On the history of the Cartoon Bank:

Q: Tell us about how the idea first came about for Cartoon Bank. Was it yours exclusively?

A: I’ve been a cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine since 1977. For most of those years I would submit between 10 and 15 cartoons each week and might get one accepted for publication. That’s the case for most of the other cartoonists at the magazine. In 1990, during a week when I had sold no cartoons to the magazine (despite having drawn 15, some of which I thought were pretty good), it dawned on me that perhaps there was a market for the cartoons that the New Yorker rejected. I convinced friends of mine, who, not coincidentally, were also New Yorker cartoonists, and who, not coincidentally, I was buying drinks for, that they had nothing to lose by having me scan their rejects and try to market them.

So, the original Cartoon Bank was made up not of New Yorker cartoons, but of the rejects. The New Yorker got the cream of the crop, and the Cartoon Bank got the rest. Commercially, second-best proved good enough, and these rejected cartoons went into many textbooks, newsletters, CD’s, intranets, and onto the fledgling Internet, creating a profitable business.