Alumni Prolific Cartoonist Finds Humor in—Well, Pretty Much Everything Stories You May Like Is it Seasonal Depression—or the ‘Winter Blues’? May / June ’24 Trivia Roundup Designing Clothes for Kids with Sensory Issues Decades after launching her first comic strip in the Daily Sun, Ali Solomon ’01 has her work published in the New Yorker and beyond By Beth Saulnier The single-panel cartoon depicts Gollum—the loathsome, gargoyle-like creature from The Lord of the Rings—squatting in front of the counter at a “We buy gold” store as the proprietor peers through a loupe at an infamous piece of jewelry. “Oh, yes. Definitely a forgery,” says the caption. “Hope it didn’t cost you much.” The witty work, which ran in the New Yorker in fall 2018, marked the debut of cartoonist Ali Solomon ’01 in the magazine—and in her field’s major leagues. Familiar to Big Red grads from the late ’90s and early ’00s for a long-running strip in the Daily Sun, Solomon is a prolific cartoonist and humor writer who balances those efforts with a longtime day job teaching art in a Manhattan public middle school. A strip from Solomon's long-running comic in the Daily Sun. “It was really, really exciting—I lost my mind,” Solomon says, recalling what it was like to see her cartoon in the magazine’s august pages after years of submissions. “I bought so many copies of the issue that it pretty much negated what I got paid for it.” Since then, Solomon has had dozens more cartoons run in the weekly print magazine and on the New Yorker’s website, which features a daily humor spot. Some of the entries are multi-panel and in color, like a roundup of “new uses for the Iron Throne” (from the heyday of “Game of Thrones” in May 2019) that include repurposing it as dentist’s chair, lifeguard station, ski lift, and pointy repository for Edible Arrangements bouquets. Solomon's debut book, from 2021. In July 2022, she offered “summer reading assignments for adults,” such as: “Rank the following books by how much money you spent in late fees at the library in order to finish them: The Goldfinch, City on Fire, War and Peace, Middlemarch, Dune, Infinite Jest.” As Solomon observes, the print New Yorker tends to run cartoons that are fairly timeless, while the website allows for more real-time observation of current events. When it was announced during the COVID pandemic that New York’s watering holes would have early closing times, Solomon produced a cartoon showing a lonely Humphrey Bogart alone at the Casablanca bar with the caption, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine after 10 p.m.” “It’s funny, because with the New Yorker, you never know when you’re going to get published; the cartoon that ran in this week’s issue, I think I sold three years ago,” Solomon observes. “They post them online on Mondays—and every Monday, all the New Yorker cartoonists check to see if anything of theirs ran. And we’re very good about letting each other know, ‘Oh, I saw yours; you should look.’” It’s funny, because with the New Yorker, you never know when you’re going to get published; the cartoon that ran in this week’s issue, I think I sold three years ago. In addition to the New Yorker, Solomon has contributed to the venerable online literary humor magazine McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, where her work has included topical comic essays like, “Hello, I’m the Internet, and You’re Parenting All Wrong.” She has also published cartoons on the site, such as a sampling of “James Bond films for parents”: A View to a Spill; The Mom with the Golden Glue Gun; PinkEye. (It’s something of a companion piece to a cartoon she did for the New Yorker site on “Hitchcock films for city dwellers,” which included The Rats and The Next-Door Neighbor Who Knew Too Much.) Other outlets for her work have included the New York Times Book Review and the Huffington Post, as well as her own Instagram. Stories You May Like Is it Seasonal Depression—or the ‘Winter Blues’? May / June ’24 Trivia Roundup A Solomon Gallery (Editor's note: Captions are repeated for legibility.) "It feels good to get out of the city for the weekend.""He wasn't scary until he started sharing his conspiracy theories.""I'm the Ghost of Christmas Grammar, and I see you're having trouble with past, present, and future tenses.""Very good. Now try reading it with the lights dimmed and the background music louder.""I finally got the popcorn kernel out of my molar, so my schedule just opened right up.""Keep practicing, and someday you'll be able to play the two songs you remember, at houses that also have pianos." Among her favorite recent cartoons: a Wizard of Oz joke riffing on the “Irish farewell” that ran in the New Yorker in September 2024. “You had the power to leave all along,” Glinda the Good Witch tells Dorothy, “just click your heels three times, grab your coat, and sneak out without saying goodbye.” Admits Solomon: “That resonates with me, because I’m shy and I’m always looking for a way to leave a party.” A Long Island native, Solomon has been cartooning since childhood; she taught herself to draw by copying “Garfield” and “Calvin and Hobbes.” She published cartoons in her high school newspaper and, as a comm major in CALS, started a multi-panel comic strip in the Sun partway through her first semester—running it more or less every day the paper came out until she graduated. Solomon has been cartooning since childhood; she taught herself to draw by copying “Garfield” and “Calvin and Hobbes.” Dubbed The Living End, it featured a regular cast of characters navigating student life: studying, dating, making friends, finding off-campus housing, pledging a fraternity. “When I first started it, it was ‘a joke a day,’ but later it became more serial, with longer storylines,” recalls Solomon, who lives on Long Island with her husband and two tween-aged daughters. “Some of it was based on things that were happening to me at the time and some of it was just nonsense that I made up.” After graduation, Solomon earned a master’s in teaching at Columbia and began a career in education while pursuing cartooning on the side. Her work has included designing greeting cards for an online company and creating illustrations for the Menagerie trilogy of young adult fantasy novels. In 2021, an imprint of Hachette published I Am “Why Do I Need Venmo?” Years Old: Adventures in Aging, an illustrated humor book based on a piece she and a collaborator did for McSweeney’s that was among the site’s most read articles of 2019. Her first solo book, garnering laughs from the Big Apple. It contemplates various absurdist life stages, like: “I am ‘super into dogs and clogs’ years old,” “I am ‘excited about composting’ years old,” and “I am ‘hurt myself putting on pants’ years old.” Her second book, a collection of humorous essays and cartoons titled I Love(ish) New York: Tales of City Life, came out the following year. “It’s sort of a love-slash-hate letter to New York City,” she says. “And it’s also a farewell letter, because it came out right after I moved to Long Island after 22 years of living in the city.” For the 2024–25 academic year, Solomon is taking a teaching sabbatical to produce her first middle-grade graphic novel. Tentatively titled Such Great Heights, it's about a tween whose fear of heights curtails her plans to reconnect with some more-adventurous cousins. While she was thrilled to get a book contract, she was bemused by the pub date: 2028. “This whole project was something that I wanted to create for my kids—a story that is of the age that they are,” she says with a laugh. “But I didn’t realize how long it takes to publish a graphic novel. By the time it comes out, my eldest daughter is going to be, like, 16.” (All images provided.) Published January 18, 2025 Comments Keith Heron, Class of 1984 28 Jan, 2025 I enjoyed her sense of humor. Have a great year! Reply Dan Mansoor, Class of 1979 28 Jan, 2025 Brilliant. I’d publish all her work in the New Yorker. Congrats. Reply Leave a Comment Cancel replyOnce your comment is approved, your email address will not be published. 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