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.

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

Sitting at the bar, doing my usual. Fortunately the Zetas are having an ITC Garamond theme night. They were impressed when I told them I studied under Josef Albers at Yale.

I don’t even know where Yale is, homie.

Thank god they haven’t figured out where I got this vellum.

You know the acquaintance at the party who, desperate to impress you or otherwise form some sort of connection, hangs on your every word, asking questions and analyzing your behavior to the point of annoyance? Talking Points Memo is that fucking guy now. You make an off-the-cuff remark about meeting up for a beer in a doomed attempt to defuse the controversy that resulted from making a simple statement of fact about something that happened to a guy you know. But you keep forgetting that That Fucking Guy will remember your promise the next day and start sending Facebook messages that are all like, “so u still down 4 beer 2moro?” And he’ll keep getting all up in your grill about it until you finally meet him one afternoon for a sympathy drink.

People talked about Bush as the president with whom Real Americans would want to shotgun Thunderbird or Steel Reserve or High Life or whatever while watching the Dallas Cowboys. This is mainly because Bush understood one fundamental point that Obama apparently does not. Article 301(b) of the Constitution:

No President shall addrefs his Subjects as rational, fully-functioning adult Humans.

Obama’s mistake was to think that his audience would take his “beer” remark for what it actually was–a bit of cultural shorthand for working out differences, airing grievances, etc. But the press once again demonstrated its infantile fascination with unscripted political speech, mindlessly promoting a literal reading of Obama’s remarks. What resulted was the painful photo-op we continue to be subjected to today. An awkward-looking public “meeting” on a Potemkin patio surrounded by a barricade to create the illusion of privacy and intimacy. It’s going to be a long four years eight years painful decline of the empire.

I was tempted to just write a pithy entry about the appropriateness of Gates drinking Blue Moon at the Beer Summit. A mediocre product designed for people who value authenticity, substance and change, created by an Astroturf organization that serves as a front for billionaire corporate suits… I like my beer like I like my presidents.

UPDATE: Corrected post title.

Earlier this evening we were directed toward a cartoon contest run by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The contest was to “draw humorous attention to the not-so-funny issue of political interference in science.” We must have missed the memo on that one, since the finalists are already up for a vote. We recognize no names except for Mike O’Brien, the cartoonist for the University of Maryland Diamondback newspaper alongside whom we’ve placed as runner-up for a few college-cartoon-type honors.

Given our proud tradition of armchair cartooning here at BRCB, we took a look at each of the finalists to see if there was anything worth looking at. Our team of Bangladeshi child laborers hardworking interns will be critiquing six today, with the other half following sometime this weekend.

The results, after the jump.

Brian Narelle comes up with something label-intensive.

Two observations. One, seems like Narelle would label the alligators if he’s going to label “WHISTLEBLOWERS POINT,” “LEGISLATIVE PROTECTION” and “BLOW HERE.” But he can’t, because two, the cartoon doesn’t reference a particular event or debate. Our research has found that readers like discrete events to grab ahold of when digesting a cartoon. A handy reference point would have solved both of these problems.

Next comes James MacLeod:

We quite like the simplicity of line that complements the deadpan (though topical) nature of the one-liner. If you put a lampblack wash on it you could probably stick it in The New Yorker. The caption, though, might could use some copy editing. We usually try to stick to the rule they teach news writers about ledes: if we can’t read it aloud in one breath, we keep working on it. The fact that it’s done in Arial doesn’t help.

Jesse Springer with the Wheel of Fortune approach:

The wordplay is quite clever. The linework: spontaneous, expressive. Almost Coker-esque. The Photoshopping: nothing special, but nothing that detracts from the cartoon as a whole. This could easily be in a Cagle roundup, especially given the big fat “POLITICS” label that Ramirez et al. frequently use.

John Klossner:

The Iwo Jima flag-raising photo is a longstanding cartooning trope. The photo is so iconic in American culture at this point that to use it effectively means doing something original. We’ve never seen this variation before, so props to Klossner for that. But, much like in Narelle’s piece, we’re not really sure what the individual elements represent, which hinders his effort. The message is clearly a triumphal one, but it lacks specificity. Though we do like his loose, inky style.

Katherine Selkelsky:

This is sort of bizarre. A quick search using the terms given yields a bunch of Library of Congress pages, as well as information about a few academic conferences. This makes us wonder if Selkelsky has ever actually used Google or done academic research. Next.

Kevin Cannon:

Cannon comes from the RJ Matson School of Slick Draftsmanship And Fun Color. He also appears to come from the Kelly School of Comically Excessive And Oddly Moralistic Labeling. The cartoon would have been far better had he not included the word “good” on the bill. But cartoons are supposed to be fun to look at (nobody remembers Winsor McCay for his writing), and Cannon done real good in that respect.

Who wins in this group? No question MacLeod’s funny takes teh funny cake. And even though his President looks more like Mitt Romney’s bastard servant child than Obama, Cannon’s mad CS4 skillz win the Auto-Draw battle.

Who will they face off against? Which of the remaining six have what it takes? Our hardworking team wants to know just as badly as you do. Until next time…

I just got my grubby paws on one of these “smartphone” thingies. The novelty has not worn off yet, but, eternal optimist that I am, I must bolster my defenses in anticipation of the inevitable crash.

This one took a while to come up with. I wanted to do one about death, using the Grim Reaper, but I didn’t want to get into Far Side territory (other approaches I was considering included “Death’s Roommate,” “Death’s Intern,” “Death attempts to figure out directions from Southern California to Tampa using his GPS handheld,” etc.). I think I succeeded. We’ll see.

You can thank our team of web interns for our new-and-improved “True Blue” look. They stayed up for six weeks mainlining Hot Pocket juice and Mountain Dew Code Red as they learned CSS at gunpoint. Some even gave their lives. And for that, we thank them each time we buy Hot Pockets.

Also added/subtracted names from the blogroll, though we steadfastly refuse to get rid of the March-2008-vintage Bad Cartoonist. We’re convinced he is not retired, but rather simply waiting in the shadows.

Also with the new theme comes something that WordPress calls “widgets.” On the left sidebar are two widgets that you will find eminently handy. One allows you to follow me on Twitter. The other allows you to stick this blog on an RSS feed (such as Google Reader), which is probably the best way to go about reading it given my irregular updating schedule.