Random Batch of the Week: Batch 128

Hello! Welcome back to Random Batch of the Week, an ongoing segment in which I discuss a randomly picked cartoon submission. This week’s batch was chosen by subscriber Barry Nelson! Thanks Barry! If you want to choose a batch, please do! And if you want to be a subscriber too, all you have to do is click this button:

Batch 128 is from May 2021. I was using that bad font, which I discussed in a previous post. Five cartoons total, one sold to The New Yorker. Let’s begin with this one:

I like this one! I like Lassie (as a concept. I’ve never seen the show). I like that Timmy keeps falling down into wells. It may be overused, but the phrase “Timmy fell down the well,” still amuses me. And, apparently, as I am learning in this exact moment as I google it, Timmy never actually did fall down a well in the show, but that only makes the phrase funnier.

I also enjoyed drawing this picture. Sometimes when you draw a cartoon, you don’t have a clear idea as to what the picture should look like, and you have to figure it out along the way. Sometimes that works out but sometimes the picture is a bit bland, maybe uninspired. Occasionally, however, you know exactly what the picture should be before you draw it. This is one of them. The moment I came up with this idea, I knew I wanted my stock business man sitting, typing and listening while Lassie stood on two legs, going through the schedule.

The door in the background is important. You need the door in this picture, it adds to the action, it conjures up what happened right before this picture (Lassie came in through the door), and what happens after (Lassie leaves the room.) You also need the business man typing. It’s a small detail, but combined with the door it sets the entire tone of the toon. These two have worked with each other for a while. They both know the drill, they can talk and work at the same time, there’s familiarity between them. These details help dictate the inflection of how the caption should be read, the fast-paced nonchalant tone of workplace drudgery. In turn, that tone instructs the reader how to interpret the punchline: Timmy fell down the well, which is not an emergency as it is in the show, but just another bullet point in the schedule, a monthly occurrence, all part of the job. Essentially, the joke is all about how the phrase “Timmy fell down the well” is overused.

Bleh, I just realized that I explained the joke, a big no-no, but what else is there to say? How that the plant in the background was poorly drawn? It looks like some weird alien plant. Very strange. Speaking of aliens, on to cartoon two:

As I mentioned about the previous cartoon, sometimes you know how youre going to draw it and sometimes you don’t. This one is sort of in the middle. I had a vague idea of what this picture should look like, but it’s such a wonky concept that I wasn’t sure how to execute it. I chose the lazy direction.

Space, as you may have heard, is not two-dimensional. Those tractor beams would be cone-shaped. This cartoon is as flat as it gets, there’s no attempt at a cone, it’s all triangle. Related to this, there’s no horizon line in this picture. If I hadn’t been lazy, I would have drawn the bottom UFO at angle where you could see the bottom of the ship, putting the horizon line right in the middle of the picture. That’s normally a boring place to put it, but it would make sense for this drawing. Instead I just copied the top image and flipped it vertically.

Cartoons require immediacy to work, and this cartoon clears that bar. The reader gets what’s going on at a glance. But that’s a flimsy excuse, as I’m sure I could have made the picture better and kept that clarity intact. My other (bad) excuse is that I draw these on spec, having no idea if they will sell. I tell myself that every time I choose to be lazy, but at the end of the day, whether or not they sell, I still share them with the world, representing myself as an artist. Oh well. Still a good joke though, and most people don’t actually care about this stuff. Moving on…

This cartoon is just insane. If you’re lost, it’s supposed to be a play on the phrase/trope “look who brought a knife to a gun fight.” Instead of a gun fight, it’s a dance-off. I don’t know why. Originally I think I had the knife-wielder in a more aggressive pose, but something about a guy threatening unarmed people in a nightclub seemed, uh, in poor taste. So the guy is just sort of holding it, which makes the joke even more insane? I probably should have scrapped this idea and not drawn it at all. The nightclub itself is strange. This is a fever dream of a cartoon. Weird is great, but this one just ain’t working. Next!

I sold this one to The New Yorker. I was very happy to sell it, it was one of those cartoons that didn’t come right away, so selling it made the wait worthwhile. Those wolf shirts had been on my mind for awhile before I came up with the idea. I knew the shirts were a good topic. They are ubiquitous but I had never seen a cartoon about them. That’s sort of a sweet-spot for cartoonists. If you notice something that everyone knows about but there’s no cartoon about, hold on to it. If you can’t think of anything immediately, let it linger in your brain. Sketch out any ideas you can with it, even if they are bad. Combine the topic with tropes. Maybe just let it sit for a month or two like I did with this one. Something will come. Or don’t do any of that, you can do whatever you want. I’m not your mother.

Apparently there’s something important about these shirts having three wolves on them, and mine only has two. I don’t think it matters but anyway the picture was small and for the sake of clarity I had to make the wolves as big as possible. If you like this one, you can buy a print of it! 

This picture has had a few different captions over the years. This version came from my friend Sadie Gennis, who reviews TV. There’s her signature, above mine. The joke is about how some prestige shows are written as if each season is one long movie, and how sometimes people would point that out, thinking it was a profound observation.

It didn’t really matter what the show was in this toon, it just needed to be something kids would watch. Sadie wanted the cartoon to be about Peppa Pig, but at the time I was unfamiliar with that show. There can be a weird sort of tunnel-vision that occurs while cartooning. Peppa Pig is a big show, very well known. But because I didn’t know much about it, I sort of had this irrational fear that no one would, or only a few people would rendering the joke unnecessarily confusing. So I went with the safer bet of Sesame Street. This kind of thinking can be a trap, however, as it might prevent you from making a better choice. This is why cartoonists need to know a little about a lot.

Another version of this cartoon had the caption “Want to start screaming? It’s 5 AM somewhere.”

That’s all I have to say about this cartoon, and the batch!

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