Cartoons

Cartoons

I love cartoons, and always have. Even though a lot of my friends said they did, I may be the only male in Western Civilization who actually bought Playboy magazine for the cartoons. It’s the only reason I miss The Saturday Evening Post. In the morning paper, Crankshaft is particularly well drawn, and Willie ‘n Ethel are consistently funny. I loved Calvin & Hobbs, but that may have been because I actually used to be Calvin when I was a kid, although nobody ever thought I was particularly cute or funny.

They look simple, but there is a real art to drawing cartoons. Like a good joke, a cartoon is a very short story complete with a scene, a set-up and a punch line. Drawing the joke on paper is a challenge to the skills of summation: Everything in the drawing must contribute to the tiny story being told, and nothing should detract from it. The layout of the cartoon is always a challenge, and the drawing itself is a blend of the realistic with symbolic images. I’m proud of the job I did on most of them. The “no news” cartoon is my favorite.

Cartoons are supposed to be humorous. A couple of my hunting cartoons are clever (at least I think so) but for the most part they’re not hugely funny—at best, they’re in the “wry smile” rather than “laugh-out-loud” category. Sorry. They would all do better with a laugh track in the background.

When I was trying to sell my cartoons, I’d send off a portfolio to a magazine and always turn the fourth one upside down. When the portfolio came back with the inevitable rejection note, the fourth cartoon was (almost always) still upside down. To me, that indicated that nobody at the other end had gone through my offerings with enough interest to even turn that one right-side-up.

I finally gave up. The end came when Fly Fishing Magazine returned a packet of fishing cartoons that I had sent to them. Their note said, in so many words, that although they had never used cartoons in the past, they liked my argument that they would work well in their format, and as a result, they had contacted a cartoonist to do a few for them. I wrote them a note that told them where they could stuff their idea, but never sent it. Instead, I tore up the remaining business cards I had that announced me as a cartoonist.

I illustrated a few stories with cartoon images, and, in one instance, created a design for a seagoing sweatshirt, and have included those illustrations in the mix. You might recognize my man Cosgrove in a few of them.