Harry. What's up? Nothing? This is, I put this little book of LSD because I was experimenting with cycle dogs at the time, so. But he, yeah, Steve, he's got, there's a surreal side to a sense of humor that I really like. Anyway, that's the cover, we can skip this. It's kind of boring, but there's Penny again. Not a great, it's kind of Penny and, you know. Oh, this shows you, this shows you the sketch for the, oh, this is a sketch for the second book we did. It's his, it's called Other Diversions. Number one is walking in Other Diversions, so. He was telling me, he would write the script and it's about three amigos. Does Harry wake up? I remembered something and I like this. My favorite part of this is we're sleeping and I'm like wahoo and Penny turns around and is pissed off. It's like Martin, like he woke us up. But these strips were super fun to do and he was completely open with having me integrate like we'll be walking in the woods. I integrated New Hampshire, Vermont and you really enjoyed that, which was a huge relief for me because I really, I love to draw the woods and nature and all that stuff. This was, we got to do a thing on the New York, what's this place in New York, the town hall in New York with Nathan Lane was moderating it and Steve was there and it was so much fun and he just, that's basically, I laugh the whole time because these guys are so good. They're so funny. Well I was drawing, I did some drawings on a big screen and this is just, it's kind of crazy. I stopped thinking about, there was a time early on when we started collaborating where I was like, oh my God, this is Steve Martin. I grew up, I grew up loving Steve Martin. He was my hero, but it went away and I guess when I met him and spent some time with him he's like, he's just a really nice guy and I don't know, yeah it's not there anymore, which is nice. This is where the title of my book came from, comes from, yeah, which is, that's the brutal thing about having a dog. Even my dog now, Junior, we go the next one. You've always thought, yeah, then my dog now, it's like sometimes I look at Junior and Junior's just like a year and three months and I'll just be like, geez, it's kind of, how am I gonna, but someone said to me recently when you have a dog, you have all this love and you have to keep giving it to the dog. You have to keep giving it to another dog, another dog, another dog. This is a rough, these are just cover ideas that let's get back to funny, oh that's a good one. That's very out of buying. That's like the Mickey Mouse hair. Well this shows you from the journal, so you'll see what the roughs look like in my journal and this was, I think this was Steve's idea and then the next one you can see the actual cartoon I think and we switched the, I think we switched the, he switched the line on it and I like this line better. But you can see it's very film noir, very cinematic and it borrow a lot from, I still watch, I watch a film, a criterion channel film every night pretty much. This is a strip I did from Mountain Gazette Magazine which is a new magazine that just started, it's not a new magazine, it was big in the 70s, large format and it started up again, Mike Rogie who was lived in Burlington started it again. Anyway, Steve and I have been contributing double page spread comics to this publication and this is the, this one I did by myself without Steve. This is the first one I did, this is about my dog Junior, I got a puppy, a little Aussie Shepherd, standard Aussie Shepherd and I'm absolutely, so yeah, if you can read this, but this is exactly how it went down. I was first allergic to the dog, I almost got divorced over this, Sophie was allergic, she was flipping out, she couldn't believe I got another dog, I got a dog, she's now come to love Junior but it was really tough and it's at night getting up, you take your puppy out at 3 a.m. to take him, go to the bathroom whatever and he does, he humps a little towel, he's a little, you know, he's happy, he eats, after he eats he gets excited so he goes out onto the patio and humps a little towel because he's so happy. So I was like, get a room, you two. But if you ever go to Cornish, New Hampshire, you go to the next one, it's like, Maxwell Parrish lived there and worked there and it's just like his paintings, it's, I mean, you look at night and you see where, that's Junior, right? Such a good boy, such a good boy, he's a good boy, G-O-O boy, all right. Let's see, oh there's another one there, little dog says, Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to get me to chew your stockings. Again, totally inspired from films. The Graduate was a seminal movie for me, it was my kind of catcher in the ride, it was like huge for me, that movie, it was the first, I saw a movie and I was like, oh, I can leave home and just go after a girl. That's something I could just do with that, I don't have to ask my parents. Yeah, no, that, oh, we did it twice, so go down to the next one, I guess. Two 60 year old men looking for a cursor. Oh, there you are over here now, so. There you go, yeah, good luck. Godspeed, oh you're on that, there we go. Okay, I'll talk about that because I'm a collector, I collect art, I actually spend most of the money I earn on art. That's the other thing I love about Steve, because if there's something that I'm unsure of, I'll ask him about it, he knows most of the auction sites and but. You've seen his collection, right? Not all of it, his and Anne's, both of them, yeah. I scared that hotly. Oh, you did, the Splash one? I scared that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's got, Steve's got a great eye, he's got a great eye. Yeah, his collection's insane, he's a Lucian Freud that's, there's no caption here, but I love Willard Metcalf, a Cornish colony artist, I love, if you get a chance, look up Willard Metcalf, brilliant, one of my favorite American impressionists. I just bought a Willard Metcalf pastel that I got really cheap. This is Wanda Gogh, I don't know, really fantastic illustrator, artist. Yes, millions of cats, yeah, she was a fantastic artist. Check her work out, there are books on her. Well, we go to the next one, this is a watercolor of hers that I picked up at auction maybe a year ago, and it's of, I mean, it's nice to get a print, but this is an actual watercolor, and it's about, you know, this big, thin paper, and it's gorgeous, it's just gorgeous. I bought an NC Wyatt, I have a huge NC Wyatt. And oh, this is a nice segue, that was completely unplanned too. I met Andrew Wyatt years ago, I went to Chad's Ford, Pennsylvania, and hung out with Andy and his wife, Betsy, for about two and a half hours. And we had grown up, we were huge Wyatt fans, we sat for a while, at one point Betsy got up and left us to kind of hang out, he talked about Hopper, but at some point I was gonna take the picture, I said, can I take your picture, maybe I'll get one of you, and she said, yeah, I'll get one of you and Andy together, and Andy said, I get an idea, why don't we stage something here? I mean, really, he was like 90 at the time, and he said, I'll get on the floor, and he said, Betsy, you take your cane and get on top of me and go like that, like you're gonna hit me, and I've got more photographs of them, like this photo shoot, and it was hilarious, just absolutely hilarious, this is all in the memoir, I wrote the whole essay up in the memoir, but what a trip, what a total trip, they were so generous, and they really loved the cart, they loved the drawings, oh that's my wife, they loved the kind of crude, Andy loved the crude quality of my drawings, because I brought a bunch of drawings with me, because I knew I was gonna be really nervous, and I'm like, I'll just put these out and see what happens. I think we're almost done, no? There's a couple, what are you doing with me, seven, 14, getting close to the end, I like this one, this is very autobiographical, I like to come here sometimes all by myself and shout the most offensive things I can think of, like, not maybe not everyone, like this one I like, because you can't, you can't anymore, you can't, and I also like that drawing, I'm very proud of that drawing, it was really, yeah, if I might say so myself, we'll go quickly, I'll go quickly then. Oh, this is the recent one of Steve's, you never see them roll over, why should you? I'm sick, it's not sick, it's actually very sweet in a way because, shotgun, because I did a book called Death, my first cartoon collection, Death by Laughter, was actually a lot of death cartoons, and I remember when that came out and I got a few, more than two, people saying that how there was a retirement community or a hospice place, they had the book in their library and made so many people laugh, like they really appreciated it, you know, kind of laugh in the face of death. Oh, this is another strip, this one actually, this is a sneak preview, this isn't even out yet, but Steve wrote this, it's about Andy Warhol, and you know the shot Maryland's, anyone know the shot Maryland's? Well, there was a studio in 1964, Andy Warhol created a series of five silkscreen images of Marilyn Monroe, each a different color. This was a blast to do by the way, that's Lou Reed by the way, and the studio, I wanted Dracula in there because it's just, the silkscreen portraits, basically this woman came into the studio in 1964, her name was Poe Burr, you can Google this, Dorothy Poe Burr, she said, can I shoot these? Andy thought, yeah, you can photograph them. She pulled out a revolver and shot the right, they were stacked four together, they later became, and then he's like, and then I like this little pop, pop art thing, so the shot Maryland's, as they came to be called, acquired instant cachet, and shot Blue Sage Maryland was sold at Christie's in 2022 for $195 million. And Andy Warhol, you know, of course he's gone now, but if he were there, he would have been, he would say, wow, this one I really like too, I was like, take it easy, Billy, I'm just gonna give her a treat. This might be the last one. That's Junior, that's a recent one. It's like that old commercial where, was that 70s commercial where the guy was like walking in Paris and he just says, I love this woman, I don't care, who knows it? Remember that was a commercial? No, never. All right, thanks John, thank you. Big round, God bless you. Just gonna stay up there. Trotsky in Vermont, yeah. Well, I did this because I was just messing around with drawing, William Stuyg once said, he loved to like see what happens, to see where the ink moves and where it goes on the page. And I always thought, I always loved that. There was something that I did at elementary schools, I would have kids come up and draw scribble because I was trying to get the kid over the intimidation of the paper, so I would have them do a scribble like that. I'm not gonna have anyone here do it because I don't feel like it. It's a cool game, by the way, to play with anyone. I still play it when I'm out and I have paper. But so you look at this and you think, well, what can I turn it into? Anybody have any ideas? I'll pretend this is a classroom. What do you think this could be turned into? What do you think? Oh, it could be, I like that. That's not a very good student. You're not being, you're gonna get in trouble. Go with the dog. You know, my brother is an educator and this is a terrible dog, so let's just get rid of this. I hate this drawing. Oh, it's stuck. Always get, you know, just don't be afraid to destroy your work. My brother is an educator and I hope this is filmed that he sees this and I went to his school in Rochester, New York and I said, I had him do a scribble, right? I'm like, John, let's get Mr. Bliss up there to do a scribble. Here's what my brother's scribble was. I'm not kidding. And every adult in the whole room, all the teachers were just like, and then I'm like, okay, that's cool. I don't know what I did. I don't know. Yeah, I'm not gonna, I'm just gonna go away. I don't think you go away. But yeah, I love to draw trees and the thing that I'll tell people about drawing is to understand, I'm reading about Leonardo da Vinci right now. Isaacson, in fact, I finished Isaac. Did I finish it? I think I did. But da Vinci, Leonardo da Vinci was off the charts unbelievably amazing. I can't, there's no one else who's ever lived, in my opinion, who was as smart and as just as amazing as da Vinci was. The guy dissected 30 cadavers and drew everything he knew about them. Everything, and they were drawn beautifully. Just miraculous drawings. So, all this to say, if you wanna understand trees, you have to just study them and keep watching them. Like now I'm learning, oh, the bark's really quite different on a sugar maple than pine trees are different in the background and white pines. And oftentimes if I'm cartooning, I will start this way because I love to draw this stuff. I love drawing. It's a way for me to draw the things that I love to draw. I'll put a dog here with some guy walking the dog and then I'll think of, like I said earlier, I'll think of a narrative that led up to this moment in the walk. And there was a recent cartoon I just did where it had the guy walking and there's a big landscape. I think it was yesterday's cartoon and he says to the dog, behold, my antidepressant, look at the nature. So, anybody have questions? I'm moving over here now. They used to send out kind of calendars. Not really though, no, they'll send out a calendar. And every now and again, like when Osama bin Laden was killed, they had sent out an urgent, we need a cover on this right away. And I submitted a cover that I thought was very good and I thought they should have run it. It was just, it was an ocean. It was just a shot of the ocean, just a watercolor. And it was just a turbulent waters and because they buried him at sea and there's nothing but turbulent times then and now and, but they went with something else. It was a picture of Osama bin Laden with and then someone he raced it, which I thought was kind of a shallow, like, you know, I didn't, I'm opinionated. But I've just, I've gone from answering your question to, you know, touting how good I am. I was like. Ed Corman spoke here about five or six years ago. Yeah. And one of the things he talked about was the connection between the art and the gap. And he said that sometimes he had the art down and then it was a challenge to get the caption that was inappropriate life. I was wondering if you could, now since you keep a journal, where it looks like you're writing and drawing, maybe you see that in a different way, but could you comment on how it works for you, connecting the art and the words? Well, they have to be, they should be inseparable. In other words, they have to rely on each other. So a good example of that is the guy sleeping with the vodka bottle. Like the caption says, you wake, question mark. There's no, you can't, it needs the drawing, so. But it's different with every cartoonist because my captions is my style of writing. It's there's a cadence to it. There's a way that I want it to flow like a song. You know, I was just one yesterday. My wife and I was going, I did the drawing and it came down to one word. It was a fairly decent length caption, but it was instead of a device, my device, like a device was better than my device. And it was better because a device, he was talking about his phone. He was walking in the woods and saying, basically he's walking in the woods with his dog. He's talking into his phone. He says, hey Siri, set a reminder for me so I know how wonderful it is to be walking in the woods without my device. So, but it was really important that it be a device because it's more universal than my device. It's too, I felt like my device is somehow it was too personal. I might be wrong, but that's an example of how you could get pretty nitpicky It has to be right. And it's how I talk. It's how I would talk to. They come to you at the same time. So the art and the words or the, no, not at all, that was me drawing. I literally did a drawing of a guy walking in the woods just like I would draw here. And I really liked the drawing and I stared at it. And then he had a phone, he had a phone. So he had the phone. He's walking. And then at first I had something coming out of the phone like he's listening to someone. And I didn't really have anything. And then, did I ask someone? Wait, I might have, did I? Oh, no, no, then it came to me. Then something came to me like, no, he should be saying something. I'm sorry, my wife, that's her cartoon. That's her idea. So I should clear it up. Because she gave me the idea about him thinking something about how wonderful it is to be in nature and then using his device to remind him of that. That was her idea. And I just changed it. I said, how tranquil I used it. I wanted the word tranquil, how tranquil it is. Am I over-explaining it? Yeah, it can be very complicated. It can be, well it's like, like I said, it's like writing a song or anything. Yeah. Before that, you now see things automatically as cartoons as you're going through life. Do you find that ever creating a wall between you and the experiences you're having in your framing things in terms of future cartoons? No, I don't think so. Even as a get in the way of my being present. And I don't think so. I mean, it almost has to a little bit because if I see something as a potential cartoon, I am working that. Like, is your wife or your people know you well? Say things like, are you doing it now? Kind of. Kind of. Yeah, my wife definitely, yeah. And wasn't there, was there, oh there's a really funny movie called Walk Hard, the Dewey Cox story with John C. Riley, which is so funny. And they're having an argument, they're getting divorced and Kristen Wiig just looks at him and she says, and they're arguing and she says something, a line that's mad at him and he's listening to the line. And he's like, that would make a great song. And she said, Dewey, don't you write a song about this? I know, that's how your mind works. You're always reading things in that kind of way. But it's, I don't so much anymore because I draw, it's more, the drawing is first. Drawing is the first thing. I don't, I think Ed probably does or did, I should say. Oh, he's probably out there still. He's probably. I'm interested in the ones particularly, I like them all. I like your work a lot. But I like the ones that are funny without the caption and then the caption tightens it in so that it gives it a point big. That I don't know how he sharpens it. Yeah. But that's like the Amish midlife crisis and it's funny as a drawing. Yeah, that's true. But then that gives it a snap that, I love that. That's funny. The snap that the caption gives. Yeah, no one's actually pointed that out before but you're right that in that, you almost don't need Amish midlife crisis up there in the box. It's a little superfluous. But it adds a nice effect to that. Right, maybe. I'm just saying, I never thought of that before but you make an interesting point there because it's funny without it. I mean, I think people would, might, I don't know, I'm not sure. Yeah. I try. I try. On the single frames. Yeah. And they're always turned in a really precise, perfect way. Thank you. Thank you. That means a lot to me. I work for, I think a lot about those the way it's, and I think there was a poet that I met once, Yousef and I won't know how to pronounce his last name. Does anyone know this? A Pulitzer Prize winning Yousef Karma? No? Come on. He said to me that there's poetry in the cartoons, in cartoons. And, you know, I kind of like to believe him a little bit even though I know very little and nothing about poetry. But my mother-in-law, who's 92, who just had a stroke a year ago and she, a published poet, when she reads to me her poems, I think the same thing. I think this is very much like writing captions. You know, it's very specific. Yeah. Can I have a look of rejected New Yorker cartoons? Is that ever popular in that case? Yes. But should they have work too much? Do you have your future in that? Yeah, yeah. You're a prolific cartoonist, I think. The question is, how many cartoons a month or whatever period do you submit to the New Yorker out of how many, do you total, and how many are rejected or accepted? Yeah, that's a good question. I'm syndicated through Tribune Media. So I, and I've been syndicated since 2008, I think. So I have to generate a daily cartoon six days a week, okay? I'm contracted with the New Yorker, I've been contracted for most of them since 99, which means they have first right of refusal on all my cartoons. So what I do is I generate six or seven cartoons every week, I send them to the New Yorker first. They say, oh, I want, I'm gonna take these two to the meeting, so they hold them. Then I have to come up with two more, send the rest to my syndicate, and that way, the New Yorkers, they'll take those to the cartoon meeting once a week. They'll either buy one, they usually buy one. Usually I sell once a week, once every two weeks. And I don't care anymore, I really don't. I used to be, Ed Korn, we used to go, we used to really hate not selling. It would really drive him crazy. He'd get mad, and he was frustrated, and I'd be like, Ed, man, you're a legend. It doesn't matter anymore. You've done like 60 covers. But it really mattered to him, it bothered him. So it's brutal, it's absolutely brutal. I mean, unlucky because whatever is to profane or unpublishable of the seven or eight I generate every week, seven days will publish. I'm sorry. I just wanna say it, it was seven years. Yeah, well they're the ones that I like. They're usually ones that they publish ones that are profane, and they'll publish them. So I'm really, and that wasn't, that was kind of by design. I mean, it was, I don't, but it's a really brutal career. It's just, for people who have to rely on the New Yorker, it's super hard. The seven days get into the syndicate? No, I send it directly to seven days. Although they get the similar drawings than the syndicate. Sometimes the same drawings, and sometimes profane drawings. In full transparency, we are all friends. Yes, we are. I'm interested in your art, not the cartoon. Yeah. Do you have a collection of art somewhere? Not mine, right? Yeah, I do. Oh, mine, it's all over the place, you know. I don't know. Yeah, I do, I do. But I'm not, I'm sick of it, man. I'm kind of sick of looking at my work. I don't hang it up in my house. I look at it every now and then and say that's, like I'll look at my old work and be like, wow, I was really good. I could really paint watercolors. But I'm way more interested in other people's work. But I do have most of my work. Some of that I sell. Some of the New Yorker covers I sell. I sell the King Kong cover to the company that owns the Empire State Building. They bought that cover. Yeah, I really love the famous kid with the mark. Yeah, thanks. That's a beauty. Yeah, I'm really proud of that. That almost got me a gold medal in 1993 from the Society of Illustrators. A guy, a judge came up to me and said, you were that close. I was like, fuck you. Yeah, that was, that was, that piece I am very proud of. I like the modeling on that really worked out. And my journal drawings, like I said, but after studying Leonardo da Vinci and seeing his drawings, all those drawings at the Windsor Castle, they're just unbelievable. They're, they blow my mind. I can't believe he was that prolific. And he died at 66. Yeah, I'm gonna steal some of those. I'm gonna break in, I'm gonna get them. You can't get them. Do you ever consider or have an urge that you will push yourself into fine arts which you would get paid for the same amount of work for a whole lot more? I make pretty good money doing cartoons. No, it's not, it's not. It's just the opposite. It's very easy. And drawing, drawing cartoons is, I love to do it. It's easy. Never, never. I used, there was a time when I used to think of, when I used to think of a cartoon. If you find yourself trying to think of a cartoon, you're just gonna hit a wall. But I just start drawing. That's what William Steig said. And Ed would say, Ed Coran would say, just start drawing and see where it takes you. And that's a beautiful way to work. I think my way, if I don't mess around to get right to work, then I've got it. Yeah. And it don't mess with you, it's really good because I've had a whole night to figure it out. Yeah, yeah, that's nice too when you can sleep on it. Dream of, I've dreamed of paintings. Yeah, that's a whole another. A daily cartoon, tell me besides where a cartoon comes out on what day? I don't, the publisher does that. I mean, there's some, my syndicate does that. I mean, there's some days, like, of course, if Christmas is coming up or the holiday, I'll do some snow cartoons or some seasonal stuff. Beach stuff in the summer. Yeah, anyone else? Yes. So why do you say the cartoons you send to seven days are profane? Some of them are. What? I don't want to say they're sweet. Some are sweet. Those are the, yes, you're right. I should take that back, you're right. Yeah, you're right. No, you're right, I think that's true. They used to be profane. They did. Years ago, they would, the, if I could think of one, there was some, they would publish the sex things, the sex jokes that I did, which would have, like, there was a woman in bed and the guys got the bra on and the woman says, I'm going to need that bra back, you know. So just those things I couldn't get published in syndication, maybe the New Yorker would publish some things. But seven days, God bless them, they would, the cartoons that I really like that were unpublishable anywhere else, they would run. But you're right, I think that is true. They are kind of sweet. Yeah, well, I'll get you some. Do people ever ask you to draw their dogs? Yeah, sometimes I'll do that for people. I'll put their dog in a cartoon. Just to see if their dog is, you know, not doing well. I do that for people, sometimes. The article about you in seven days about that, it sounded like you sometimes think about giving cartooning up. And I was hoping that's not true, because, like, six days a week, I look forward to a moment of, it's just peaceful. A little bless. A little moment of bliss. I just love it. I look forward to it every day. Wow, thanks. That means a lot to me. I don't think I will just because it's not. But I'm not retiring in terms of books and working hard. I don't really have any, I don't like promoting. I don't like doing stuff like that. I like coming to libraries and talking to people. But I think in the world that we live in right now with social media and this, especially for young people especially, my son's 30, my stepfather's 24, there's an immense pressure on young people to be famous, to be seen, to be known, to have followers. And I rail against that. Even though I have a lot of followers on Instagram. Now that's funny to me. That's me being asshole. But I do rail against it. I think it's terrible for young people. It's terrible for creativity. When I think back on my early career, the most important thing for me, and it still is, is the fact that someone is paying me to draw a cartoon that I love to draw, a picture I like to draw. It could be $50 or $100 or, I don't care. But the fact, the joy I get from that is amazing. It's just like, this is great. I don't need much more than that. So I'm gonna need a job. So I'll keep drawing cartoons. And I love to draw my dogs. And I like to make people feel good. So. There's a way to get a cartoon a day from you? Yeah, you can. See, I suck at promotion. You could go to my website and just type in your email. It doesn't go anywhere else. It just goes to my, I have a web guy who's Peter Woodward from my art school roommate. God, I love this guy. But he, my website, harrybliss.com, you go in, you put your name in, and you get my cartoon every day in your mail. You can see on my website, there's a ton of cartoons on there. The whole log is there. And I sell prints there and stuff. It's higher than me. Yeah. I just thought of something I asked Ed the last time I saw you and Ed together. Yeah. And I asked Ed, does he take suggestions or? Yeah, he doesn't. And he never did, but you do. I do, yes. I take, you know, anybody has an idea for a cartoon. You know. Yeah, no, I don't, I like collaborating. One of my favorite things to do was, in fact, my brother-in-law, Tony, he's a law professor in Wayne State, just sent a cartoon to me three weeks ago that the New Yorker had bought. And it's great. It's got, I can't answer my phone somewhere, but it's got a huge rock, like a bolder, big giant cliff, and it's thinking to itself that it'll never beat rock, never beat scissors or something. It just, I don't know, but it was such a funny gag. And I drew it very like, you know, highly rendered rock and, and one of my favorite things to do is to call him and tell him the New Yorker bought your cartoon. It makes me so happy. So, yeah. All right, anybody else? Good. I'm interested that I hate commissions because I can't- Me too. All the time I'm trying to work on things and they like this, well, they like this. And that's like a kiss of death for getting anything good. You have to work under that happily every single day. Will they like this? But it's, no, it's not a commission though because I'm drawing for me. Okay, so then- They're just, they're just along for the ride. Okay. Quentin Tarantino said that about making movies, which I loved. He said, I make movies for me. It's just, this is a luxury that people like my movies. That's the way it's turned, you know, it is. So, oh, I hate commissions. Can't stand it. Draw this, we need a businessman in a suit. I don't know. Even for New Yorker covers? Even for the New Yorker covers. If they, I still submit on occasion, but yeah, I wouldn't like that. I wouldn't, I might turn, I probably would turn it down. You reach a certain age in your life, you're like, I don't wanna do anything that is gonna cause me stress or just like lose sleep or, I'd rather, if you can afford it, you know, if you need the money to pay your bills, that's different, but yeah, no thanks, man. I'd rather hike in the woods with my dog than sit strapped over a desk. As you've been talking, more and more I've been seeing one of your cute puppies at your podium instead of you. Aw, thank you. And John, of course, is talking about what it's like to live with a cartoonist. He worships me, okay, to yourself. Junior, I should have brought him, I actually thought I'd bring him. Well, thank you, yeah, it was a lot of fun.