It’s almost Halloween, and every year I do a new batch of Halloween cartoons. It seems like every year it gets harder to find new Halloween humor and I have to go further afield. Then again, every year gives you fresh zeitgeist to see Halloween through, so it all works out in the end.
OK, on to this year’s new Halloween cartoons:
I was thinking a lot about pumpkins with this cartoon. What do they look like, how they’re carved, the goo inside, seeds, etc… and the word “gourd” popped into my head. I was playing with the homonym “gored” for a while, like someone being gored by a bull, but instead it was a bull giving someone a pumpkin, but, as you can tell, that’s pretty weak. Anyway, the phrase “out of his gourd” presented it self soon after, and this sort of weird spooky cartoon came about.
(BTW, I did make sure that a pumpkin was technically a gourd. Cartoons aren’t any fun if they basic premise is wrong.)
I love the scene in the original Frankenstein where the doctor is yelling ‘It’s alive! It’s alive! It’s alive! It’s alive!” and I thought if you were the monster and you’re just coming to consciousness for the first time, this guy next you you yelling and screaming might be a bit much. Connecting it to waking up wasn’t far behind.
I almost never do multiple panels. I like to think that it’s because I work best in a single frame with a single caption and that’s where my talents lie. But if I’m really honest, it’s also that I’m a bit lazy and I hate drawing the same thing more than once in a cartoon.
Still, this Star Trek Halloween cartoon was worth it. Big thanks to my pal Mike Lynch for helping me make sure that vulcan blood had actually been seen on TV before. (Again, accurate cartoons are funnier.)
This is one of those Halloween cartoons that took a long time to get right. First there’s the candy house. You can’t skimp on the drawing there and there’s a lot of detail to get right. Then you have to shade all of that. Ugh. And the caption took a really long time to trim down to something reasonable. Anyway, it all worked out well I think. (I especially like the candy orange slice shutters.)
This Halloween cartoon seemed so simple that I was sure someone else had done it. Seriously, it’s an obvious joke. But I did my due diligence, looked around online, and no one had done it. Having said that, a dozen versions of this will have cropped up between the time I drew it and the time this blog publishes.
And now the last of my 2013 Halloween cartoons. I got the idea for this one at a coffee shop. The lady asked me if I wanted my latte hot or cold and while it’d be more entertaining to tell you that this popped into my head right at the moment and I yelled “A-HA!” and ran out of the coffee shop pumping my fists in the air to the delight of onlookers, it came to me later in the day unceremoniously.
Feel free to check out all of my my other Halloween cartoons here, read what I had to say about last year’s batch, draw your own cartoon zombie, and check out these posts about costumes.
Happy Halloween!