Cartoon Stories: Riffing

Cartoon Stories

Riffing

So, when you run out of early ideas (one of which I’ll introduce in next’s weeks Stories, mapping out the peripatetic plot of my first cartoon saga, The Dynamo Brothers), you start keeping funny thoughts jotted in a notebook, or planning to jot them and forgetting what they were. Out of whimsy comes this final group from 2017.

Be Leary. The theme is topical, as you may suspect. We used to have more faith in humanity, before we learned just how broadly our world is populated with carts drawn by asses. The punchline is a quote from Shakespeare’s King Lear, spoken by the fool.

Everyone’s Got a Shtick. Just a pun, but an example of how you could never describe a lot of ideas and have them seem funny, while a sketched out one puts the little joke across.

Skeletons in the Attic. One example of how cartooning teaches you skills you’d never develop as a painter, working from big concepts. I never had the occasion to sketch a microphone before…no doubt a creative person’s Google search history is filled with all sorts of non-sequiturs. In the state of Ohio, we have an old mystery, the Cleveland Torso Killer of the 1930s. I think most would say, objectively speaking, that the term “torso killer” is a little chuckle-worthy.

Year End Best. Here again, a drawing challenge. If we had a kudos, embodied in the form of a beast, what might it look like? I shaped it roughly as the United States, and gave it a fairyland handler. The kind of thing that only happens in cartoons.

Riffing

See The Cartoon House

The Dynamo Brothers

(2020, Stephanie Foster)