Thursday 16 October 2008

Cartoons

I have a couple of ideas for cartoons, but I can't draw them; all I can do is write the caption.
There was a tutor at the adult education college I used to attend whose course was "Cartoons". One evening he gave us on the writers' course a short lecture on what he did. "You don't have to be able to draw well to make a cartoon," he began.
Well, most of the cartoons I have seen over the years in such magazines as Punch and The New Yorker and more recently in The Spectator have been the work of highly skilled artists. Some are not too well executed but these are few and far between.
Yet James Thurber, who was not a good drawer, had tremendous success at The New Yorker. Paul Johnson in last week's Spectator writes about him and, in comparing him to Matisse, who could draw well, says: "Personally, I would rather own a good Thurber joke than anything in Le Maitre's entire oeuvre."
He tells of how Thurber would doodle and produce with a few lines a sketch of, say, a seal; then he'd give it a caption; later he'd draw something the seal is sitting on maybe.... Eventually a cartoon with caption would be formed.
That's one way of doing it. The trouble with my ideas is that having thought up the cartoon in every detail first, I know what I want to draw but can't draw it.
I could, of course, try to get someone else to draw it, or send the idea off to a magazine maybe.
Well, I don't know anyone who could draw it, so sending the idea off to a magazine might be a better option.
Not on your life, Matey!
I met the wife of a professional cartoonist who told me that her husband often sent work out but occasionally it would be refused and then, later, he would see the same idea used by someone else. He never complained, she said, in case it ruined - wait for it - the good relationship he had built up over the years..... blah, blah, blah....
Good relationship, my foot! Let me tell you, it's a jungle out there.

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