Cover Image: The Best of the Rejection Collection

The Best of the Rejection Collection

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Member Reviews

This graphic novel was hilarious and well-drawn, definitely worth the money and the hype, and I hope will be successful!

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I an unable to review this title, as it was archived before I had a chance to download and read it. This feedback is only to stop this title from adversely affecting my netgalley feedback rate. If in the future I have the opportunity to read this title, I will post a proper review here.

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I love unique books like this. It was a great read. I laughed so hard I had to put the book down. Highly recommend.

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I like such type of different books.
Some of these cartoons are remarkable, some are remarkably bad. Some make you gasp and ask "Did they really just go there?" Like an excellent grade B movie these rejected cartoons are a wonderful guilty pleasure.

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Fun stuff. Can’t say that I finished the book. There is so much here to be processed. The sameness of the questions asked of the cartoonist were sometimes revealing and sometimes annoying. Well worthwhile as a coffee table book though.

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I don’t think I’ve laughed this hard in a while and I absolutely need to read this again! I can’t wait for there to be enough rejections for a third edition!

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Ok, here's the thing: I've never been a fan of The New Yorker's cartoons. So why did I request the DRC? I don't know, honestly. It might've been curiosity about what could be so bad as to warrant a rejection - just what is too weird for TNY? It was not the best thinking on my part. At any rate...
If you're a fan of The New Yorker's cartoons, I'm sure you'll enjoy this collection. While it's obviously not the best of the best (these were rejected, after all), they all retain the tone and spirit of TNY's usual fare, and I think fans will like this book. Having said that...
I personally have never understood the attraction of The New Yorker cartoons. I find them bland, maybe worth a chuckle, never a guffaw. This collection is no exception. I did find a few funny, there's always a few that hit, but I also found casual racism and misogyny, and more references to bestiality than I would've expected (I'm guessing those are among the reasons these were rejected). I promise, I did try to like it, but I just couldn't. Still, my dislike doesn't change the fact that for the people who like TNY cartoons, this offering will be a hit, and the collection, for what it is, is a good one.

#TheBestoftheRejectionCollection #NetGalley

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Some of these cartoons are remarkable, some are remarkably bad. Some make you gasp and ask "Did they really just go there?" Like an excellent grade B movie these rejected cartoons are a wonderful guilty pleasure.

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The Best of the Rejection Collection is precisely as stated on the cover - a well curated collection of worthy New Yorker cartoons which didn't make the cut for one reason or another. Released 10th May 2022 by Workman Publishing, it's 384 pages and is available in paperback and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

This is a collection of artists' works along with a short Q&A full of witty answers from each of them. Questions are the same for all contributors with questions ranging from "Where do you get your ideas" to "Have you mooned or been mooned more often in your life?", "What would make a terrible pizza topping?" (some really funny and outré answers), and "What’s the funniest thing that you witnessed, overheard, or came up with that you couldn’t figure out how to use in a cartoon?"

The following pages for each artist contains facsimiles of some of their rejected works.

The cartoons are funny, irreverent (some very much so), NSFW, or too direct and include things like a grandson berating his grandfather for the lack of color film from Auschwitz, Jesus hanging ten upside down (sans surfboard) on a monster wave, and a surprising number of inappropriate bestiality implications (which I freely admit made me giggle/snort for the most part).

Four stars. This would make a good selection for public library acquisition as well as for fans of the New Yorker type of sophisticated humor. I confess to not being up-to-date on selection criteria for public library acquisitions in the wake of recent challenges in the USA, but I don't think any of these should pose any real problems, even in the current climate.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

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My thanks to NetGalley and Workman Publishing Company for an eARC copy of this book to read and review.

I get why they had the Q&A segments with each contributor, but after a while they got repetitive and I just wanted to get to the rejected comics.

Some made me chuckle, but I can see why they were rejected. Most were either too risque or just all out crude.

This might make a good conversational coffee table book or bathroom reader. It didn't do much for me, but if you or someone you know has a strange sense of humor, this one might work very well for you/them.

2, it was different, stars.

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3.5 stars. The cartoons themselves were enjoyable enough. They were all rejected and I could usually tell why--some too obscure, some too dirty, and some just not quite funny given the long odds of actually being one of few cartoons selected. I found the information about the creative process and artists interesting to an extent, but I got more than I needed and it became very repetitive as the book goes on. This would probably be appreciated most by readers who are cartoonists or journalists themselves or very interested in those topics.

Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review!

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The short of it is that this collection is fine. I thought it would just be a series of cartoons, but there's actually a two-page, simple questionnaire that each author fills in. It's not a bad idea, and in a couple of cases it proved to be moderately funny, but it ends up being extremely repetitive. The basic humor of many of the (overwhelmingly male) cartoonist doesn't really give us much.

In the end, aside from a couple of actually original and interesting authors, the feeling was mostly "Yeah, I totally understand why this was rejected." That's not good.

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Intriguing idea to publish cartoons that didn't quite make the cut and discuss where they went off the rails.

While interesting and mildly amusing, this book was too "inside baseball" and merely would appeal to folks wanting to sharpen their wits in similar veins.

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A good selection of gag comics. It's a great look at the creative process of artists and why some gags are publishable and others are not. As with any selection, there are hits and misses.

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Thank you to the author, Workman Publishing Group and NetGalley, for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This collection of cartoons that were rejected for publication is ordered by a short Q&A with the artist and then by a selection of the artist's cartoons. The Q&A are set questions put to each artist, and after the first dozen I was over it - too much posturing in an effort to be effortlessly funny, which comes off as belaboring the point and ultimately being anything but funny. The cartoons were a mixed bag - many were lewd, crude or otherwise offensive, and thus understandably not suitable for a broader audience. Didn't hinder me from chuckling, smiling and at times laughing hard.

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A good book to read casually. There is a Q&A for each cartoonist and it nicely showcases everyone's personality along with a few of their rejected cartoons.

I have a copy of the first edition and I am not sure if the 2nd edition offers much more.

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Well, there's a definite reason why these were rejected. I don't think I laughed once. Most of them didn't make any sense.

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Guess what - this is a collection of cartoons that had been submitted to The New Yorker and were rejected. Most were amusing, a few caused outright laughs and there were some that drew a blank. That's really not too different than my reactions to an issue of the magazine. However, the subject matter matters. As Difee explains in his introduction, The New Yorker demands a certain amount of decorum, or sometimes simply humor. For one reason or another these didn't make the cut.

Each cartoonist answers a short questionnaire. Some of the responses made me laugh, others not so much (but I don't think those people were trying, although I wouldn't put too much effort into a pie chart, either.) It's interesting to read the answers from your favorites and enjoy cartoons you wouldn't see otherwise.

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I enjoyed this collection very much. The illustrations were well done and the writing was witty. Thank you for the opportunity to read this ARC.

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Matthew Diffee either did some dumpster diving or the white collar equivalent to acquire 296 cartoons that were rejected from The New Yorker. As funny as some of the cartoons were, the real fun was the answers given to the series of questions Matthew Diffee posed and the little vignettes that were drawn. If you want to find out some weird facts about ,i>New Yorker cartoonists, this is the book for you!

Thanks Netgalley for the opportunity to read this title!

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