Cartoon fan, eh? You and these New Yorker artists are in the same boat. That is, you could be:

Cartoonist Sam Gross has mixed feelings about the cruise he'll take in September.

On the one hand, he's looking forward to the opportunity to discuss his craft with an interested audience. Gross is one of a half-dozen cartoonists for The New Yorker featured on three Celebrity line "cartoon cruises" offered this year.

"I do well interacting with people at bookstores and lectures and so forth," says Gross. "I'm pretty fast on my feet."

On the other hand, there's the seasickness issue.

"On two occasions, I've contemplated suicide, and both of them were on boats," he says with a sour laugh. "I'm not crazy about boats, I'll tell you that."

The cartoonist, who signs his work "S. Gross," will share a seven-night cruise, beginning Sept. 24, with his colleague George Booth. New Yorker cartoonists Jack Ziegler and Victoria Roberts will be featured on a cruise beginning Sept. 17, with Danny Shanahan and Matthew Diffee on one that departs Oct. 1.
...
Gross, 71, began selling cartoon ideas to The New Yorker in 1964. Many of those early ideas actually were drawn by the legendary Charles Addams of The Addams Family fame.

A few years later, the magazine began buying Gross' cartoons, too.

One of his most famous efforts is a 1983 cartoon that shows a cow jumping over the moon. A bull, looking on, confides to a calf, "Your mother is a remarkable woman."
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At 62, cruising cartoonist Jack Ziegler isn't much younger than Gross. Yet he represents a different generation of New Yorker artists.

Gross' sophisticated-gag approach and raffish style are a link to the magazine's golden age. But Ziegler is one of a small handful of cartoonists (Roz Chast is another) who, in the 1970s, began pulling the publication into a more modern world.

To at least one person within the magazine, however, he was pulling too hard.

When Ziegler began selling cartoons to The New Yorker, they would never actually appear in the magazine. He mentioned that to the cartoon editor, who investigated the situation.

"It turns out that Carmine Peppe," the man who laid out the magazine, "was shuffling them all to the bottom of the pile," Ziegler recalls. "He felt that I was bringing down the standards of the magazine with this type of eccentric humor." Keep rowing...

If I were choosing, I'd go with Victoria Roberts in September (the schedule and, mmm, pricing are here). Although Sam Gross is the genius behind the cartoon that even now sits in a small frame here at Emdashes Central: "I don't care if she is a tape dispenser. I love her."

Drawing a crowd: With `New Yorker' cartoonists as part of the crew, Celebrity is hoping to lure the sophisticated set out to sea. [Jay Boyar, Orlando Sentinel]
On the SEASIDE—Cartoon-a-Day Desk Calendar for Cruisers [About.com]
Thankful for: Good Design! [The Rake's Progress. "Carmine Peppe was the legendary layout editor at the New Yorker, one of its great unsung heroes. For more than fifty years, he was responsible for the incredibly delicate craft of space shimming, not unlike a master carpenter."]