Monday, October 1, 2012

iLost in Transit


Greetings again my friends! This week's cartoon was a request/challenge by my good mate Don, who asked my the other day "when are we getting an Apple maps joke?". Funny story though, the idea I was always planning to do this week was pretty much a large group of people standing in a park playing with their phones and in the background you can see a big sign saying "The first annual Twitter fan club social BBQ". I really like the idea of Twitter fans trying to be social and they all just end up standing around tweeting on their smartphones. You know what? I still do like this idea, I may just change it now, but can you see where this is going? So I literally only came up with this final idea a couple of hours ago, as I thought I'd give this Apple Maps thing a go (I do love a challenge) and I just happen to be thinking about both things and then about combining the two ideas and boom! I ended up really liking the idea of a large group of iPhone fans all getting lost trying to get to their fan club BBQ because the Apple Maps sucks as you may all know by now, I'm not a massive Apple fan at all. So any chance to poke fun at them and I'm all over it (hence why the guy's iPhone is freakin' huge and long like a TV remote), so cheers Don!

The thing that I did take some time to sort out was just how subtle to make the joke, in fact just before I finished it, it was not as subtle and spelled out a bit more. In the end, I went 'screw it' and did it how I wanted to as I'm a big fan of subtle humour that you have to think a bit about before you get it. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but when I first stared cartooning I used to get some work for Australian "men's" magazines and a motorbike mag and they always requested that the jokes be painfully obvious and not subtle at all. So for years and years I just got into the habit of always doing cartoons that way and it wasn't until I started this blog that I now deliberately try to go the opposite direction and make the joke more subtle. As I said before, those are the jokes I always like myself, so it makes sense really. In the end I did conceded a tad though as if you look at the final inked artwork the thought bubble is "Where is everybody?". The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to give a bit more of a hint as to what the joke was, so I changed it to "How did they all get lost?" hence why the text is done via computer as it was getting late when I changed my mind and I was in a hurry. 

The countdown has begun! Yep, Friday the 12/10/12 is my first whole day to myself when both my boys will be in daycare so I can cartoon! Very excited. As it's the first one though I might have an actual day off and have some quality "me time" (ie, on the couch playing games all day).....ahhh, it's been so long.

Until next time!

Mike

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