Air Mail has stopped buying cartoons, closing a market that had become a regular outlet for single-panel cartoonists since the digital weekly launched in 2019.

Contributors learned of the decision in an email from cartoon editor Bob Mankoff on September 8. According to Mankoff’s message, the decision came without advance warning. Cartoonists had continued sending their latest batches because the editorial team had not been told that Air Mail was about to stop buying them.

Mankoff noted that no cartoons had appeared in the previous two issues — something that, in retrospect, suggested a change was coming. He also told contributors that outstanding bills would be followed up and that artists would be paid in full for work already purchased.

More than 1,700 cartoons

More than 1,700 cartoons appeared in Air Mail during the publication’s seven-year history, according to Mankoff’s message to contributors.

Founded by former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and journalist Alessandra Stanley, Air Mail launched in 2019 and made cartoons a regular part of its mix of reporting, commentary and cultural coverage.

Michael Maslin, writing on Inkspill after the decision became known, recalled Air Mail’s arrival as a welcome new market for cartoonists. Over the following years, work by a wide range of established and emerging artists appeared in the publication.

A market disappears, not the publication

News of the decision quickly circulated among cartoonists. Jason Chatfield, one of the artists who had contributed to Air Mail, wrote about receiving Mankoff’s email and placed the loss of the market alongside the broader difficulties cartoonists face in finding publications that regularly buy single-panel work.

There is an important distinction. Air Mail has not closed. The publication continues, and its existing cartoon archive remains available online. What has ended is its role as a regular buyer of new cartoons.

For cartoonists who submitted work to Air Mail, that means one fewer place to sell it. The decision removes a paying market that had been open to cartoonists since the publication’s first year.

The archive remains

Air Mail’s online cartoon archive is still accessible, preserving the cartoons published during those seven years and offering a record of the many artists whose work appeared there.

The publication that arrived in 2019 as a new place for cartoonists to submit and sell their work is still publishing. That particular market, however, has come to an end.