Make A Cartoon of Yourself : Ideas

If you are having trouble starting your cartoon, this hub will help you think of ideas! However, for those wanting to make a cartoon of yourself online, Cartoony.Me would be the best site to do this!

In analyzing the idea behind the cartoon, perhaps the best place to start is with the gag cartoon. The newest of the cartoon forms, it is, at the same time, the most endangered of the species, not only because of the demise of the general circulation magazine but also because of the emergence of the art director as a force in American journalism. Art directors, who on many magazines rank right up there with their editors, think in terms of unified pages, with title, art, and copy working together to do a communications job. To throw in an unrelated, self-contained gag cartoon to disrupt the flow is anathema to many art directors.

But as long as we have The New Yorker, Saturday Review, the women's service magazines, and trade and specialized magazines still giving gag cartoons prominent display, the art may yet survive.

To the cartoon connoisseur, gag cartoons represent the ultimate in the cartoon art. A gag cartoon is to be savored, not just looked at and read. The subtleties of the art are considerable.

Usually the whole point revolves around a single line printed underneath the cartoon, and everything within the drawing must substantiate that point. The gag cartoonist keeps his cast of characters down, his setting simple.

In most cases he has no particular ax to grind, but that does not mean he has nothing to say. If the editorial cartoonist is a political cartoonist, the gag cartoonist is a social cartoonist. The gag cartoonist is never happier than when, in the words of Stephen Becker in Comic Art in America, he is jabbing away constantly at our shams and illusions," in the end touching upon some social truth.

Gag cartoonists come onto their gags in a number of ways. Sometimes they dream up a scene and then try to think of a gag line to fit. Sometimes they start with the line and then try to imagine a scene that will make it funny.

Asked by Cartoonist Profiles magazine how he gets his ideas, Eldon Dedini said: "To be truthful, it's still a mystery to me. And it's the mystery that makes it interesting... Maybe if I knew more about it, I'd lose the touch."

"I find if I put enough stuff in me by reading and observing, something is bound to come out."

Chon Day finds thumbing through Barlett's Familiar Quotations helpful- or even thumbing through his old roughs that didn't sell.

Most gag cartoonists buy some of their ideas from outside sources. They pay the writer 25% of what the cartoon earns and keep 75% for themselves. Only the cartoonist signs the cartoon. Certainly, cartoon editors at the magazines can't remember all the cartoons they and all the editors before them, on all magazines, once bought and ran. It has been said that the novelist has only a few basic plots to work with. Similarly, the gag cartoonist has only a few basic ideas. The setting, the props, the characters change; the words in the gag lines vary; but the ideas persevere.

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