Navied Mahdavian

I'm really happy that we were able to, that you were able to inject into the conversation.

What was it?

BARF and vibrators.

There's so many good things.

When I found out my grandmother, my last living grandparent, was dying, my first thought was, I need to draw her hands.

I'm a visual artist, a cartoonist for The New Yorker and comics writer, so drawing is how I understand much of the world.

For a long time, my cartoons had been impersonal.

Commentary on the world around me, sure, but not really about me.

The closest my personal life got to influencing my cartoons were cartoons I lifted from things my friends and family had said around me.

It was only after my daughter Elika was born that my personal life began to creep into my cartoons more.

Every artist will tell you that their medium is the highest art form.

But they're wrong, because cartooning is in fact the highest art form.

Cartoons can say so much with so little.

With just a few lines, you can express happiness, smugness and sadness.

This is called face pareidolia.

It's the phenomenon where we see faces in inanimate objects.

We see ourselves in these cartoonish faces.

They're blank canvases onto which we project ourselves.

We see faces everywhere, ourselves in everything.

It's evolutionary, a survival technique.