Now say hello to its close cousin, cartoon #5217

Puns are often a close-knit family.*

*Even now I’m wrestling down the urge to draw a cartoon of a family squeezed on the same couch, knitting.

You’ll note two things about this cartoon: the parakeets don’t look like parakeets, and the joke is a pun. This lets you know that I don’t always research what I draw, and when I warn against the hazards of drawing puns, I’m preaching, not practicing (though in my defense, this pun hasn’t been drawn all that often.)

Yesterday I warned against the dangers of writing pun cartoons that have likely been done before. I mentioned Carbon Dating in passing, but here’s the proof. This one is carbon-dated at five years.

Note for tyro cartoonists: Beware the pun. If you strive to write cartoons with a fair chance of being unique, stay away from word play. I drew this five years ago, and I’d be surprised if anti-bacterial soap opera hasn’t appeared a few hundred times since then in submission envelopes. 

I generally love puns. They’re easy to write. They’re goofy. Occasionally sublime. But not everyone likes them. And by everyone I mean editors.* Some buyers prefer the traditional format of drawing and caption, or drawing alone.  I never sold to certain magazines until I submitted the standard drawing/caption.

Speaking for myself, writing too many puns can make you lazy. Puns are often obvious, a slap in the face for any cartoon. And puns are always time-stamped. You get one chance to bring it to life — to retain the element of surprise — and you have to be first. Was Cereal Killer ever funny? Maybe. If you were the first one to write it, draw it, sell it. But it reached its expiration date a few seconds after it was published.**

Once nobrowcartoons.com is online, you’ll discover that I’m a hypocrite. My inventory will be choked with pun cartoons. I still like them. I won’t run from my past. But unless I get an idea that’s bolt-from-the-blue brilliant, I’ll do my best not to write more of them.

And the world weeps in gratitude.

* But here’s the exception. If you’re submitting to trade magazines, puns will always be popular. The buzz words and jargon that inform any field are beloved. I draw a lot of science cartoons, and many of them are puns. The expiration date is stamped on each one, however; you probably won’t be the first person to pun on Carbon Dating. Your best bet is to pun on the terms that are newly coined, or more rarified.

**Which isn’t to say that you couldn’t write a funny cartoon with the Cereal Killer idea. Cartooning is built on the reefs of older jokes. It’s not enough to point them out. You have to add a new layer.

I figure a sentence of 8-12 years should do the trick.

For those keeping score, I’m up to 214 cartoons. To all of you cartoonists with only 213 cartoons, I laugh haughtily. The above is an early greeting card that swept the nation; as in under the rug. 

Since I’m writing this on my laptop, the internet comes to mind. Mike Lynch reports that the webcomic Goats will be published by an imprint of Random House. I could create a new strip online, wave flags for several years, and work to get it noticed. I could create a new strip offline and see if a syndicate is interested. Either way it’s flag waving.  Freelancers are forever leading their parades of one,  spinning flags and batons overhead in hopes of being noticed.

And then there’s Spot the Frog. Four and half years of strips. What to do with them? As I’ve mentioned, I might make the third year available in a book and sell it from the trunk of my car and my website.  But I’m a fan of boingboing, spearheaded by Cory Doctorow who celebrates the Creative Commons movement and the general notion that information is all the same, be it dry or creative, and to succeed online you need to go Zen and become online. It’s not enough to show Spot strips on the internet, to sell hard copy book collections. Spot needs to be deconstructed. It needs to be reassembled to suit the way people use the internet and what they find there.

I’d make Spot available as an e-book, for free download, allowing users to do what they like with the strips, as long as it’s not for profit.  And the e-book would be a true e-book, not a pdf, a fixed-margin format unto itself, but one that could easily be reformatted to fit any electronic reader. If it’s better to read the Spot strips in a column, rather than a row, depending on your screen or inclination, you can do it. If you want to send a Spot strip to a friend, or post on your site, you don’t need to screen capture the pdf, or scan a page from the book. The e-book already offers the gif.

The idea is to make the book as internet/reader friendly as possible.  Would it lead to people buying other work from me? No idea.  Is it the old “Give it away for exposure” idea dressed in shiny futuristic clothes? Maybe. But the strips are finished. They’re either cold cinders, or tinder for new fires.  Nothing to lose by striking a spark.

For cartoons that don’t involve frogs, I’m trying the Ted Goff/Mark Anderson approach, of storing cartoons online, in an easily searchable (and purchasable) database.  It’s a gamble, because I’m not Ted Goff nor Mark Anderson, and my cartoons might have the appeal of old apples (the newest is five years old) but I’ll have my storefront up and running in August at nobrowcartoons.com.

With luck I’ll find a few fans of cider. 

All of you creative types already know about this, and likely have deals with your own vineyards or orchards.  Rick Stromoski has been bottling the stuff for years. But if you’re a consumer of art, you may have wondered where an artist’s creativity — the fabled creative juice —  springs from. Wonder no more.  [A Fuse #8 Production]