Today's Cartoon

Three sweaters on and I'm still feeling the cold. It's well below zero outside and a freezing fog has descended. Can't get my body going today. Even typing this feels hesitant and awkward.

Today's cartoon was another drawn using 'The Gag Machine' late last night. I'm trying to use it every day, to see if it genuinely produces good cartoon ideas. I usually have my best cartoon ideas in the early parts of the day. However, if I'm distracted or busy, I might not get around to sitting down and thinking of what I'll draw that night. If I leave it too late, I struggle to think of a gag, so having a software backup is helpful. Whether this cartoon works or not, I'm not sure. I quite like it. I wanted to draw a beggar as a skeleton because I thought it might say something about our relationship with beggars. You can read it in a number of ways. Foremost, it's saying that the most successful beggars are those that look the most pitiful. So, reductio ad absurdum: a dead beggar skeleton would probably reap in the money. The other way to read the cartoon is that people rarely look a beggar in the eye and, by throwing money in, they somehow nullify any kind of liberal anguish they might otherwise have. This guy has clearly been dead months but nobody notices.

I draw these while I'm relaxing watching TV, which is why I put in too much time and effort. Once I have the idea and the basic cartoon worked out, I enjoy the process of slowly refining the lines and then adding the shading. I could have worked on this for a couple of hours more and been as happy as the proverbial Larry. The irony is that the more I work on a cartoon, the less use it probably is.

Today I want to see if I can refine my application and improve its ability to produce cartoon ideas. I suspect there might be a better way of structuring my data which will produce better results. I need to test it on a small sample of data to see what happens.

Another Cartoon With Mass Appeal

Another cartoon drawn with the aid of my new 'Gag Machine'. It probably accounts for the reason that any rational person would find it odd/unfunny and without a jot of sense. Yet these are the cartoons that make me laugh, give me the most pleasure to draw, despite there being no market for them. If I had more time or a purpose for drawing it, I'd have finished it more than I have: better drooping fag, bit of smoke, halo around his head, more shadows on the ground, a few 'geeza' rings on his hands...

Being a fan of cartoons and cartoonists, I probably look at too many of them every year. In my downtime, I often page through one of the big collections I have (Private Eye or Punch) or I look at cartoons from The New Yorker via the DVD Rom I have saved to my tablet. They produced it a few years ago and it contain their entire back catalogue, which my memory tells me might be as many as 70,000 cartoons. I look at so many cartoons that I probably immunise myself to the general strain. A few will still produce a mild fever. Fewer still will make me splutter and cough. Yet there's a broach tranche of cartoons that are professional and eminently publishable yet just a little bit bland. I enjoy cartoons that make me gasp because of the unexpected. 'Sid the Jesus' makes me laugh but I have no idea why. I know it wouldn't be funny if it was 'Sid the Christ' or even 'Jesus Smith' (though that one isn't too bad).

I would never send this to a magazine. I wouldn't embarrass myself. Not because I'm ashamed of the cartoon (quite reverse) but because I know it doesn't fit with the cartoons the market so obviously wants. Perhaps the fact I like 'Sid the Jesus' explains why I can't even get one of my more mainstream cartoons published. Perhaps people can sense that those cartoons aren't authentic. They're my attempt to be being something I'm not. Yet cartoons like 'Sid' are clearly not for mass consumption.  It leaves me in a difficult situation at the end of 2014. Can I handle another year of constant rejection? I have days before I have to think about such things. Resolutions are nearly a week away.

Regarding the 'The Gag Machine': quite a few new features yesterday. Using Windows forms, it's so easy to program the little (usually tricky) features. I did a quick search of the reference library, found a few methods I needed, and half an hour later, I'd added a settings screen, with a customisable save directory (also saved in the settings) for all the outputs along with a button which allows you to browse to the folder on your PC. On Android, I'd have had to write my own File dialog and then create a new Activity with various Resource files for the new screen. By contrast, Microsoft have everything ready for you. It's so easy that I've now run out of things to implement and that's the first time that's ever happened to me. I now need to have a long think about what to do next.

A Body Building Cartoon

You find me hot and sweary. I’ve lost my bloody S-Pen again and I now see that I have to do something about this habit before it becomes a regular part of my working week. I’ve had the Note for six days and I’ve already lost the pen twice, which means that I’ve now used up all the time I usually give myself to tidy my office each year. This can’t go on. At this rate, I’ll have the tidiest workspace in the country but I won’t be getting any work done.

It’s already Sunday and I have work backing up and what is sure to be a horrible week ahead. Tuesday I’m going to the dentist for a much delayed check-up, although that’s not strictly true. ‘Check-up’ makes it sound like I might need no work but who chooses to spend £50 on a check-up and inevitable polish if they don’t need to? A bit of a back tooth came away last week and I know it will mean work. Probably lots of work. My tongue tells me it’s a cavity the size of a small bungalow. I imagine crowns, extractions, months of appointments stretching ahead into the New Year. By the time it’s all done, in six-months, it’ll be time to start getting phone calls from the dentists asking me to make an appointment for a check-up. If they didn’t pester me so much, I’d probably go more often.

Once I’m beyond the horror of Tuesday morning, I need to get working. I have real work to get on with, two cartoon strips need to be finished for a football fanzine, plus I need to settle on which of my unpublished cartoons I’m entering into a competition. Since I don’t think I’ve got one good enough to send, that also means more drawing. In the meantime, I’d throwing today’s cartoon out there in the realisation that nobody would want this kind of thing. My problem is that the cartoons I like aren’t cartoons that other people like, or, specifically, cartoons they’d be willing to pay for.

But I could moan on about that for another 1000 words but it’s not getting my S-Pen found. And I have to find it before I also lose my spare…