From the Mind of Mariani

The following 60 seconds are more turbulent than the mighty rapids above and below Niagara Falls.

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Almost all of the cartoons I feature in this newsletter, Frank’s Buffalo Born Babble, are published in a newspaper. In traditional newspapers, every word and image must survive layers of editorial, legal, and corporate scrutiny to protect the brand and its advertisers. Social media and Substack completely remove these institutional barriers, giving creators absolute control over their work. While platform taboos still exist, my content stays safely within those boundaries.

Building the gag

I avoid explicit cuss words and hesitate to imply them in cartoons that will go to newsprint for fear of rejection, so I was surprised my editor thought this cartoon was funny and usable. There were some alternate versions on standby, but the humor didn’t land as crisply as I wanted.

"Horseshoe Falls" is the formal, geographically recognized name for that specific waterfall. Calling it the "Canadian Falls" is actually the informal nickname.

Source: Wikipedia

If I had clearly written out “HORSESHIT FALLS,” I don’t think the gag would have worked because the reader would have no “A-ha” moment of discovery of what Trump was trying to do. Furthermore, I couldn’t assume everyone knew that Horseshoe Falls is 90% in Canada. My challenge was to tie Trump into another stupid assault on Canada as a follow-up to the Lake Ontario/Lake America fiasco.

In the first few seconds of the “How I Made This Cartoon” timelapse above, you can see that I originally sketched out a simple painted sign, but I decided to use dimensional letters to give Trump something to handle, more than a paintbrush. This way, I could show what the sign was and what it would become in one panel.

I needed another program, CorelDRAW, to create the extruded letters in perspective faster than I could using old-school methods. Unfortunately, CorelDRAW does not have a built-in timelapse recording feature, or I would have included that video in this post.

Meant to be

The drawing process was pure kismet; Corel is based in Canada’s capital, Ottawa, just a couple of hours from Lake Ontario.