Archive for 2007:
Meet Howard Inkley
I’ll be posting at a new New Yorker Magazine cartooning blog which is slated to start next month. I’ve been invited to be their first “Blog Captain” for the month of January.
Meanwhile I’ve located someone to pinch-hit for me here for the few weeks I’ll be blogging elsewhere:
Some time ago, I collaborated on a book with the excellent Charles Monagan, called “Poodles From Hell”. We had a third collaborator, one Howard Inkley, a prematurely deceased cartoonist who had met his death in a freak accident in a New Haven, Connecticut laundromat. Howard contacted me from the beyond in a series late-night visits and told me previously unknown facts about world history and revealing stories of the afterlife, including the fact that there were a lot of poodles in Hell, which furnished the title of our book. Once the book was finished, my communications with Howard suddenly ceased, in spite of my attempts to re-create the circumstances in which he had previously contacted me. I finally had to assume I would never hear from him again. Recently, however, I was unexpectedly visited again! I was sitting here at my computer late one night when my fingers began to move, seemingly on their own. They typed the following message, then stopped:
“Hello again. Sorry I haven’t communicated recently. Here (Though technically there is no here here) there is no time, so what may have seemed like a long stretch to you means nothing to me. (Or everything, depending on how you look at it). I’ve been following your blog with interest and am hoping you wouldn’t mind if I add my 2 cents-worth from time to time.”
This communication couldn’t have come at a better time. I had found my pinch-hitter.
So for the next few weeks, I’m leaving Howard in charge of “I Really Should Be Drawing”. He’ll be posting from time to time from the Afterlife. I never know what the guy is going to say, though, so I don’t really know what to expect. I just hope he doesn’t leave the place a mess like that panel of celebrity judges did a while back. I just got everything straightened up again.
See you back here in February
-Mick
The 12 Days (Or More) of Christmas
This means, for some of us, an unwanted vacation. No batch of funny pictures for a while. No weekly cycle of creation, submission, rejection or acceptance, (or checks in the mail).
Christmas is so cruel!
It’s during this time, surrounded by the constant reminders of the season, that Christmas ideas often come, too late for submission to the magazine, which requires a few weeks lead-time for seasonal cartoons, so these ideas become next year’s Christmas cartoon ideas and get buried in the idea-box for another 10 or 12 months. Ideas tend to lose their potency if they hang around that long, like vitamins or old men. By the time next Christmas comes around, last year’s jolly Santas have grown thin and listless, their beards long and shaggy. They start to smell bad. Take this guy, for example:
It’s just a damned shame we have to suffer through this Christmas thing every year. There’s nothing for it, I suppose, but to just give in and try to enjoy ourselves. Maybe I’ll go shopping or something.
(Only 21 shopping days left before the next art meeting!)
Oh, what the hell…
Merry Christmas to You All!
The Speaking Dead!
First a bunch from James Grasdal
(Who I suspect may be related to one of the judges, since he’s so well represented)
(A gardening maniac)
And a couple from Rusty Springfield
(Who usually writes music)
And finally, an actual photo from Ira Fader
(Death imitates Art!)
Thanks to All!
DEATH!
One favorite subject for cartoonists is our old pal, Death, the Final Jokester. We do our best to humiliate him. We endow him with human weaknesses and failings. We dress him up funny, mock him, and even turn the tables on occasion and attempt to kill him.
It’s our way of dealing with the guy, who, as we all know, in spite of everything, always gets the last laugh.
Eventually, when we tire of trying to get the best of Death, We draw cartoons about the afterlife, usually the familiar Heaven and Hell.
We get God in there, too, usually patterned after the “Big Guy in the Sky” image promoted by some religions, or thinly disguised as Zeus, borrowed from the ancient Greeks to avoid outright blasphemy.
Another approach to the subject of death is the gravestone gag, in which the caption appears within the drawing as an epitaph.
This gives me an idea.
That panel of celebrity judges I employed to evaluate entries in the recent reverse caption contest here are still hanging around. They’ve had nothing to do since then (Or even when the contest was happening, actually) and have been making a nuisance of themselves, lounging around in their underwear and complaining about everything between their many trips to my refrigerator.
I’m going to take a chance here and suggest another contest:
The
You Really Could Be Writing a Witty Epitaph
(Not for your own gravestone, necessarily, but for some other, presumably departed, soul.)
Contest
(Selected entries will end up on their own tombstones in a graveyard drawing in a future blog).
Send your epitaphs to mick@mickstevens.com
If nothing else, maybe it will get these people out of my hair so I can get some work done.
Who’s Idea Was This, Anyway?
When we sit at our drawing boards and computers trying to come up with ideas, occasionally one will pop into our mind seemingly from out of nowhere. The idea probably doesn’t come from that non-place, but possibly from some unconscious idea-mill in our brains (No doubt located in the vicinity of the previously discussed joke wheel) which processes all the visual images and small and large events experienced in our ordinary day-to-day lives: Snippets of conversation, what the dog did, out-of-body experiences, that asteroid that landed in the back yard the other day, etc., plus all the things seen, heard, or read on television, newspapers, magazines, and on the internet. They’re are all up there, waiting to be pulled out and examined for possible future cartoon use.
Part of the grist for the idea-mill is cartoons themselves, including all the cartoons we’ve seen and all the ones we’ve drawn ourselves. I’ve had to throw away a lot of good ideas (Or what seemed like good ideas at the time) because a small alarm went off in my brain (flashing lights, sirens, and bells) alerting me to a vague memory of having seen the joke before, possibly done by another artist, say, Chon Day, in a Saturday Evening Post cartoon in 1953.
Even the magazine can slip up. Sometime back in the 80s, I submitted an idea I’d sold previously. Not only did I forget, so did the magazine. They bought it again! Finally someone noticed and brought it to my attention. There was a suspicious look in the editor’s eye on that occasion. I had the impression that he thought I was trying to pull a fast one on the magazine, which would have been pretty stupid of me. It would have been a good way to terminate my budding career.
When we create, we have to be open to the unconscious part of our brains, where the mill operates, and let ideas flow, (On those lucky occasions when ideas feel like flowing). Afterwards, we can go back to our idea-boxes, notepads, or sketchbooks and decide what’s good, what’s bad, or what’s been done before.
Cartoonists often come up with the same ideas independently. I doubt there’s any conscious theft of ideas among us, but occasionally we can duplicate one another’s work by accident. We also sometimes see a cartoon published which is similar to an idea we’ve submitted and had turned down or one that we’ve have had published some time earlier. It makes you wonder if we’re all connected in some way to the same big idea-mill, located in our collective unconscious.
I believe I hear the mill grinding as I write this. I’d better get up there and see what’s going on. I’ll be right back…
Perhaps the idea mill needs an overhaul.
•
And Now The Moment…
The judges here at the
You Really Should Be Drawing Reverse Caption Contest,
after much hand-wringing, head-scratching, and shady inside deal-making, have reached a decision.
And the Winner is….
Michael Shaw!
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“The chicken or the egg?”
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Michael’s drawing was selected based on the following attributes:
• Nice God Drawing
• Interesting Chair Treatment
• Economy of Line
• EZ Cloud Treatment
(Which I know at least one of the Judges is contemplating stealing for use in his own future God cartoon)
The selection of Mr. Shaw’s drawing was also helped along considerably by the fact that it was the only one received. This in no way diminishes its value, however.
The Judges and the Kaption King wish to express our sincere gratitude.
Thankyou, Michael!
A Note
I’m Adding New 1st OK Stories and Self-Caricatures as They Arrive.
Recent New Arrivals Include Stories By Liza Donnelly and Peter Steiner.
Scroll Down to the 1st OK Stories Post to Read Them.
Thanks.
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King Kaption
Early magazine cartoons came in two basic forms: Sight gags, which had no caption, and cartoons which had speech balloons. Sometimes a title would be also be added. The speech balloons had long stems which would lead from the mouth of the speaker to the balloon, which contained the words spoken by that character. There were often many balloons, one or more from each of several characters speaking in the picture. After a while the balloons began to disappear from cartoons. The words in them, maybe having nowhere else to go, drifted down to the bottom of the panel. The multiple conversations began to disappear in favor of only one or two speakers. (It was hard to tell who was saying what without the balloons). Eventually, the second speaker was pretty much eliminated, too, leaving us with the now familiar solo speaker.
This was the case for many years, although some of us still did and still do wordless or titled cartoons and combinations of the two. Every once in a while the balloons show up again, too, but the captioned cartoon is pretty much the mainstay.
At one time the drawing and the caption were done by separate people. There were gag-writers everywhere, sending their stuff out to standup comics, editors, and cartoonists. That began to change, probably in the 60s and 70s. When I started, I fell in with a bunch of artists who, like myself, all wrote our own stuff.
A few years later, along came the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. As we all know it became spectacularly successful. Who knew there were all those frustrated gag-writers out there? In the process it also had a beneficial effect on cartooning in general, bringing more attention to our work and allowing readers to participate in the creative process, while occasionally sparing the cartoonists the arduous task of coming up with captions of their own.
It occurred to me that though it’s fun to write captions for existing drawings, it might be also fun to do it the other way around. I asked myself, “Shouldn’t everyone also have a chance to experience the agony and the ecstasy of drawing a cartoon?” My answer to myself was a resounding “Yes!” That’s why I’m introducing a new feature on the blog:
The
You Really Should Be Drawing
Reverse Caption Contest
…An invitation for readers, cartoonists, and cartoonist wannabes to come up with a drawing to match a specific caption.
The winners get absolutely nothing in return for their labors except to see the results published here.
(This blog has very shallow pockets).
Send your scanned drawings
8 1/2” X 11”
200 dpi
jpeg format
to:
mick@mickstevens.com
(Or, if you can’t do it that way, let me know and I’ll send you my mailing address.)
Don’t forget to sign your work.
Pencils ready?
Begin.
(Click on This Image to Make it Bigger and More Readable)
From My Recipe File…
The other day while I was drawing up ideas, I took a break and went into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. While I was waiting for the coffee-maker to finish it’s work, I happened to notice an old recipe file there on the counter and began to thumb through it. Here are some of the things I found:
Roz Chast Chicken
A feast for the eye!
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Bread a la Ziegler
Take two slices bread, finding two that match in shape and size as closely as possible. Insert the two slices of bread in an old fifties-style chrome toaster and push down the black lever on the side. Wait for the bread to reappear, popping up from the toaster in a few minutes. In many cases the bread will actually fly up into the air. This is completely normal. The bread should be hot and lightly crosshatched. Very black bread, especially if accompanied by smoke and or flames, is overdone and must be rejected or scraped with a table-knife until it achieves a semblance of proper appearance. Care must be taken when extracting the bread from the toaster. Never use a fork or other metal instrument to free a stuck piece of bread. Doing so will likely result in small, jagged and potentially dangerous lightning bolts shooting out of the toaster. Once your bread is free, place it on a plate and add butter, jam or jelly, or any other substance that occurs to you at the moment. Use your imagination!
Bon Apetit!
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Beasties Barsotti
Take a small animal and place it on a silver platter under a domed lid. Add a few flies or other insects circling over the lid. Have it served by a lion waiter to a diner who is also a lion who is sitting at a table with a pristine white table-cloth. One of the lions will invariably say something hilarious!
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Pasta Sam Grosso
Open a can of worms.
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Mankoff KaBob
This recipe requires the weekly delivery of several tons of food items to your kitchen door, which have been produced by small farmers across the country. You must sort through all the various pieces of fruit, vegetables, meat, and unidentifiable objects and carefully pick out only the handful suitable for use in your KaBob. Care must be taken to reject any that don’t appear to be fresh and appetizing or those which have a bad odor. Once you’ve made your initial selections, it’s usually a good idea to consult with another chef or two to further finalize your choices. Once that’s done, you should end up with between 15 and 20 usable items. Insert each carefully on a clean skewer and brush lightly with printer’s ink. Publish over an open flame and place on a newsstand.
Serves about 1 million.
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