Image
Sep 12, 2026
Thanks for reading Frank's Buffalo Born Babble! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
While you were looking the other way
Misdirection is often associated with the magician’s craft.
Misdirection—or direction, as some magicians prefer to call it—is the subtle, deceptive art of directing an audience’s attention towards one thing (a magical effect) so it does not notice another (the method or mechanics of a trick). It can refer to both the effect of a spectator’s mind being focused on an unimportant thing, or the action that causes it.
Source: Masterclass.com
Misdirection has an equally important spot in the editorial cartoonist’s toolbox.
Hopping lilypads
In a single-panel cartoon, the artist can guide the eye from left to right and top to bottom to create the effect of multiple panels in different ways. I chose carefully placed speech bubbles as trail markers on the setup, development (or continuation), and payoff path.
A reader will naturally start on the left or upper left, but I wanted to ensure an emphatic starting gun so the eye wouldn’t skip ahead. I used bold letters, a jagged outline, and a harsh yellow field to start things off. After all, that’s one angry speaker up on the box.
The woman continues the dialogue with her own loud response. I used a soft mint pastel field to make it pop against the white background, but not in the same way as the orator. I saved white for the punchline.
A normal speech bubble for the man on the right would have done the job, but I felt it was better to change it up with a contrasting voice, so I used a dashed-line whisper bubble with small letters. Additionally, leaving the bubble uncolored further de-escalated the voice.
In this way, less is more.
About the homonym
There’s another layer to the gag that’s obvious, but also subtle; maybe you caught it.
If someone is disparaging migrant people, they might incorrectly call them leeches on society, people who are draining resources and living off the labor of others.
The woman was justifiably outraged at what she heard, but that is not what you read. The orator meant leaching toxic waste, not leeching people.
Sometimes “earwitness” testimony is wrong.
NAPLs
I recently finished reading “Thundering Waters” by Christen Civiletto (see more at the bottom of this post), where she describes Non-Aqueous Phase Liquids (NAPLs) as black sludge wandering underground independent of groundwater, a deadly agent with a mind of its own. In that sense, migrating chemicals could be thought of as them, and not just it.
Sentient toxic waste. That is one scary nightmare.
