Back to the drawing board

FOUR YEARS AGO, when I sold my first cartoon to The New Yorker, I couldn’t wait for the untold success that would surely follow.

What followed was the swift rejection of my next 50 cartoons.

Over the course of the next year, a maddening pattern emerged: For every cartoon the magazine bought, there were at least 20 that they didn’t. And what’s worse, they were rejecting my good stuff. When I whined to one of the magazine’s other cartoonists, he replied, ‘‘You’re getting one out of 20? That’s fantastic!’’ Batting .050, I learned, was something to be proud of. A-Rod, you’re in the wrong business.

I live in Boston, separated from New York’s cartoon community, so I never fully understood the selection process. But I do occasionally make the trip down to Manhattan to drop off my weekly batch of cartoons in person, as many of the other cartoonists do. On one of my visits to the magazine, I saw the pile of submissions coming in for that week.

There were 15 cartoons by BEK (Bruce Eric Kaplan), all in his bleak and biting style and all very funny. Next, there were a dozen zingers by David Sipress. And so on through the enormous pile. I realized The New Yorker can’t publish even a fraction of what its roster of more than 40 cartoonists churns out every week. There just isn’t room.

And then of course there is the question of content. We cartoonists don’t blame the magazine for choosing the witty psychiatry cartoons over the witty proctology ones. We’re grateful that they publish cartoons at all. Still, we draw what makes us laugh, even when—especially when—it flies in the face of good taste.

So when my friend and fellow New Yorker cartoonist Matt Diffee came up with the idea of collecting our favorite unpublished gems for a book, it struck me as an idea that was long overdue. Finally, a chance to rescue a few of our favorite casualties of the editing process. And trust me, there are more than a few to choose from.

What’s great about these cartoons is not that they’ve been turned down by The New Yorker. It’s that they were ever done in the first place. Because in the back of our minds, none of us are really stupid enough to think that The New Yorker is looking for cartoons that include the word ‘‘diarrhea,’’ that offend the sensibilities of an entire race, or that begin by asking the question, ‘‘What would Jesus never, ever do?’’ (Though we do sometimes like to imagine editor David Remnick enjoying a guilty chuckle before tossing the offending item in the trash.)

In the face of certain rejection, we draw these cartoons because that’s what we do—because we can’t not do them, even if we know they’re going to disappear forever into the back of a closet. Thankfully, these haven’t.

New Yorker cartoonists Drew Dernavich, Matt Diffee, and Eric Lewis will appear at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge on Nov. 15 to discuss ‘‘The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker’’ (Simon Spotlight Entertainment).

Drew Dernavich is a New Yorker cartoonist who lives in Needham.