Episode
DMA #47: Naked Kickstarters & Bypassing the Print-pocalypse with American Bystander's Michael Gerber
- Published
- May 25, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4232
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Summary
“You cannot write a line of code that replaces the invisible labour, the thousands of terrible rough sketches, and the deeply human derangement required to make a truly great cartoon.” If you try to launch a print humor magazine in the 21st century, most financial advisors will tell you to just set your money on fire instead; it’s faster, it requires less paperwork, and it keeps you warmer in the winter. We live in the era of the digital churn. We live in an ecosystem where corporate media conglomerates are continuously gutting their editorial staff, pivoting to video, pivoting away from video, pivoting to AI slop, and generally treating the written word and the drawn cartoon as disposable ephemera. The conventional wisdom is that print is dead… But if you’ve been reading this newsletter for more than five minutes, you know I am obsessed with the messy, unglamorous back-end of making a living as an artist. I love pulling back the curtain on the creatives who look at the “churn,” laugh, and figure out how to keep the lights on without selling their souls to the algorithm. This week on Draw Me Anything , I brought in a guy who looked at a sinking ship and decided to build his own lifeboat. I was thrilled to host the brilliant Michael Gerber . Michael is the publisher, editor, and mastermind behind The American Bystander , a publication that Newsweek literally called “the last great humor magazine.” During the stream, we dug into exactly how you resurrect a print humor magazine in the 21st century without setting mountains of corporate cash on fire. It is a story of grit, absurd luck, and a publishing model that bypasses the corporate overlords entirely. But before we get to the Chinese oligarchs and the naked Kickstarter launch, we have to go back to a very small room in…