Changing Direction Midstream
You know, I’d like you to think that all these Loose Parts jokes appear with harps and glowing lights but they all don’t. (And a good thing, too. The neighbors were getting a little tired of waking up to harp music at 2 AM.) Sometimes a joke materializes in the process of drawing the cartoon ... and that joke is different than the one I started with.
Take the cartoon for last January you see above. That caption is not the one I wrote when I dreamed up the panel. What was the original? Here ya go:
“There’s been a decision in the Students of Mrs. Wilson’s class v. Billy Klunk. Settlement stipulates the defendant was indeed a ‘poopie head’ and entitles you to administer one ‘noogie’ at a furture date of your choosing.”
Hoo boy. There was some good there. I mean the idea that there was a class action suit against your childhood bully was a goof one. And the idea that some law firm pursued it for years only to award you a trivial settlement is a good one. And any time you can work poopie head and noogie into a comic, that’s good, too.
But after I drew it and started type setting the caption, I couldn’t help but decide this sucker was collapsing under it’s own weight. It was just a huge caption and something was bugging me about letting it go. So I didn’t. And that meant I had to either scrap the cartoon or do a little salvage action.
Now salvaging a comic is a dangerous thing, too. There’s a tendency to want to save the drawing – and the effort – but you have to protect against saving it even if it means a bad joke. But in this case I think I did all right.
The key here, of course, was hitting on the concept of ‘malicious rejection’. The idea that lawyers are so desperate for business they developed something they couldn’t lose on ... well, that was pretty good.
So the class action suit idea went into the trash and a new comic was born in the incubator of an old drawing. The irony was, that it took me more time to rewrite a caption than it would have to pull another idea out of my joke book and draw up a replacement.
The good thing is ... I still have something inside my head that goes off when something isn’t right. Maybe when that isn’t there, that’s a signal to hang it up. Thank God it’s there.
Stupid Thought Of The Week
I was drawing a cowboy cartoon this week and something hit me. What’s with cowboys wearing vests? Why did they all wear vests? And then, were there just warehouses full of matching pants? Did they go around buying three-piece suits and just say, “Hey, the vest is cool but the rest of these things, bleh.”?
Yeah, I told you it was a stupid thought.
Till next time ... stay Loose.
dave
Blogged Arteries
Sunday, February 21, 2010
