John Cuneo has over 50,000 followers on Instagram. Not mind-blowing numbers if you're a celebrity-influencer—Gwyneth Paltrow has 8.3 million followers, Cristiano Ronaldo has 590 million—but "pretty good for a pervy cartoonist up in the woods in Woodstock," he says. His tagline: "Drawings mostly. Dark thoughts lightly rendered."
How he got so many followers is a mystery to the illustrator, whose work has appeared in all the magazines that matter over the past three decades, including on the cover of the New Yorker. "I don't know how I stumbled into 54,000 followers," says Cuneo. "I'm guessing one or more prominent folks who like my work like Neil Gaiman or Ron Perlman gave it a serious bump a while back."
Instagram is a near-perfect vehicle for the illustrator's noncommissioned work. Cuneo is compulsive about drawing. "I'm the guy who walks around with a sketchpad or a card in his pocket in case he needs to draw something. I draw all the time," he says, and notes of Instagram: "It's a place to put all this stuff." He posts almost every day, skewering male fantasies, domestic life, and the political scene with sketches that feature more penises than a locker room. "I get away with an alarming amount of genitalia for some reason," Cuneo says. But all that libidinous energy is a double-edged pen. "I've drawn myself into a corner," he says. "If I do a normal drawing, people ask, "Where's the penis?'"
Some of his most scabrous depictions are of the 45th US president, whom Cuneo delights in sending up. Two scatalogically themed sketched are worth searching out on his IG feed: Bill Barr wiping Trump's ass with the Constitution and Trump using top secret documents similarly.
There are plenty of "normal drawings," of course—Cuneo illustrates an adorable column on dogs each month for Garden & Gun—like the sketch on this month's cover. It certainly hits an anxious nerve for those in the creative/content-generating realm who worry about being replaced by AI. Cueno is not optimistic about the future of his profession. "At first, I was thinking of it as a change in the industry like digital art," he says. "I wasn't thinking of it as the existential threat it really is. It's the end of illustration. I find myself putting blinders on and just focusing on my sketchbook."
(This is the second work by Cuneo to be featured on the cover of Chronogram. The first, Amuse-bouche, was published in May 2018 and depicted a woman planting a flower while all the creatures of the woods emerged to devour it. An apt visual metaphor for upstate gardening.)
Cuneo is an old school illustrator: No digital tools, just pen and ink and watercolor. And for Cuneo, craft is essential to what he does, how he builds a drawing from a single line. "For people who draw with ink, artists who work in contour, the line is paramount," he says. "The trick is to control it while taking the line for a walk. There's a weird yin-yang between control and chaos."
Every new drawing is a world-building exercise. "While there is a predetermined agenda for some drawings (like the one you're using for the cover), many others simply evolve from a figure on a page, and where elements are added in that weird, half deliberate/half free-associative way, so that maybe an actual scenario or concept presents itself," Cuneo says. "Often, it's a self-indulgent mess, but like Linda Barry said: 'Sometimes you just have to make things for no reason.'"
And making things for no reason is what human beings do. Artificial intelligence may replace us, but they can't stop us from making things for no reason, which they'll never do. Unless they kill us all, of course.
