Cartoon Yourself For Free

Below, we will then discuss some of the purposes of free cartoons and their problems! If, however, you want to turn your picture into a cartoon, you can go to Cartoony.Me and cartoon yourself for free!

There are those among cartoonists who are tied grimly to causes. Their art has bite but little comedy. So agitated over social injustice was Robert Minor, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and New York Evening Journal editorial cartoonist who helped pioneer the stark, lithographic look in newspaper cartoons, that he became more and more involved first in socialist and later communist causes, drawing only for radical organs, like The Masses and The Liberator, capping his career not as a cartoonist, calling for which he was eminently qualified, but as a worker for the Communist Party and an editor of The Daily Worker.

There are others who, like Virgil Partch are uncommitted but too sophisticated to place their faith in anyone's promise to right wrongs. They take seriously, however, their high calling to provide readers with what Partch describes as "a few yuks."

But even if the cartoonist means only to entertain, he almost always does more than that. "You can't write or draw anything without making some comment on society," Al Capp, creator of Li'l Abner, said in an interview. "No cartoonist, no matter how talentless or obscure, has ever drawn a dog without having made a comment on the state of dogs. He's never drawn an outhouse without making some incidental comment about rustic life in America."

The Cartoon Solution

One of the many magazines failing to survive the Great Depression was Open Road for Boys, a not-very distinguished publication but one remembered fondly by today's middle-aged cartoonists as the sponsor of a popular cartoon contest. Each month the magazine presented its readers a potential tragedy in cartoon form: for instance, a goat was shown about to butt an unsuspecting nature lover over a high embankment. Or, as in Harold West's scene, a bandit was shown about to send a sheriff to his death. It was the job of the reader/ cartoonist to come up with some solution: a follow-up panel. The more ingenious the rescue the better. Winning solutions were shown in a follow-up issue. There were two or three modest prizes, and, almost as exciting a couple of honorable mentions along with some runners-up. The expectation of being among the elect saw many boys in the 1930s keeping close watch for the mailman each month. Among those who felt the thrill of national exposure for the first time in Open Road for Boys was Mort Walker.

What the young Road contributors did in that contest is what cartoonists have always done: They solved life's problems in ways not open to to ordinary problem solvers. Where but in the cartoon world could a character fall hundreds of feet without so much as a hint of discomfort? Where else could someone like Beetle Bailey appear as a heap of rubble after a run-in with his sergeant and then show up fresh and alert the next day, with no signs of the earlier violence upon him?

image source