Tom Toro (photo by Cheshire Isaacs)
Noted cartoonist and former KC Studio contributor Tom Toro releases a new book
Ambition is a funny thing to Tom Toro, whose 15-year career as a single-panel gag cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine — and for a few years at KC Studio — gets its overdue due in his infectiously quirky and entirely accessible new cartoon collection, “And to Think We Started as a Book Club…”
The title comes from the caption of Toro’s improbably inspirational front-cover cartoon, showing a gang of masked yet somehow unthreatening bank robbers successfully speeding off in their getaway car. One crook proudly gestures with his crowbar in one hand and a big bag of cash in the other, while giving the panel’s thought-provoking punchline. Ambition, indeed.
But that’s the kind of self-actualized get-up-and-go (minus the lawbreaking) that’s fueled Toro’s personal and professional life since growing up in the San Francisco Bay area as the son of a Bronze Medal winner for canoeing at the 1960 Rome Olympic Games.
“From him I definitely got not only my stubbornness, but setting your sights very high in terms of the goal you want to achieve,” says Toro, 43, who lives in Portland, Oregon. “Setting your sights on winning an Olympic medal and setting your sights on being a cartoonist in The New Yorker are somewhat equivalent, I would say, in giving yourself a challenge. I sort of have this nasty tendency to aim straight for the top.”
To name but a few, The New Yorker’s firmament of single-panel stars over the decades has included Charles Addams, James Thurber, Gahan Wilson, William Steig and Roz Chast, who declares Toro “a master of the art” in a blurb for his new collection. Translation: Welcome to the firmament, Tom.
“That’s very high praise from a master herself,” Toro says. “I don’t quite believe it happened. It’s mind-blowing. It’s almost as important as the first time that I sold a cartoon to The New Yorker.”
Before breaking through at The New Yorker, Toro — a graduate of Yale University, where he was cartoon editor at the Yale Herald — embraced but didn’t focus entirely on cartooning. He wanted to do different things and see where they might lead.
“When you’re a young person and you’re trying to be an artist, you try a bunch of mediums where your voice fits or doesn’t fit,” Toro says. “It’s a time for exploration.
“The cartooning is something that has stuck with me throughout my life, no matter what else I was pursuing. So even when I was writing screenplays and books, I’d always be cartooning. When I was (national-champion lightweight) rowing, I’d also be cartooning for the college paper. When I was writing novel manuscripts — none of which got published, unfortunately — I’d always have time as part of my day for cartooning. And it migrated from being a consistent hobby to something like the centerpiece of my creative and professional life, because, over time, it was the thing that kind of hit.”
The hits keep coming in “And to Think We Started as a Book Club…,” with chapters devoted to “life, love, family, work, beasts, tech” and “weird.” Still, whether Toro’s cartoons muse on the cinematic preferencesof cats, the inescapable silliness of sex or the creative leanings of cavemen, they tend to share a decidedly peculiar bent, not unlike Gary Larson’s legendarily bizarre single-panel newspaper cartoon, “The Far Side.”
“Larson is a huge influence,” Toro says. “There’s a darkness and mischievousness to Larson that I really strive for in my own sense of humor. And there’s also the Charles Addams (“The Addams Family”) influence of having something a little bit twisted, something a little bit macabre.
“What I try to do in my drawings is catch the reader a little bit off guard, because I sort of have a very gentle style. I have a gentle kind of wash to the inking and my characters are sort of very normal looking folks. So when there is something slightly twisted about the humor, I think it hits you even harder, because you don’t
expect it.”
Twisted? How about Toro’s post-apocalyptic cartoon of a now-bedraggled corporate type sitting around a campfire with three expressionless children, to whom he explains with a tragically misplaced sense of wonder: “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”
“That one,” Toro says of his most famous cartoon, “has been latched onto by the climate movement as a kind of iconic cartoon that resurfaces every now and then. It’s funny, when it was first published in 2012, I was not on social media, so I was kind of blind to the impact that it was having in that space. Only much later did I realize that it had been meme-shared by celebrities and people in that movement.
“As an artist, finding your audience is the thing that’s really key. And it’s never been easier in a way to have your stuff out there and see who’s gravitating toward it. But you try and also follow your own star and not be too swayed by what seems to be getting clicks and comments and attention online, because then you start to enter this self-referential kind of doom loop, where you’re just feeding the beast.”
Toro, who still enjoys what he calls the “old-school” experience of drawing by hand, views the impact of the internet and the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence both warily and ambitiously.
“I am worried about AI,” Toro says. “I do think that AI is going to be really problematic. The genie’s out of the bottle a little bit on that one. I feel like the artists who come out the other side are going to be the ones who learn how to harness AI for their own purposes. Instead of completely rebelling against it, they’ll be using it to make their own work flow more efficiently or use it
as a way to kind of experiment in their craft.
“But I actually think cartoons are somewhat perfectly suited to the digital era. There’s a reason why my most famous cartoon has become an enduring meme in social media. Because what is social media other than image and then caption, right? That’s what Instagram is. That’s what Facebook is. I almost think that it’s kind of the form that fits this new age in a curious way. So cartoons might be in a little bit of a renaissance. I’m hoping that’s the case.”
Toro’s previous publications include a series of illustrated children’s books and the provocative “Tiny Hands,” a collection of Trump cartoons published in 2017 by Dock Street Press, during his time in Kansas City.
Toro looks forward to making it back to KC, where he lived from 2015 to 2018, moving here from Berkeley, California, with his first wife when she took a job with Kansas City Repertory Theatre.
“I miss it,” he says. “I miss the people. I miss the trees. I miss the autumn air, the change of seasons. I miss the kale salad at Westside Local. That is a great kale salad.”
