From a recent A.V. Club interview about Kate Beaton‘s essential new book, Hark! A Vagrant. The as-close-to-universally-beloved-as-it’s-possible-to-get-without-being-a-baby-panda Beaton and cartoonist Sam Means had a cartoon in the June 28 issue of the magazine (as “Beans,” which is a great combi-name). Are more forthcoming? Only Bob Mankoff knows for sure.

AVC: How did you get involved with _The New Yorker_? Did they come to you, or did you go to them?

**KB**: No, you have to submit to them. You give them packages. _The New Yorker_ doesn’t come to anybody, not even the people who’ve been published there for 20 years. You have to submit, and you just keep doing it until they buy one.

**AVC: What’s it like doing comics for them?**

**KB**: It’s just a different audience–and by “audience,” I mean the _New Yorker_ editor who buys your comic or doesn’t, and he’s the guy you want to really impress. I could do anything I wanted on my site, but I just wanted to get in somewhere where an editor said, “This is good enough,” or, “This is not good enough.” There’s a certain _New Yorker_ sensibility, style, sense of humor, that I thought about when I was making them, like, “I want this to look like a _New Yorker_ cartoon.” And I thought that’s how I should go about it. I didn’t write them, Sam Means wrote them, and I drew them. We had a partnership. But recently, I was on a panel with Roz Chast. She’s amazing, and she was like, “You shouldn’t adhere to any style, you should just do what you wanna do. You shouldn’t make it look like a New Yorker cartoon, you should make it look like yours.” Which I never really considered. [Laughs.] I mean, _The New Yorker_’s kind of an institution. But she probably is right. I enjoyed doing it, but maybe I would enjoy it more if I had stuck to my own sensibilities more. I don’t know.

See, we do sometimes still write about The New Yorker!

–Emily Gordon