Emily Flake Reflects on a Lifetime of Drawing

Emily Flake may have gotten a head start on her artistic career when she was born with an unusual last name – one that guaranteed her a lot of teasing, and so set her up with the awkward childhood that she now calls “very important to being a good artist.” Years later, Emily’s overcome her early challenges and then some. Her first work was published in The New Yorker in 2008, and in recent months, her cartoons have been popping up on an increasingly regular basis. Besides that, she illustrates an offbeat comic strip, “Lulu Eightball,” which appears in many weekly newspapers, and has put out a book about quitting smoking (NB: she hasn’t, entirely), These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves. We sat down with Emily recently to talk about all this and more.

TCB: What is your earliest drawing memory?

EF: I was just always, always drawing as a kid – there aren’t specific memories I have. I wanted drawing to be my “thing” so I wasn’t just a chubby kid with glasses and a weird last name.

TCB: What did you like best to draw as a child?

EF: Like a lot of little girls, I liked to draw horses, and also naked people. I was kind of a budding pornographer – a child pornographer, literally. I also did a lot of pigs. My father and I bonded over our shared love of pigs.

TCB: Were your parents or anyone else in your family of an artistic background?

EF: My grandfather was a cartoonist and a painter; we would go down to Houston to visit him, and I would try to impress him with my drawings.

TCB: When did you decide you wanted to make a living out of your art?

EF: I pretty much always knew I wanted to be an artist – or an actress. That latter dream died an early death – after a star turn as Ruth in a fifth-grade production of Pirates of Penzance, I started acting up too much to get cast in school plays. I ended up going to college at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and majored in illustration.

TCB: Did you have a day job while you were working as an artist?

EF: I’ve been freelancing full time since early 2006. Before that, I didn’t have a lot of practical skills, so when I had to find a job, I was like, “I can draw pictures, or I can wait tables.” So I did that, and then in Chicago I worked for a record distributor. Then when I moved to New York, I briefly did ad sales for the New York Blade, after which I worked for another record distributor until I was able to live off my freelance work.

TCB: Tell us about “Lulu Eightball.” How did you start doing the strip?

EF: I started doing the strip in 2002. At the time, I did a lot of work for the Baltimore City Paper, and they once had me do this four-page illustration for Valentine’s Day. I asked them about doing a regular feature, and they happened to have an opening on their cartoon page. Since then, the strip has appeared in as many as ten papers at one time, and the people who follow it seem to like it a lot. There’s not really a theme to it – though mostly, by default, it ends up being about drinking and failure.

Click here to view the complete collection of Emily Flake cartoons on Cartoonbank.com.

TCB: Where does the name of the strip come from?

EF: My parents called me Lulu when I was a kid, and I like watching pool. But mostly I kind of just liked the way the words sounded together. They have a nice ring.

Cartoon by Paul Noth, featured in the July 9, 2007 issue of The New Yorker.

TCB: What do you think is the biggest necessity for getting one’s cartoons into The New Yorker – artistic talent, sense of humor, persistence?

EF: I think the most important thing is persistence, and consistency. Keeping at it, keeping at it, keeping a consistent level of quality – and not getting too disheartened. Also finding other places you can sell cartoons to, so you don’t think, well, that effort was wasted.

TCB: How would you describe your approach to work for The New Yorker vs. “Lulu Eightball” or some of your other work?

EF: I approach it all the same way. I always write first; I’m relatively more competent as a writer than as an artist, I think. I will keep The New Yorker in mind if I’m drawing for them, as in what will appeal to the readers. I try not to send them a lot of stuff that’s too topical.

TCB: Can you name some of your favorite New Yorker cartoonists?

EF: The first two I was really excited about were Edward Gorey and Gahan Wilson. I first saw their work when I was five or six and my parents had some of their books checked out of the library. Later, when I actually met Gahan Wilson, I told him, “You’re the reason I became a cartoonist!”, and he replied, “I’m so sorry.”

Of artists today, obviously, I think many of my cohorts, like Zach Kanin and Paul Noth, are great. And among non-New Yorker artists, I like the illustrator Graham Roumieu.

Cartoon by Zachary Kanin from the May 7, 2007 issue of The New Yorker.

TCB: What about favorite cartoons?

EF: A lot of Sam Gross’s are just classics. Gahan Wilson’s as well. There was one that Paul Noth did of a clown bending down to a kid, pointing to the tear on his face and saying, “It doesn’t mean I’m a sad clown. It means I killed a man in prison.” There was also that one of Zach’s with the teakettle screaming.

TCB: How did you find the reaction to your most recently published cartoon? Were a lot of people you knew shocked by it? Do you think the fact that it was published signifies a change in taste at the magazine?

EF: A couple of my friends were like, “Way to get a coke joke into The New Yorker!” That cartoon hews more closely to my less filtered sense of humor. I don’t know if it means anything is changing at the magazine; I try not to speculate too much on what their editorial thinking is. It’s their magazine, and I don’t want to try to guess what they are going for. Who among us can know the mind of Bob [Mankoff, New Yorker cartoon editor]?