In Cartoonland, Opposites Attract
Last week’s New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest used this cowboy drawing of mine.
A number of folks have mentioned it to me since it appeared. I should say right off the bat that this drawing was submitted sans caption — I sent it in to be considered for the contest; it never had a caption that worked for me. That’s how I’ve been rolling with the contest for quite some time. I enjoy seeing how others might solve something I was never able to solve myself.
But captions aren’t what I wanted to talk about today. Looking at this drawing made me realize that in this drawing I’d combined two opposites from my cartoonist storage unit (i.e., my brain): “things enjoyed” and “things not enjoyed very much at all.”
In the “enjoyed” category: some of the imagery associated with the West, particularly cowboy imagery. The outfits, the expanse of the great plains and big skies — and of course, horses.
A long time ago I picked up this 1972 UK kids book, The Story Of The Cowboy. I probably looked through it twice, sponging up the imagery — the “flavor” of the illustrations, sort of like what I’d soak up from watching a cowboy movie. (Movies, and television shows account for most of my cowboy graphic vocabulary).
I must draw several cowboy-ish drawings every week. It’s a fun place to go on paper. And that brings me to the category of drawing things not so fun, things not enjoyed. I never ever enjoyed high school gym class. The weeks spent working on the apparatus in the gymnasium were highly unpleasant. My school had a balance beam, still rings, a high bar, parallel bars, and, of course, a pommel horse. Don’t get me wrong: I love the Olympics, and watching athletes use these things. Their abilities are, well, amazing. But for a not very athletic student (in other words: me), using the parallel bars and all the other gear was stressful. All I saw was potential trouble: broken bones, pulled muscles, perhaps even unconsciousness from falling and landing on the hard wood floor (none of that ever happened…to me).
What I’m getting at is probably clear by now: I often draw on experienced imagined moments and moments actually lived (I have to think this is true for most of my colleagues as well). Because we’re filling up our graphic libraries (our brains) with just about anything we see or imagine, the fun wheel of opposites to bring to a cartoon is infinite. When I’m asked Where do you get your ideas? I always answer with some variation of, “From living.” I’ve never been out west, never seen the Great Plains — I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cowboy in person — but I did sit in a gymnasium, staring at a pommel horse as each of my classmates took their turn on it. One or two kids were pretty good on it — and that was fun to see. But mostly, I thought about the potential hazards. The experience — all of it — stayed with me, thankfully.
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Bonus prairie cartoon.
This appeared in The New Yorker May 10, 2010. In this case I combined two things I liked:
