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Hi. I'm Jason Adam Katzenstein.
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And today, we're gonna draw some intrusive thoughts.
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Weren't we?
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[bright acoustic music]
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So Jason, for this episode,
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you proposed talking about drawing thoughts.
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I have a lot of thoughts,
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and we were talking about intrusive thoughts specifically,
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and so the sort of thoughts that maybe everybody has,
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but perhaps the more anxious among us fixate on.
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And you don't just depict yourself having these thoughts,
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the avatars for yourself
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having these thoughts in your cartoons,
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span inanimate objects, fictional characters,
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historical characters.
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It's a therapeutic impulse, I think.
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It gives me permission to be more vulnerable
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if I can give the thought to inanimate objects
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or historical figures or fictional characters
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because if somebody else is thinking it
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then I don't have to be responsible for the thought.
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I can really probe the deepest darkest parts of my psyche.
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[bright acoustic music]
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This is a cartoon about an executioner
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who apparently sleeps in executioner garb
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and is worried about whether or not
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he remembered to lock the dungeon.
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Have you had some sort of experience
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with disastrous consequences?
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It's actually that I haven't
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had the disastrous consequences.
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I'd say that if you live with somebody with OCD,
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chances are the door is locked,
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but that will not preclude this person
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from checking over and over again.
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I like, too, that it's this classically
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sort of scary character who you humanize
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both with this very relatable thought,
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but also with like those super cute sheets
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and that little little mug and that tiny book.
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I really wanted to stress the contrast
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between what is heightened and strange about the situation
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with the things that are more mundane,
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and so that's why I took a lot of care with the sheets
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and the mug and the shading
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to make it feel like anybody
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who is having trouble tossing and turning.
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Your characters don't look like you,
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but they think like you.
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I think they're all self portraits.
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I think we're all making exclusively self portraits.
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One interesting component
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of all of these thought bubble cartoons
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is that they do incorporate your handwriting.
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I just always love seeing work
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that looks like it's done by human hand.
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I made a font out of my handwriting because-
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It's so much work.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Having the font of the handwriting made it easier
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to change every single word between drafts.
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I learned to make a font out of my handwriting
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by treating Google the way I often do,
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which is as if it's Ask Jeeves and I just typed in
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how do I make a font out of my own handwriting?
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I found this website, Calligraphr.
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What you do on this website
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is you can download a template,
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and the template has every letter in the alphabet
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and they are lightly on there,
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and you quite literally just draw over them
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in your own handwriting.
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Then all you have to do is upload the template
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back to Calligraphr,
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and it'll turn your handwriting into a font.
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Voila, you can write.
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[bright acoustic music]
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We have a fire hydrant who is just sitting on the sidewalk
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wondering do cars just hate me?
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There's a person walking by.
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There's a car who is a respectful distance away.
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This one comes right from therapy.
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Yeah?
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In OCD group therapy,
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we make fun of each other's obsessive thoughts,
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and it's a tactic that people use
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to make those thoughts have less power over each other,
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and so it helps you separate yourself from the thought,
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and all of a sudden this thing that felt overwhelming
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gets to be something that you can laugh at.
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That's just some therapy being paid for
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courtesy of The New Yorker that week.
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Tell me about the decision to frame the hydrant
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with a car and a person.
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Part of what's funny or heartbreaking,
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take your pick about this one,
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it's not the fire hydrant is completely alone,
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but that just nearby is a car avoiding the fire hydrant
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or a person that's not even looking at the fire hydrant.
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So it's about feeling those feelings
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while you're in a crowd
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and you're surrounded by objects and people.
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I like that there's no villain in this cartoon, though.
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But it doesn't seem like anyone is intentionally
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trying to hurt the feelings of the hydrant.
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As it is in life,
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even the villains don't go around thinking I'm the villain.
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So here we have a lamp and a little side table.
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I'm definitely not trying to do a literal verbatim copy
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of the thing in front of me.
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I think that it has more life
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when you can see some of the mistakes,
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some of the hesitation.
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One thing that I am realizing as I draw this
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is that my passport is actually hidden there
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in that bottom drawer,
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and I have this fear
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that I leave for the airport without it,
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and so I'm going to invert that situation.
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And rather than me feeling upset
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about having left the passport,
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the passport is upset that I have left it.
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[bright acoustic music]
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So here we have black hole,
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and the black hole is thinking
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I've absorbed all matter within my gravitational pull.
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I should be happy...
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It must be liberating in some ways, though,
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to make a joke about something
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that you're not so steeped in knowledge of.
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I took the one thing I know about black holes,
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which is they suck things in,
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and the one thing I know about moving the goal post
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for what you consider to be a successful and happy life.
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So tell me a little bit about the backstory for this one,
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if you remember anything about what inspired it.
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I do remember what inspired this one,
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and it was selling my first cartoon to The New Yorker.
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I achieved this dream
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and then it didn't solve every other problem in my life.
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Of course, these are things
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that I have worked through in therapy
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and learning to laugh at these thoughts
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has been a way of managing them
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that has been really helpful to me.
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I'm glad this one sold.
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You know what, though?
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I'm at a place where I love making these cartoons so much
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that it's no longer for me
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about whether or not they sell or are published.
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I also just love the medium so much
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that I've learned to stop marking success by
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is this one that was published in The New Yorker
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and started to market more by is this one that I'm proud of.
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[bright acoustic music]
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You don't always need to approach the blank canvas
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with your complete premise already in mind.
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You can let the drawing take you
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to weird and wonderful places.
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I can't, for the life of me,
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tell you why this fish is skateboarding
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or what this thing could possibly be if not a pit,
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but when I do find out the answers to these questions,
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I'll have some new cartoons.
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Sometimes I just don't even worry
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about any of it making sense,
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securing the knowledge that drawing
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is the most fun thing in the world,
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and eventually it might lead me toward an idea,
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or it might lead me to a dead end,
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but ultimately I'm gonna have a lot of fun in the process.
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[bright acoustic music]