Best of the Rejection Collection

by Matthew Diffee

"The Rejection Collection" brings together some of "The New Yorker's" brightest talents - Roz Chast, Gahan Wilson, Sam Gross, Jack Zeigler, David Sipress, and more - and reveals their other side. Their dark side. Their juvenile side. Their sick side. Their naughty side. Their outrageous side. And what a treat. Ventriloquist dummy cartoons. Operating room cartoons. Bring your daughter to work day cartoons (the stripper, the prison guard on death row). Lots of couples in bed, quite a few coffins, wise-cracking animals - an obsessive's plumbing of the weird, the scary, the off-the-wall, and done so without restraint. Every week "The New Yorker" receives 500 cartoon submissions, and rejects a great majority - mostly, of course, for not being funny enough. There's no question why these were rejected, and it's not for lack of laughs. One can almost hear Eustace Tilley sniffing, We are not amused.

• ISBN13: 9780761165781
• Publish Date: 19 October 2011
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Out of Print: 15 June 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Workman Publishing
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 320
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

The Best of the Rejection Collection is precisely as stated on the cover - a well curated collection of worthy New Yorker cartoons which didn't make the cut for one reason or another. Released 10th May 2022 by Workman Publishing, it's 384 pages and is available in paperback and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

This is a collection of artists' works along with a short Q&A full of witty answers from each of them. Questions are the same for all contributors with questions ranging from "Where do you get your ideas" to "Have you mooned or been mooned more often in your life?", "What would make a terrible pizza topping?" (some really funny and outré answers), and "What’s the funniest thing that you witnessed, overheard, or came up with that you couldn’t figure out how to use in a cartoon?"

The following pages for each artist contains facsimiles of some of their rejected works.

The cartoons are funny, irreverent (some very much so), NSFW, or too direct and include things like a grandson berating his grandfather for the lack of color film from Auschwitz, Jesus hanging ten upside down (sans surfboard) on a monster wave, and a surprising number of inappropriate bestiality implications (which I freely admit made me giggle/snort for the most part).

Four stars. This would make a good selection for public library acquisition as well as for fans of the New Yorker type of sophisticated humor. I confess to not being up-to-date on selection criteria for public library acquisitions in the wake of recent challenges in the USA, but I don't think any of these should pose any real problems, even in the current climate.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.