There’s tons of great kids cartoons here at Andertoons. Just sayin’.
(BTW, you can embed cartoons on your blog too!)
Month: November 2009
Dave Barry Reveals Secret To Being Funny
Lately I’ve been reading And Here’s the Kicker: Coversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on their Craft by Mike Sacks, and I ran across this little gem about writing funny via Dave Barry:
It’s a lot like a magic trick, in that there’s a very mechanical way in which it’s done. There are a lot of obvious and basic structural things you do with a sentence and with a joke and how you set it up on the page. And the trick is to do it in such a way that it doesn’t look like there was any effort involved–that it’s somehow magic.
He continues:
There’s a certain amount of inspiration, but there’s also a fair amount of work and repetition and practice and mechanics that are involved…
I’ve never seen it put that way before, but he’s exactly right! While cartoonists know the work involved in crafting cartoons, to pretty much everyone else it’s magic.
Cool.
Client Feedback on Great Art
Love this post over at Crestock’s blog – 10 Famous Works of Art (with client feedback).
Example:
Client feedback:
From his expression, it’s not totally clear he’s screaming. We showed it to one of our HR girls and she said “It looks like he’s really tired and having a yawn.” So let’s add a voice bubble with text that reads “Nooooooo!” (for the text, use Comic Sans).
Great Tip For Getting Your Content Found Online
I recently read a very good review of Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, so I picked up a copy. Wow! Not only succinctly written, but inspiring as well. I have a host of new projects in the queue for my developers.
While the whole book is good thus far, this particular snippet leapt out at me in the chapter entitled “Get Found in the Blogosphere” about producing remarkable content:
Create cartoons or caricatures of things happening in your industry. For inspiration, take a look at the funny cartoons in the Sunday New York Times that parody politicians, and then find an artist who can create something similar for your industry. Buy a copy of the New Yorker magazine and take a look at the cartoons and try to find someone to create similarly humorous ones about your own industry.
Hmm… Seems to me like someone else wrote something similar recently…
Anyway, the whole book is full of great ideas like that. I recommend it highly!
Addams Family Musical Not What You Think
Nice article in the Trib today about the new Addams Family show previewing here in Chicago before heading to Broadway.
I’m heartened to hear that the show is based primarily on the actual cartoons instead of the TV show or movies:
Once the decision was made to focus only on the drawings, “The Addams Family” gained a crucial advantage over most other musicals. The source material is just those 150 Addams drawings, all based on the premise of a family of creeps who happen to love each other very much. One typical example features Gomez and Morticia sitting by the fire in their gothic castle. “Are you unhappy, darling?” asks Gomez, in the two-line caption. “Oh yes, yes! Completely! ” answers Morticia. Another features the loving pair, accompanied by their children Pugsley and Wednesday, all staring out happily together at a view of a graveyard.
But the cartoons didn’t form a continuous narrative. They were just cartoons. And thus the show is not stuck trying to stage an existing story — an encumbrance that has torpedoed many recent Broadway musicals from “Cry Baby “ to “Nine to Five. ” Within the parameters of these characters and Addams’ basic mise-en-scene, the show can do its own thing.
Here’s a short video from the local news while we’re at it:
The Mrs. and I have had our tickets for a good while. Can’t wait to go see this!