The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log » cartoonist

John Callahan passes away

Joe — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:09:05 +0000

It’s being reported that noted cartoonist John Callahan has passed away over the weekend from complications related to his long-time parlaysis. A quadraplegic since a car accident in 1972 he learned (after quitting the bottle) to draw with a pen clutched between both of his hands. His subject matters were darkly humorous and macabre, often dealing with physical disabilities and political correctness be damned -- not to the taste of everyone, of course, and for every admirer of his work he had plenty who wanted to condemn too (he seems not to have minded, even including a Hate Mail section on his site! Good for him).

(the blind nun -- an animation from and (c) John Callahan)

“Callahan’s humor has a savage quality. It offend some people, but lots of others — especially among the 43 million Americans who are classified as handicapped — find that something liberating happens when you laugh about your adversities. One of his extended pieces is even called The Lighter Side of Being Paralyzed for Life. He’d rather turn painful situations into jokes than be indulged by a pitying, patronizing attitude,” Pat Riley, NBA Coach, in his book The Winner Within, quoted on Callahan’s site.

(to some this might be in poor taste, seen as mocking the disabled, to Abu Hamza it is probably even more annoying, to others who think humour is important for all sections of society, able bodied or otherwise, it’s funny. By and (c) John Callahan, borrowed from his site)

Fellow cartoonist and admirer of Callahan’s work, Rod McKie, points us to this video of a documentary on Callahan made for Dutch television (in English with Dutch subtitles, as is the norm in the Netherlands for programmes made in English):

www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7dMBCB3t70

Don’t get married to an idea

Joe — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 08:11:47 +0000

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)