30 Cheeky Illustrations By Cartoonist Will McPhail

Will McPhail is a cartoonist working for The New Yorker, a world-famous American magazine started all the way back in 1925. Believe it or not, just a decade ago Will was a zoology student doodling his lecturers instead of studying and even though he graduated, he decided to radically change his career path and pursued a cartoonist’s career.

The artist spent his days in various coffee shops and libraries around Edinburgh, analyzing and illustrating peoples’ behavior before eventually landing a job at The New Yorker. Nowadays he submits 8 to 10 fresh ideas for the magazine every week. “The best I can do is to find an area that I want to do a cartoon on and accept the stage – then hope that my sense of humor moonwalks on to that stage,” said Will in an interview with BBC.

“Your sense of humor is accumulated throughout your whole life, up to the point when your pencil touches paper; you’ve just got to hope it shows up,” said the artist. “The reason why I’m decent at drawing cartoons is because I wasn’t very attractive in high school, so I developed a sense of humor as a deflection from that.”

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Image source: Will McPhail

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Image source: Will McPhail

Even though The New Yorker is based in, well, New York, Will chose to stay in Scotland. The artist says the country has a draw on him and creative people in general. “It’s my job to capture all different walks of life, the idiosyncrasies of life, and Edinburgh and Scotland have got a plethora of different classes and niches of people,” said Will. “There’s all sorts of fascinating social avenues you can go down and find people from all backgrounds. It’s super inspirational when it comes to coming up with ideas.”

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Image source: Will McPhail

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Image source: Will McPhail

The artist mentioned that he was pressured into choosing a “realistic” career path since he was young but eventually realized he didn’t need permission to be creative. Nowadays Will encourages others to follow their dream careers too: “Education is a good thing – but I think a lot of the time, people feel like they need some sort of academic permission to be creative, and you don’t, you can just do it.”

See more of Will’s creative comics in the gallery below!