Columnist Scott Dickensheets: New Yorker cartoonist? I could do that!

Scott Dickensheets

Friday, Jan. 9, 1998 | 9:31 a.m.

THAT'S IT, I want Jack Ziegler's life. Not the whole package, of course; he can keep his wife, the lovely and undoubtedly talented Kelli, a singer -- I'm a reasonable man, after all, and I already have a perfectly good wife of my own.

No, I just want those parts of his life that have to do with being a New Yorker cartoonist. Aside from gatherer of discarded bikinis at the Playboy mansion, can there be a better job? I can already picture myself hunched over the drawing table spinning doodles into gold, my back to the big window in which is framed the valley's mountainous western edge, copies of my own cartoon books resting on a nearby bookshelf.

For now, though, until my takeover is complete, the drawing table, golden doodles, big window and cartoon books belong to Ziegler, who moved to Las Vegas in November. A tall, fiftyish man, he is witty, charming and talented, qualities that will serve him not a whit in Las Vegas but are essential to success at the New Yorker.

He's been a New Yorker cartoonist -- unlike some, he doesn't doll up his trade by calling himself "an artist" -- since 1973, when, after a year of rejections, he sold the 563rd cartoon he'd ever drawn to the magazine. "It didn't become a regular gig right away," he said, sitting in the drawing room of his apartment, "but it gave me the confidence to go on."

"New Yorker cartoonist" and "Las Vegas" aren't ideas that seem immediately compatible -- one is urbane, intelligent, whimsical; the other has Siegfried and Roy. You think of a New Yorker cartoonist as a suave urban figure haunting the Big Apple with a sketch pad. You are, of course, overthinking things.

"Kelli is a singer, so this is a good place for her," Ziegler said. "And I can do what I do anywhere." Have paper and flat surface, will travel. And travel they have: The two were drawn from Connecticut to Las Vegas by the same lure that attracts so many new residents: a documentary on Cirque du Soleil.

"We were watching TV one Sunday morning last spring," said Ziegler, who had married Kelli not long before during a trip to Las Vegas. "We were watching a documentary on Cirque du Soleil, and I said, 'I wouldn't mind seeing that again. Why don't we move to Las Vegas?' "

None of the foregoing shakes my conviction that I would be a fine caretaker of the Ziegler franchise; I can do whimsical -- my entire life is a testament to that. And simply replace "witty," "charming" and "talented" with "trite," "klutzy" and "self-deluded," and, well, we're not so different!

OK, I am a little worried about the work regimen. "I try to have 12 ideas a week, which I fax to New York on Monday nights," he says. (As of Wednesday, he's penned -- although not sold -- 15,629 drawings.) Now, readers with a carefully indexed backlog of my work know I haven't had 12 workable ideas in the entire 28-installment run of this column. Still, between my kids, dogs and the many hilarious variations on the stranded-on-a-desert-island theme, I think I can make it work.

All right, I'm perhaps even more worried by the fact that my only artistic talent lies in jotting squiggly, huge-headed, genderless characters on restaurant place mats -- whereas Ziegler's style is nimble, unforced -- but I'm not daunted.

So, Mr. Ziegler, it'll be ink pens at dawn -- now draw!