I'm really enjoying doing comic strips of late, as you can probably tell. Honestly it's purely me trying not to restrict my ideas so I'm open to any humour idea, where as before I may have dismissed and idea like this one or tried to condense it to one panel and therefore ruin it somewhat. So it's a good thing, I think anyway.
So the iPhone 6 came out the other day and instead of my usual Apple bagging, I took a different route this time....I made fun of U2! I find it kind of shit that the new U2 album automatically gets added to your playlist thing if you have an iPhone, so I've show my concern in cartoon form! Now I know that's a pretty shit picture of Bono and I don't care. I can do proper caricatures, it has been awhile, but I can do them, but they always take me ages to do as I'm not very practiced at them. To be honest I'm not a big fan, I didn't have the time, so I just did a quick cartoon version of him. Thankfully I've got the coloured glasses and the speech bubble saying his name to help me out somewhat.
Anyway, hope you like it.
Mike
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
