Each week, Bob Mankoff, The New Yorker’s cartoon editor, welcomes a parade of offbeat illustrators into his office for an open pitch meeting. Mankoff flips through hundreds of pages of panels by cartooning veterans and newcomers alike; most are rejected after a quick glance. Very Semi-Serious offers an entertaining, behind-the-scenes look at the process of how cartoons make it to print in the iconic magazine, with Mankoff as our genial guide. Longtime contributors like Roz Chast and George Booth reflect on their careers and their unique brands of humor, while young hopefuls like Liana Finck, a shy graphic novelist with an offbeat sensibility, share their New Yorker dreams. As Mankoff works to balance a commitment to the magazine’s old guard with a desire to represent new, more diverse voices, cartoons are dissected and presented with humor and heart, revealing how single-panel drawings successfully “make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.”  EM