"In the aughts, after growing disenchanted with his dream of becoming a Disney animator, he decided cartooning would be his lot in life. When he learned, in the wake of the Great Recession, that The New Yorker was the primary outlet still publishing cartoons, cracking the code of America's idiosyncratic intellectual stand-by became his mission. Until that point, The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Ren & Stimpy, and South Park had been his guiding lights ("all those '90s dudes")."
"Toro's first book of cartoons, And to Think We Started as a Book Club...(Andrews McMeel Publishing), is out this month. It collects his work for The New Yorker as well as a few cartoons published in Playboy, Yale Climate Connections, and elsewhere-a spread that indicates the range of his humor. His cartoons depict everyday quips between couples and friends at coffee shops as well as existential questions on the grandest scale: God, Jesus, the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse, et al."
Tom Toro did not grow up reading The New Yorker and did not read it in college. After abandoning his dream of becoming a Disney animator in the aughts, he turned to cartooning and identified The New Yorker as the key outlet for cartoons after the Great Recession. A blend of hubris and naivety helped him break into The New Yorker, where his work has appeared for the past 15 years. His first book collects cartoons from The New Yorker and other outlets and demonstrates a range from coffee-shop quips to grand existential and religious themes. Toro describes a good gag cartoon as introducing incongruity in the image, with the image posing a question that the caption answers in a surprising way.
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