This is a cartoon show. By a cartoonist who has been rejected by the New Yorker 78 times (and counting). 

But! This cartoonist has also once made negative $50 when her cartoon Abandonment Issues was published by Narrative Magazine. According to her cartoon sensei, Asher Perlman (of the New Yorker), this feat makes her among the top 1 percent of cartoonists in terms of successfulness. 

So come experience the dark and twisted humor of someone who continues to cheerfully make and send her cartoons off to the New Yorker after 78 rejections – attempting to summit, as they (who?) call it, the “Mount Everest of cartoons.”

Come learn from the wisdom of “10 Budget-Friendly Ways to Spruce Up Your Despair” (2023) and “Secret to Success” (2022). 

Perhaps you will be inspired to purchase one of the cartoons. Or perhaps you will be moved to write a personal letter of rejection to the cartoonist, who clearly gets off on these things. What’ll it be? 

Artist Bio: Temo (b. 1985, Dalian, China) is a published cartoonist, artist, and psychotherapist working in Chicago. A self-described “bumble bee” who moves freely across many artistic mediums and styles, Temo’s diverse body of work is united in the artist’s capacity to find the elephant in the room, dance with it, and capture its essence so vividly that everyone else sees it, too. 

Temo was a less-than-mediocre Economics graduate of the University of Chicago and a quite good Counseling Psychology graduate of Northwestern University. She received foundational training in classical Western and Chinese art from her mother, a noted Chinese Calligrapher and fine artist. But it was her improv training from iO, the Annoyance, and the Second City that finally taught her, on the eve of her 30s, how to play, create, and be an artist on her own terms.