Posted January 9, 2021 by Dioniso Punk Art

Never Give Up

“Recently submitted my first cartoon to The New Yorker. Won’t be the last — Posting it here means it’s been rejected, of course.”
This was August, 2017, and Will Santino was attending graduate school when, rather than giving up, he began submitting the magazine’s limit of 10 cartoons a month. He endured years of rejections. Then, after 400 cartoons, he finally sold his first one to the covited New Yorker, in March, 2020.

It’s been a few years since that Facebook post — the cartoon was a parody of Jackson Pollock —, and today Will can proudly claim to be an artist, and a New Yorker cartoonist, “writing a fantasy novel about cats and candlefrogs.” He currently submit 8 cartoons every week, which can be seen on his Patreon too.
“There were times when I hadn’t gotten anything for two years other than the same two sentences of rejection,” he remembered, saying that he thought “maybe this isn’t going to happen. And then it did.”