Advice Session

Police sketch of your humble narrator

The other day a budding cartoonist asked me how I got my work to “look professional.” He mainly wanted to know what pens and paper I used. I told him it was less about materials and more about the process. I’m aware of the fact that giving advice at the age of 24 is a bit presumptuous. But dude asked, and I figure y’all might be interested, too.

5) Don’t worry about what materials you use. Everything you put on the page emanates from the same place: your brain. That remains the case whether you’re using a Winsor & Newton brush or a tongue depressor covered with pigeon excrement. Schroeder played a toy piano and he was still a badass piano player. But eventually you will discover your favorite artists and want to copy their style. Experiment with whatever they use to achieve their “look.” For example, I owe my whole setup to reading about Bill Watterson, Robert Crumb, Mort Drucker and others when I was a kid.

4) Learn how to self-edit. If you’re drawing a scene, keep asking yourself whether all the important visual elements are clear and distinguishable. If you’re drawing a comic strip, ask yourself whether or not the continuity between the panels makes sense in terms of your art and your dialogue. Ask yourself if your lettering is legible and your layout flows logically from one panel to the next. Self-criticism is also a good shield against negative reactions from other people. If you achieve satisfaction from finally meeting your own very high standards, nothing anybody else says will matter to you. There are few things more irritating than that dude who draws one lousy picture and then feels entitled to worship and adulation.

3) Buy a T-square and a triangle. If you are laying out panels, these will help you get straight vertical and horizontal lines. The grid system is your friend.

2) Stake out a creative space. Have a dedicated place where you go and work. This could be your kitchen table, or the cafe/bar down the street, or in your white panel van parked next to the playground. Having that space will condition you to be more productive more often.

1) Draw every day. At the most fundamental level, drawing is all about constructing shapes and resolving spatial relationships between them. You will never know the joy of constructing shapes and resolving spatial relationships between them unless you practice and experiment with different techniques. For example, I find it helpful to carry my sketchbook in my man-bag at all times. Plus it’s a great party trick.

Follow these rules, you’ll have mad bread to break up.

Favorite Cartoons of the Year

If you were a job-seeker, an Afghan civilian or an Obama voter, the year kinda sucked for you, dinnit? But if you were a cartoonist — that is to say, if you spent the year baking delicious and buttery loaves of humor from the dough of human misery — the year was simply delightful. Yes, ladies n gremlins, as we enter a new decade, one promising fulfillment of all those broken promises of yesteryear along with dreams anew, it is incumbent upon us to reflect upon blah blah blah blah etc etc etc etc.

OK, with all that out of the way, here are my favorite cartoons from the past year, presented in order of publication.

Holiday Safety Tips, Part 1 – Taking Presents From Strangers

Badthink

The American Prospect’s critique of Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone piece reminds me of the sort of thing Mattel’s PR team might put out the day after The New York Times reveals that Barbie dolls are made with the bones of aborted Malaysian sweatshop fetuses. “Our fetal recycling program did not actually start until 1993.” “At no time did our Vice President of Development visit the fetus factories personally.” Nitpicking the facts that surround an issue without actually engaging the issue itself is a well-worn tactic of propaganda outfits. But this I find most interesting:

This is pernicious for a lot of journalistic reasons, but politically it’s bad for progressives beacuse conspiracy theories stand in the way of good policy analysis and good activism, replacing them with apathy and fear.

Why progressive activists thought they had a role in Democratic policymaking at the national level — despite all empirical data suggesting otherwise — will remain one of 2009’s great unsolved mysteries.

Keep It Inside Your Sketchbook

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) comes up with a novel excuse for keeping The Terrorists out of the American criminal justice system:

When a reporter pointed out that federal trials aren’t televised, perhaps making the “megaphone” a little less likely, Republicans said there were other ways for terror suspects to peddle their propoganda from a U.S. courtroom — for example, sketch artists.

“What we’ve seen happen is artists draw pictures and this will be written up and there will be defense attorneys taking the global stage,” King said. “We are in an electronic era where they Internet and all these other media that we have will create a real time look at what’s going on in New York.”

Regular readers will know that I agree with King here. There is nothing more horrific than watching one of your artist comrades accidentally get a couple thousand civilians killed just because he didn’t get the foreshortening correct on Omar Abdel-Raman’s left arm.

By the way, did you know that a ground-up Conte crayon + three teaspoons of Crisco = the perfect war paint?

Obama in Oslo

I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

Whatever, dude.

P.S. Cf. Le Chateau de IOZ.

tiger’s game

When I was a kid I picked up a yellowed, crumbling Mad paperback at a garage sale. It covered the period during which Mad (at Harvey Kurtzman’s insistence, the story goes) transitioned from a comic book to a magazine. Early Mad Magazine pieces were really text-heavy and dry. It was as if they were trying to completely jettison the baggage associated with comic books following the Congressional investigation and subsequent downfall of EC Comics. But they included an Al Jaffee parody of Ben Hogan’s “Five Fundamentals” golf tips, which was the general inspiration for this cartoon. It’s funny how many bits of random, arcane cultural trivia you can glean from old magazines and newspapers and end up incorporating into your work.

This cartoon was actually quite difficult to draw. Since I was going for a more schematic, diagram feel I had to boil down the actions and figures to clear, simple lines. Plus the fact that the characters are very small on the page didn’t help matters. If you can’t tell that the golfer is beckoning toward someone outside the frame then the entire thing stops making sense. But it came out reasonably well, so here it is.

Oy Vey

When I drew this cartoon to tie the fall of the Berlin Wall to the contemporary situation in the West Bank, I expected a certain amount of negative feedback. The UGA campus represents a sort of nexus between your flat-earth right-wing Christian types and your metro Atlanta Jewish types, and as such has several rather sizable Likudnik student organizations. What I didn’t expect was the stack of angry letters fixating on the way I implied that the Israelis bought the Berlin Wall secondhand from the Germans — “on clearance.”

Well, turns out certain people have certain stereotypes about Jews and money. And the “Jews and money” routine itself has a bit of historical baggage.

Anyway, I got e-mails, I got phone calls, I got angry letters from university presidents written about me. Some understood that I was acting in good faith and focused on the substance of my argument. Most got caught up in the IDF soldier’s comment. And to the extent that my message was obscured by sloppy self-editing, I do think there was a bit of merit to those complaints. Folks who publish things have a certain obligation to anticipate reader reactions and get rid of possible confounding variables in order to direct readers toward the intended message. I should have been more direct with the IDF guy’s comment re: getting the wall used. But that’s the only thing I would have done differently.

Side note: it is certainly interesting that the pro-Israel crowd has managed to make a cottage industry out of shouting “anti-Semitism!” whenever Israeli policy is criticized in America. It has always seemed odd that at the same time Likud supporters keep reminding us that the Holocaust was an incomparable atrocity, they devalue the anti-Semite label by comparing every little perceived slight against them to what the Nazis did. And this sort of thing has happened to a Georgia cartoonist before, too. Check out Dylan Woodliff’s brutal, pointed Emory Wheel cartoon from 13 months ago, the hysterical reaction from faculty and ultimate mea culpa from the artist.

So the moral of the story is that your humble webmaster is now your humble, anti-Semitic webmaster.

As Smoove B would say, “Damn.”

P.S. Though I disagree with some of his particulars The Chiego Blog had a pretty good summary of the problems with throwing around such loaded labels.

Methods

People ask me questions sometimes. Normally it’s stuff like “What are you doing rummaging through my dumpster” or “Hey, didn’t I tell you never to come back here,” but occasionally I am asked about the process of creating a cartoon. Many people who can’t draw view it as a sort of magical activity. People who are able to crank out 2,000-word essays on a regular basis are reduced to a state of childlike wonder as they watch someone generate an image from a few lines. Because more people can write than draw, the cartoonist’s status as a diviner of objects into two dimensions is retained. This is why cartoonists are routinely paid seven-figure signing bonuses out of college and thus able to afford the trappings of celebrity, such as severe opiate addiction and leaked hotel tapes.

But drawing a cartoon is very much like writing an essay. Both require planning and revision. This is my process.

Step 1) Writing. The most frequent question you are asked as a cartoonist is “Where do you get your ideas?” I like to give different answers to this question, because the truth is really quite boring. It all starts with a blank page in your trusty sketchbook.

Here, random phrases are written down. Small figures are drawn. Half-baked ideas are discarded. I read the newspaper and check my Google Reader constantly in order to pick potential topics. Generally I try to do something UGA-related, but generally there’s nothing interesting happening at UGA, forcing me to draw elephants and donkeys mugging a crying Statue of Liberty and holding big sacks marked “Taxpayer $$$.”

Step 2) Thumbnail. Because I am impatient and have a short attention span I do not generally like to do a lot of preliminary work. I like to knock it out. But a thumbnail or two to get the composition down is generally quite helpful, if only because it forces me to go ahead and find a solution early on.

In this stage, I don’t put in any more details than are necessary. I just block out where all the elements should go.

Step 3) Pencil. This is the full-size rough, also done in my sketchbook. Here I mess around with the composition a bit more and refine the details.

As you can tell, I changed up the angle from the thumbnail in order to give Mike Adams a bit more sneakiness and be the focus of the viewer’s attention.

Step 4) Transferring to bristol board. This is something I adopted from my graphic design classes recently. It involves going over the rough with a hard point on top of a sheet of tracing paper coated with conte crayon, which transfers the image onto the board in crayon.

I have come to prefer this method to penciling on the board directly because it doesn’t alter the surface the way pencil and eraser do, optimizing it for inking.

Step 5) Inking the cartoon. I use matte black waterproof ink and a round sable brush for linework, a Rapidograph for lettering and a Hunt 102 quill pen for details. It is a very Stone Age method.

Step 6) Scan it and send it.

But it is important to remember that like every writer, every cartoonist eventually evolves to have his own highly idiosyncratic method. For example, I often wonder how my system would change were I to quit my crystal meth habit. But that’s another blog post.

Like Space Camp For The Even More Pedantic

“We are the fontographers. We are the dreamers of dreams.”