Rod McKie ponders the investment in time and emotion (and possible financial repercussions) of the cartoonist creating something they like themselves but which doesn’t work for publishers or readers and how a canny cartoonist can sometimes rework it to suit when its a single cartoon but how much more difficult it is if they have created entire strips which they may or may not have to put aside; I’d think plenty of cartoonists – and writers and pretty much any other type of creative artist – will empathise with this, having spent a lot of time and passion creating something they really like only to find that it simply doesn’t fly with others. Its well worth a look, being, as we’d normally expect from Rod, well considered, honest and illustrated with examples from his own work:
“I wasn’t quite sure what Charles Schulz meant when I first heard that. That’s because gag, or magazine, cartoons are often recast with a brand new punchline, so you never really have to kill-off the entire idea, just come at it from a different angle. I know Michael Shaw has rewritten a punchline for a cartoon that the New Yorker didn’t like, and then liked, in its new version. I’ve done it myself, when it suddenly occurred to me that I could completely remake a cartoon I had drawn years before, by changing the punchline to suit a new market, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Truth be told, cartoonists do it all the time. That’s not to say though, that you can’t ever come up with a completely unusable cartoon, you can – at least I can; but it is never as difficult to kill off a cartoon idea as it is to kill off an idea for a comic book, or comic strip, or a graphic panel.”
(a scene from Sunshine on Leith by and (c) Rod McKie)
Thu, Jul 30, 2009
Comics and cartoons