When asked about his creative process, Will told Bored Panda: “The only real structure I have in my life is The New Yorker’s submission schedule, so my week is usually built around that. I spend most of the week pouring a stream of consciousness all over a Moleskine in the hope that there will be 8-10 decent ideas in there by the time submission day comes around. Then I draw those ideas up and send them off!”
“It was quite a well-oiled ship up until the point where I started working on my graphic novel. Now I look like one of those ‘poor unfortunate souls’ from the Little Mermaid, an untethered ghoul swirling around with no sense of direction or self,” Will says.
“Oh, absolutely!” the artist replies when asked if he ever faces creative block. “I find myself staring in the mirror telling my reflection that he’s a talentless, unfunny worm surprisingly often! I’ve come to realize, though, that my version of 'hard work' is literally sitting down in front of a blank piece of paper for as long as I can. If I can just put the hours in, then things usually start to appear on the page. That said, there have been times when I’ve almost had to chain myself to the drawing board until it gives in to my demands. My demands being: one pigeon cartoon, please.”
McPhail says he has many inspirations for his work: “In the New Yorker world, if I really want to see how this job is done, I often end up searching out the work of Liana Finck, Zach Kanin, Emily Flake, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Jason Adam Katzenstein, Maddie Dai, all amazing cartoonists. But I also get a lot of inspiration from areas outside the cartoon world. Comics like Kate Berlant, Jacquelin Novak, and John Early are true forces of nature, and watching/listening to them always puts me in the right frame of mind to work.”
“Despite what I said earlier about having to chain myself to the drawing board… I honestly love my work. I genuinely love doing the work of it. The part where it’s like 9:30 pm, I’ve got a gin and tonic, I’ve got my headphones on, and I’m just quietly drawing away, I love it so much,” Will shares.
As for future goals, he told us: “All I’m ever really hoping for is that the people who see my cartoons and read my books will say: ‘Yep, he can keep doing that’. Because that means I get to do the work part again.” Also, the talented creator is set to have a cartoon collection book coming out in autumn.
