Over the years, my standard answer to the question, “How do you come up with ideas?” has always been the same: I don’t know. And that’s true. I don’t come up with ideas. What happens is this: I sit around everyday, waiting for the cartoon gods to bonk me, Krazy Kat-like, on the head with the promise of an idea. Often that means a word, or a phrase, or an image. Any of those, if they’re interesting enough, start the pen moving along the blank page. Even then, unless there’s a fully formed idea, it’s a mystery as to what’ll happen; I rely on chance, luck, or a combination of both, whatever that’s called. That all of this is chancy is probably what’s kept me interested.
Seeing something in real life (i.e., not cartoon life) that turns into a cartoon is, for me, incredibly rare. As far as I remember, it’s only happened once. The drawing below came to me as I was idly sitting in my car waiting for a friend to come out of a store. I wasn’t trying to think of a cartoon idea. I looked around the parking lot and saw the greyhound on the side of a parked Greyhound bus and…bingo! The moment turned into the drawing below, published in The New Yorker, June 8, 1981.
I learned long ago — the hard but necessary way I suppose — that when I go looking for ideas I rarely find them. In my first three or fours years of contributing to The New Yorker I spent a lot of time trying to find ideas. I realized, as I worked on them, that that method (construction) would be very difficult to stick with — I’m a terrible craftsperson.
What happened, slowly over time was unplanned. I began (and still begin) each work day without pursuing ideas. Each day begins with curiosity, but no expectations. It’s that simple.
As the work day begins, I prop a wooden board with stack of blank paper on my lap, shake the Rapidograph a few times to get the ink flowing through the point, test the flow of the line as it hits the paper in a way that never fails to remind me of learning to do cursive in first grade. Below is the testing scribble. You can see how the line begins faintly upper right and starts filling in as I move the pen to the left (I’m left-handed, so work from right-to-left). The next section down, in the middle, the line is getting better, but not yet there. Once I begin testing along the bottom row, the ink suddenly flows — there’s no skipping in the line. I take the pen for a quick spin, just to make sure it’s not a temporary good flow.
By the time there’s ink flowing smoothly on the paper, I usually have some kind of notion as to what I want to draw. I’ve no clue as to where it — the notion — came from (and I don’t want to know). I understand that this non-process process is not for everyone. If I’m lucky, that stray thought turns into a drawing that gets sent to The New Yorker in my weekly batch. Often the stray thoughts go nowhere, but, hey, the inky road not taken and all that. Here are two recent excursions that went nowhere:
I love drawing gas station garages — mostly because they remind me of George Booth’s many great garage drawings (here’s one). I really thought this vertical car drawing had a chance of going somewhere, but the words just never happened, so off to the side it went.
This one never had a chance from the get-go. Can’t explain why I knew it wasn’t going to happen, but I kept going because it’s fun to draw knights, and it gave me a chance to draw another cat. Still working on getting cats to where I want them.
I realize that none of the above answers the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” What it does address is what I’m doing while I’m waiting for the ideas to make their way to me.