Origin of a Cartoon

Hi. Welcome to the fourth(ish) installment of Origin of a Cartoon, where I take a little deep dive into a particular cartoon, write all about how I got the idea and the many versions it took to get there. That’s great, normally, but the problem is that I think that I’m basically out of the longer stories. I may be overlooking something, but going through my sketchbooks, I couldn’t find a cartoon that had a nice juicy story behind it. I thought for a second that I would have to end this segment.

There are a bunch of my cartoons that have shorter stories behind them, however. None of them would suffice alone as a post but it occurred to me that I could combine a couple into one post. So please enjoy the first installment of Origin-a-Rama, which is also the fourth installment of Origin of a Cartoon. Nothing I love better than a simple organizational structure.

First off I wanna talk about this cartoon:

This cartoon came about when I visited my wife at work and saw one of her co-workers cubicles crowded with colorful plastic nonsense. No judgment! I get it. Anything that makes work more fun for you is worth doing. That said I simply could not ignore it either. I had to make a cartoon about it. Mostly because I knew it was “a thing,” and I wasn’t aware of any other existing cartoon about it.

So I jotted some notes in my sketchbook. The first thing I wrote was “tchotchkes carry a parasite that makes you want to buy more tchotchkes,” which was sort of a play on Toxoplasmosis, a parasite that people say causes cat owners to buy more cats. I think that’s mostly a joke, and in reality the parasite just makes you sick, but I don’t know anything about it.

I also wrote down “RETURN OF THE TCHOTCHKES.” It was hard to ignore the horror of it all, how the toys sort of sit together, a large group, staring at you like zombies. Finally I had an idea, and this was my first submitted version:

In the pre-COVID era you could go into the offices of the New Yorker and have a one-on-one with the cartoon editor and pitch your work. I showed this one to her and I frustratingly cannot remember exactly what she said about it but it was along the lines of the joke not being pushed far enough. In that moment as she was talking, I had the idea of the tchotchkes grabbing one of the people and pitched it right there and then. She said that sounded better and to draw it up. The next week I did and I sold it.

Another fun fact: the character’s original name in the cartoon was Greg. But a few weeks earlier I had sold a different cartoon using the name Greg, which I had forgotten when I sent in the finish for the tchotchke cartoon. Something about having two Gregs bothered me, so I looked at both cartoons and decided which of the two characters was the most Greg. I decided that the Tchotchkes guy was more of a Jim and sent an email to the editor asking if I could change it. She probably assumed that I had completely lost my mind and said yes out of pity. Here is the other Greg in question, by the way. You can tell me if I made the right name choices:

The next cartoon I want to talk about is this one:

I sold this one to Airmail, and it’s one of my personal favorites. Long captions are a tricky game. The joke of any cartoon with a long caption has to be about the long caption to some degree. For instance, in this amazing cartoon by Ed Steed, the joke is that the character’s primary concern is this long rant about insignificant stuff, and then just touching at what is obviously the more remarkable story at the end. The amount of words devoted to the mundane entry emphasizes just how petty this person is. Its length makes the punchline funnier.

In my football one, the length is necessary for capturing the entirety of one’s life. The joke here is that this announcer is announcing everything about this player, and the “everything” wouldn’t be funny unless it was truly everything, from that moment to his death. The more packed into it, the more the joke lands. To a degree, at least. If it were too long the joke would be DOA by the time you get to the end. Like I said, it’s tricky.

Also, the details within the caption are important. The specificity echoes the drama of the sport announcer’s idiolect, keeping the cartoon within proper context while painting a picture of the athlete’s life.

Here’s the first version of it in my sketchbook:

Two problems with this version. The first is what the hell should the picture look like? We have a situation where the the character starts in one place and ends up in another as dictated by the picture, and it demands that both be visualized. In the final version that went to Airmail, the life can be visualized through the details in the caption. It wouldn’t work in this first draft. Imagine the picture from that final with the caption of this earlier version. Without visually depicting the boxing ring that punchline doesn’t really make sense.

So the picture then requires several moments in time captured in one image. That sort of storytelling works well in narrative comics but can be tricky in one-panel gag cartoons. Not impossible necessarily, but in this case it would require a lot of picture rubbing up against a lot of caption. It’s too much.

The other problem is the name. I've written about proper names in cartoons and when to use them. This isn’t one of them. The setting requires a full name which adds a degree of specificity that distracts instead of adds. “Aaron Johnson? Am I supposed to know who that is?” A reader might ask. Or worse, perhaps there is an athlete named Aaron Johnson, and now the cartoon is inadvertently about him. In the final version, I don’t have to use a name at all. “He’s” works fine because it plays off the rhetorical device “he’s got the ball.” However, the turn-of-phrase for a boxing announcer: “Stepping into the ring, weighing 190 lbs…” requires a full name at the end.

Ok! And that’s that. Two smaller stories for the price of one. I hope you enjoyed it! If you did, why not like, comment or subscribe! Tell a friend! Word-of-mouth goes a long way. “liking” it goes a long way. It all goes a long way!

As always, thank you so much! see you next time.