Make Yourself A Cartoon

In the process of making yourself a cartoon, you would be needing a bag of tricks! Read on to learn more! If, on the other hand, you're looking for a site to upload an image and cartoonize yourself, Cartoony.Me would be best!

As part of his routine, a magician invites a member of the audience on stage to “help” him with one of his tricks. The cartoonist invites audience participation, too, by leaving out some lines in order that the reader may finish them in his mind. Or the cartoonist subdues the idea so that the reader has to work on it a bit in order to fully appreciate it.

The lead cartoon for one of Andre Francois’s books, The Tattooed Sailor, shows a sailor with no shirt, his pants rolled up to the knees. Tattooed on the man’s chest is the trunk of a woman. On his legs are tattooed the woman’s legs. The man’s pants hides the rest of her, but the reader sees that it is a whole woman and wonders what the tattooing must look like where the legs join the body.

A simple prop, combined with a stereotype, can be invaluable to the cartoonist. Like words, drawings can carry double meanings. A favorite trick of the cartoonist is to make a drawing that reads one way at first glance and another when it is given a second inspection. For example, an editorial cartoonist named Murschetz drawing for the Suddeutsche Zeitung, Munich, shows a regular line chart labeled Consumer Price Index, with the graph line shooting upward. But, looking closer, you can see a character representing German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt climbing the boxes that form the chart as though they were chicken wire, holding on with one hand and pushing the graph line downward, bending it as though it were a wire or hose. Baringou in France Observateur some years ago showed what at first glance appeared to be the American flag; but upon closer inspection the bars turned out to be jail bars with blacks imprisoned behind them.

Another trick is for the cartoonist to draw a cartoon within a cartoon. Al Ross does this in The New Yorker when he shows a couple in their living room watching a television screen. On the screen is the same couple watching themselves on a television screen. And on that screen is the same couple… and so on. Warren Miller in the same magazine shows an ancient of Rome emptying a cornucopia by turning it upside down and shaking it- only to have another cornucopia come out of it, and out of that cornucopia still another, etc.

A cartoonist can convert an ordinary human body to a body quite out of the ordinary.