Playing the 'name game'

Inspirationaly, editorial cartooning is at a point similar to what we experienced when “pandemic” entered the lexicon five years ago. In 2020, the news changed every day, and new facts and falsehoods popped up like a game of Whack-a-Mole™. Much like today, there seemed to be no end to the possibilities of what a cartoonist could draw.

It is unfortunate that the state of employment as an on-staff editorial cartoonist is much worse than it was in 2020, though, when the job market was already deathly ill. The art form continues to struggle financially in sympathetic synch with newspapers, but the passion to create compelling cartoons is still alive and kicking on drawing tables and computers worldwide.

Old Dog, new tricks

In 2020, I was already long in the tooth regarding graphic design, cartooning, and technical illustration, but I was new to editorial cartooning. I landed a freelance gig with the Niagara Gazette and its sister publication, the Lockport Union-Sun and Journal—an unlikely story I will tell in a future newsletter.

The demand of having only a weekly gig presented an opportunity for me to experiment and try out new ideas and techniques. I’m still doing that today.

This cartoon originally featured multiple characters and back-and-forth dialogue because I intended to present it as a four-panel strip. However, as I worked through the rough art phase, a simpler presentation appealed to me more and more.

This timelapse video is a 60-second distillation of over six hours of work. That should tell you I am not in it for the money, not with a paid buyer pool of two small newspapers!

Monopoly didn’t make the cut

This administration is often described as kids playing adult games. Musk’s team of fresh-faced tech wizards tore into the U.S. government’s payment system like famished dogs. But the exuberance was not limited to youth. Trump and Musk themselves are carrying on with an eff the rules mindset.

Board games have rules designed to foster fair play. What if the classic games of Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, Clue, Sorry!, and Risk were rebranded for today? New names (except for Risk- it was already appropriately named), new rules, or no rules! Win the game before it even starts.

Most of my drawing time was spent importing logos for the aforementioned games and then twisting them into new names while retaining the look of the original. My love affair with creative letterforms enabled me to actually enjoy that part

I’m in Biiiiigly trouble!

I left the Trumpiture for the end. I wasn’t sure how cartoony I wanted to make him. The clock was not screaming at me to hurry up, so I fiddled about with photo references, pushing and pulling parts of the image to get the exaggerations I wanted.

Just about every online photo that appears in a search has this warning: “Images may be subject to copyright.” My work was more photo manipulation than caricature drawing, but I was in an experimental mood and wanted to see what I could do with the distortion, perspective, and mesh transformation tools available to me. Those gadgets alone are worth a few newsletter editions—maybe soon, maybe never.

In the meantime, I’ll let you know if a “cease and desist” letter shows up in my mailbox.

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