Tag: writing

Snoopy’s Complete Novel

andertoons

Snoopy2I don’t remember how or why I came across this, but it’s a pretty fun read:

“It Was A Dark And Stormy Night”

by Snoopy

Part I

It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed.

Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!

While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

Part II

A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day.

At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in Room 213 had finally awakened. She moaned softly.

Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the daughter of the maid who had escaped from the pirates? The intern frowned.

“Stampede!” the foreman shouted, and forty thousand head of cattle thundered down on the tiny camp. The two men rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves. A left and a right. A left. Another left and right. An uppercut to the jaw. The fight was over. And so the ranch was saved.

The young intern sat by himself in one corner of the coffee shop. he had learned about medicine, but more importantly, he had learned something about life.

THE END

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Obsessing on Cartoon Captions

andertoons8 Comments

When I caption my cartoons in Photoshop, one of the things I tend to obsess on is how the words work underneath the graphic.

Here’s a recent cartoon, and you can see initially I had the word “very” on a different line than the word “impressive.”

Caption

I didn’t like the way that flowed, so I changed the caption so the two were on the same line.

Caption1

But then the caption looked too large, and I didn’t like the shape of the caption, so I changed it to this:

Caption2

It might be better with “potty-trained” on the second line, but I always like the topmost line to be the largest, so I left it like this.

To be honest, I have no idea if any of this makes any difference whatsoever in the reading of the cartoon, but I tend to sweat the small stuff, and I’m fine with that.

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Naked Cartoons

andertoons

Occasionally, when I’m feeling frisky, I like to let my cartoons run around in their all-together. I know what you’re thinking, it’s immoral, unsanitary and just plain weird, but sometimes you just have to let it all hang out and go captionless!

Some of my favorite cartoons, and some of the hardest for me to write, are cartoons where there aren’t any captions. Lately though my brain seems to be relatively fertile with them and I thought I’d share some of them with you.

I was really pleased with how this cartoon turned out:

naked cartoons 1

I wrote this one on a rare morning where the cartoon floodgates opened and about a dozen decent ideas poured out. For some reason the phrase “10 gallon hat” popped into my head and this popped back out. (8/5/11 Edit – Can you believe those old gas prices?!)

naked cartoons 2

The above cartoon had been sitting in my pile of cartoons to be drawn for about two weeks in a different form, but I was never really happy with it. I’d actually sat down to start the sketch when a much better way (at least I think so) just sort of came to me.

I was looking for cartoon ideas in the paper and ran across the standard “fish eating a fish being eaten by a larger fish” illustration next to an article. It seemed sort of a lazy way to make their point so I thought I’d see if the ol’ noggin and I couldn’t come up with something new and this cartoon presented itself:

naked cartoons 3

This cartoon took a long time to get right:

naked cartoons 4

I was working on Valentine’s Day material and trying to come up with as many different permutations on the “arrow in the heart” idea as possible. Hopefully it’s not too obtuse, but if it is, that’s OK too. Sometimes I just draw ’em for me.

Well, that’s about it. Hopefully this entry didn’t smack too much of self-promotion, but I thought it was an interesting recent trend in my work. I hope you liked the cartoons, because now that I’ve called attention to my captionlessness (call Webster’s, we got a new one!) they’re almost certain to completely dry up.