Each week for the past 10 years, Paul Karasik completes and sends about 10 cartoons to The New Yorker magazine. For those at home doing the math, that’s around 5,000 cartoons, give or take.

Paul Karasik takes cartoons seriously. Take a gag cartoon from the vault of Ernie Bushmiller’s much-loved Nancy strip, for instance. The three-panel cartoon is not so much read by Mr. Karasik as absorbed.