Art & Creativity Quote by Jonathan Shapiro

A cartoonist admitting he “normally” keeps drafts in a “catalogue type of book” is less a quaint behind-the-scenes detail than a quiet manifesto about how ideas actually get made: badly, messily, and on purpose. Jonathan Shapiro’s phrasing leans practical, almost understated, but it carries a clear intent: to demystify the cartooning process. The joke (if there is one) is that the raw material of sharp public commentary starts life as scribbles in a modest notebook, not as lightning-bolt inspiration.

The subtext is discipline. “Keep” and “series” signal routine, not mood. A “catalogue type” book isn’t a romantic diary; it’s an archive. Shapiro is describing a workflow built for retrieval and recombination: sketches that can be revisited when the news cycle catches up, or when a half-formed visual metaphor finally clicks. In political and editorial cartooning, timing is everything, but so is having a back-pocket stockpile of angles. The notebook becomes an external hard drive for the imagination.

There’s also a subtle argument here about freedom. By allowing himself to “scribble, sketch and draw” without insisting on polish, he’s creating a private space where ideas can be wrong, exaggerated, even offensive to his own taste before they’re refined into something publishable. That separation between the messy lab and the finished panel is how cartoonists manage the high-wire act: compressing complicated events into a single image that reads fast, lands hard, and still feels intentional.