No Excuse

I've talked about this before, but when I get an idea, it's usually either 1) A vague notion of an idea that I write down and work on at a later date that sometimes turns into a usable idea. or 2) I see or hear or hear something and an almost usable idea instantly pops into my head. Now, #2 doesn't happen as often as I'd like, and it's always a happy surprise when it does and I wish it did happen all the time, definitely would save me some time that's for sure.

This week's cartoon falls into the #2 catagory, but I almost didn't do it though. So the other day I was out and about and I saw a guy, who appeared to have a metal disability wearing a "Bazinga!" t-shirt on and my very first thought was "well that's no excuse for being a Big Bang Theory fan". As you may or may not know, I hate that abortion of a TV show, as you can see from the cartoon I did about it awhile back (http://brinkscartoons.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/junk-food.html). You know you really hate something when you do a cartoon about it twice, so you know I'm serious. I really don't understand why this show is so popular, I really don't.

I've been vainly attempting to get a Twitter following for some time now, but I suck at it, I don't Tweet enough and when I do think of something funny to Tweet, I tend to eventually turn it into a cartoon instead anyway. When I had this slightly wrong thought (yes I admit it), my first thought was to Tweet it, but by the time I got around to doing it I'd thought more about it, the more I thought it could be a good cartoon idea instead. This is why I have hardly any Twitter followers.

I did contemplate not to do this cartoon at one stage as I thought it might offend people....but then I realized those people are Big Bang fans so they deserve all that they get anyway. But seriously, I must be getting old, since when have I ever thought about not doing a cartoon as it may offend people? I mean it's not that offensive....right?

Anyway, I hope you like it even if you are a Big Bang fan....


Mike

Into the Ewwwwww

(click the strip to see a bigger version)

So this week I had a cartoon almost finished and ready to go, that I started last Friday, and I was going to finish it, then....Paul Walker died. Let me explain: Yesterday (Sunday) I was just about to go mow the lawn in the afternoon and I did a quick Facebook check beforehand and all over my feed was stuff about Paul Walker's death. Now I don't know about you, but I tend to do a lot of thinking whilst I mow the lawn, usually about cartoon ideas, but because I just read about Paul Walker dieing I kept thinking about it and came up with this idea. I knew it was good timing, as I could do it that night and still be relevant, as you remember a few weeks ago with my BitStrips comic, I do sometimes struggle to keep up to date and have 'topical' humour. This is usually as I mainly only draw my cartoons on Fridays. The other thing I did like about the idea is that I've not even making fun of Paul Walker, and man there was some bad, tasteless stuff flying around the 'net yesterday. So I managed to remain topical and nice! Kind of.....

Why is it black and white I hear you ask? Well as I only had limited time to do this idea on Sunday night, I set myself a challenge to do a black and white strip in one night. You see black and white cartoons are very old school from the days of them primarily being in black and white newspapers and I've been meaning to experiment with it for awhile now. So, I thought this would be a good opportunity to experiment and test myself at the same time and I knew the idea had to be in strip form as a single panel wouldn't work. You know what? I was actually excited to do this all Sunday afternoon and night, it was fun! From start to finish this whole cartoon from scratch only took me 2 hours, which is pretty good I must admit. I'm quite proud of myself! What do you think? Another reason I wanted to experiment was the regular comic strip I've been working on that I plan to launch in the new year. I'm still not sure whether I want to do it colour or not yet, so I'll do some more playing around.

Hopefully everyone has seen or at least is aware of the movie "Into the Blue" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0378109/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_16) if you haven't seen it, let me summarise it for you:  Jessica Alba in a skimpy bikini and every feeble plot point leads to her getting into a bikini and the camera somehow always ending up shooting her from below and aiming between her legs.....yep, that's about it. It's shit, and full of beautiful people not wearing much, if a guy has this in his movie collection you know why, he's an Alba fan. So now you don't have to see it....unless you love looking at Alba, but don't expect much else from it.

Alrighty, I'm off see ya next time!

Mike

A Gentle Trip

Greetings again my dear friends! Not much back story on the cartoon idea this week, as it was one of those "I see a word, think of a rough idea and I write it down" ideas. Wether or not the word I saw was "Strip" of "Trip" I don't remember, but I saw the word and though about how easy it could be to mix them up if only one letter was missing and that was pretty much it. More thought went into the exact wording of the caption honestly....

I am a big fan of jokes that use word play and more specifically when words are confused with a simple letter missing. If you need proof I've actually done several gags with this similar formula. Now, I'm not just being lazy here and reusing a formula or anything, I just find these jokes particularly funny for some reason and if I think of another one I probably still do it in the future. Pretty sure it's several....although only one comes to mind, which was the "Heroes/Herpes" one here: http://brinkscartoons.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/super-defacement.html. I'm sure there's more though....

Anyway, that's all I've got this week, enjoy! See you next time!

Mike

The Two Week Window

Hello again! So sorry about last week, Once again I had a sick child and my Aunty from New Zealand was visiting for the week so I couldn't get much work done at night either. Oh well, you have a brand new cartoon this week, so don't complain.

The other day I thought about how cathartic it is for me to do cartoons addressing things that annoy the shit out of me. One thing that did really annoy the shit out of me a couple of weeks ago was this crazy BitStrips bullshit that was flooding my Facebook feed. Now as much as I freakin' hate Facebook, I'm at home with 2 kids most of the time, so I use Facebook an awful lot to 'keep in touch' with everybody and it is a really good tool to promote this blog. If not for it my pageviews would be horrible. Anyway, so heaps of people were using this stupid BitStrips thing, although it pretty much annoyed almost everyone, I was also annoyed on a professional level. Have you ever heard professional photographers complaining about how amateurs go out and buy an expensive camera and all of a sudden they think they're a photographer? Well it's the same thing! It's an artform damn it! I've spent years working on my technique of drawing and idea generation and people download some freakin' app and they think they're a cartoonist! I think it would have bugged me more if I actually saw some pretty funny ones, but I didn't really, so that makes me feel slightly better.....slightly.

So last Friday, I decided I wanted to do a comic about BitStips, no idea why I didn't a couple of weeks ago. When I went to work on the idea for the cartoon, I realised something....I hadn't seen a BitStips comic in my Facebook feed in awhile, oh no, I'd missed my window by about 2 weeks! What will I do now? Yep, sometimes when faced with a problem the cream needs to just rise to the top. I thought "Screw it, I should just do a comic about how I was too late and make fun of the ridiculously small window of stuff being cool on social media!" and also make fun of how old and out of touch I am. I think in the end this idea proved to be better than any of  the actual ideas I had for a normal BitStips joke anyway! I think I was going along the lines of how a cartoonist dies every time you use BitStrips, I don't know I never finished the whole idea process on that one anyway.

I tried to make this cartoon kind of look like a dodgy BitStips comic, but not too much because really, if I was going to make it exactly like one, I  may as well have just used the freakin app to do the cartoon and that would kind of make me a hypocrite....never done that before have I? #cough#cough#ownes and iPod#cough#cough#bitches about Apple#cough#cough# But the funny thing is, because of this style, I drew and finished it really fast....probably quicker than if I downloaded the BitStrips App, figured out how to use it and create the cartoon with it. Go figure, that's how a real cartoonist rolls bitches! So that's why there's no detail, shading and a crap gradient background....it's deliberate! Oh and also why the guy in red's limbs are at stupid angles.

Wow, this post is getting long, better wrap it up, see you next time!

Mike 

Take Two Hours

Ahhh, it's good to be back and healthy again and drawing cartoons! So during my recent illness, let's just say my mood wasn't always the greatest which led to the idea for this cartoon. You see the other week my eldest son Dash discovered the joy that is, funny cat videos on YouTube. So for a brief period he was slightly obsessed with them, the plus side of that is that I think about 50% of YouTube is just cat videos so it wasn't hard to find some. 

So I was feeling crappy one day and Dash wanted to watch cat videos with me and you know what? As much as I make fun of these videos, they damn well do cheer you up that's for sure. So as I found my mood lifting I had the thought of "Man YouTube cat videos must be the worlds most powerful antidepressant". I wrote that down in my notebook and the rest was history.

Oh and just for the record easily my favourite video is this one: http://youtu.be/00KM53yZi2A I've seen that cat attack that printer so many times, yet it still makes me laugh or a least smile, pure gold. And here's another favourite of mine: http://youtu.be/6wA319ZtkTQ The cats in this one remind me of my youngest son Kylar, such a trouble maker!

Anyway, enjoy and I'll see you next time!

Mike

Super Defacement

Sorry, had to dip into the vault again this week as I've been quite sick and feeling like crap most of last week. Mind you, this one still looks really good even though it's about 5 years or so old, and honestly if I hadn't even mentioned that is was an old one I doubt most of you would have noticed anyway! But hey, I'm not going to lie to you guys would I?

Even though this is old, I can still remember how I got the first idea for this one! I was riding on a train one day and I'm always fascinated by what books people read, I think it says a lot about you honestly. Some people go through medicine cabinets, I poke through your bookcase...anyway, so I always have a good sticky beak at who's reading what on public transport and this one day a woman in front of me was reading some book about heroes and I only got a quick glimpse at it and thought she was reading a book about herpes! I did a quick double take and eventually saw the real title and made a note of it. How funny would it have been though, if she was reading a book on herpes...wait a minute, hmmmm, I think I have another idea forming.....

I remember for ages, the idea was always going to be something about sporting heroes/herpes, and a male sports star who sleeps around a lot having herpes. I think Shane Warne was the one I was going to use, by I could never quite nail the joke, so I eventually looked at it again and came up with "Super Herpes" and this final idea instead.

Anyway, I've had about 3 hours sleep last night, I'm still kind of sick so I'm going to bed, see ya.

Mike

A Little Feeling

This week's cartoon is another fine example of why you should always carry a notebook with you and write down whatever random ideas you have....well, that is if you're trying to come up with useful ideas that is. This one came from me seeing a poster for some cold and flu pills that had something about 'Feeling a little horse' and that was all I wrote in my notebook, was that exact phrase. Last week I was sitting at a cafe drinking a coffee whilst looking through my notebook that I usually carry around in my back pocket when I'm out and about, when I came across the horse idea. 

I always knew the idea would revolve around feeling up a horse of some sort, but what I did with this one was combine that idea with a really old joke I knew, which goes something like this: "A guy calls up his boss and tells him he can't come into work because he's sick and the boss says: 'really? How sick are you?' of which the guys replies: 'well I'm in bed with my sister...'". I have no idea why that particular joke popped into my head at that moment, probably 'feeling sick' and 'feeling horse' sparked something. 

Anyway, I really loved the idea mainly for 2 reasons: 1) I love drawing horses....no idea why, I just do and 2) I'm a big fan of also drawing the facial expression the horse has, not sure what you'd call it, but I like it. So I was very keen to draw this one as you'd expect, and I pretty much went home and started on it  right away and as it was really easy it was all done quite quickly. There's not all that much detail in it, which helped and I probably could have done a different, more detailed background, but hey, it wouldn't have any effect on the joke so who cares right?

Anyway, I hope you like it!

Mike

Then He Gave it a Brain

At first appearance this week's cartoon may appear to be just a simple dick joke, but no, a little more thought went into it than that. I'm not sure if it's just a guy thing, but in general if someone if given complete creative control to create something, often you'll find a certain number of them will create a dick shape. I'm not sure why, and in fact I wish I could do a social experiment to give a large group of people some clay and see just how many dicks are made. This was proven quite a few years ago when a PC game called Spore was released when you could create your own creature to inhabit a planet and even though they banned your account for a period of time online if it resembled a dick, so many people made dick creatures! If they didn't ban them, then that game would just be inhabited by dick monsters I swear. Don't believe me? Just a quick Youtube search for "Spore Penis" (I got 6,050 results and this game came out in 2008!), like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubyv9X13hR8 Now that's just wrong...Oh wait, look at this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-MnJtLIdlI

And look at all the famous inventions inspired by the penis shape; Rockets, bullets, dildos....wait, maybe not that one, but you get the idea.
So am I really giving this way too much thought? Probably, anyway so I've noted this down quite some time ago, that people just love making dick shapes. So I did play around with several ideas on this subject, mostly revolving around someone having the ability to create anything he wants and he makes a dick first. It wasn't until the other week that it finally occurred to me just who that person could be, the man who created it all, God! So being the Atheist that I am, I always enjoy making fun of the big guy, but technically this isn't really a religion bashing joke, if you understand how I got the idea. Who else is more famous for creating stuff? And I really like the idea of God just stuffing around at the end of a long day creating existence.  

I'm also a massive Gary Larson, Far Side fan and this cartoon is also inspired by one of his classic cartoons, this one: http://thebodaciousbelgradeblog.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/farside5.jpg Which is why, if you look carefully enough you can see a container marked "Jerks" in the background. I also added some subtle jokes on the spines of the books on the top shelf in the background, but I doubt you can actually read them anyway, so they were probably only just for me, we'll see. Oh and the "Human Clay" thing, not a reference to the Creed album, just putting that out there.....I'm not a Creed fan.....maybe once when I didn't no any better, but not anymore.....no really.

Ok, until next time my friends! (I need a cool, catchy sign off phrase, any ideas??)

Mike

Curly Traces

You know what? After all these years I think I've finally found the best system for brainstorming cartoon ideas! Riding on the bus with headphones on and a notebook on my lap. Simple yes, but effective! I can't procrastinate as I only have a short time each way and pretty much nothing else to do, I don't know why, but it just seems to get me more focused than normal. Don't get me wrong though, all my other methods still work well, as the notebooks I bring on the bus are full of random notes from many different times and locations. So all my methods combined tend to work I guess. Anyway, so I finally had a chance to take a bus ride into the city by myself last Friday, and seeing how productive it was I might try and do that every couple of weeks or so from now on. Now if you remember I mentioned last week that I had a cartoon half done and guess what? This isn't it, as I got this idea on the bus ride home to do some work  on Friday and liked it so much I just had to do it!

I've mentioned before, that sometimes all it takes is for me is to see a word or a phrase and a little lightbulb goes off in my head to let me know that there's something there to use for an idea later on. This one? I saw the phrase "May contain traces of nuts" somewhere and that's pretty much all I had written down eventually. When I first started developing the idea I was going with a joke revolving around Mr Peanut (https://www.google.com.au/search?q=mr+peanut&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=SjirUbS3BsiyiAeNn4CQBQ&ved=0CDwQsAQ&biw=1920&bih=955) and ladies who were alergic to nuts not being able to have sex with him or something along those lines. Then I thought about 'nuts' and 'balls' (that sounds wrong when you say that out loud honestly, if only I was thinking out loud on the bus, ha!), and and that a trace of 'nuts' might be a pube and then I pretty much was on the path to this idea from there. So, sorry Mr Peanut, maybe next time buddy, next time....

Alrighty, see ya

Mike

Thumb Resting

So of late I seem to finally getting into a kind of groove when it comes to cartoon ideas that relate to what I've been doing that week, which is nice. Can you see where this is going? Normally I'm a FPS (First Person Shooter, for all you non-geeks) player on my PC but my good mate Ben has been hassling me to play the new Call of Duty on my Xbox with him. In the end he just bought me the game for my birthday and now I'm crazy hooked on it....damn it. Which leads me to my story, so Ben and I with some mates were planning on a big session one night last week. That day I was out shopping and I was using my phone for something and, which being a touch screen phone, I was using my thumb which was getting sore and I seriously thought for a second "Maybe I should stop using my phone to rest my thumb for tonight". And that was it pretty much, I then thought up this idea, done.

Anyway, that's all for me this week, I'm really tired as I was up most of last night (I'm actually typing this up Sunday night) with a sick child, so I'm going to be.

See ya!

Mike

Can't Get It (1) Up

Sometimes the best ideas arise just from what you do in your everyday life, like this cartoon for example, which came from playing lots of Mario! Let me explain, you see my 3 year old son Dash has liked video games for a little while now, which anyone who knows me can tell you that's no real big surprise, but of late Mario games have become his current obsession. He's always been a big Mario fan, I think it's just now that his skills at Mario games are actually getting quite good, so he can play the games properly. It's actually quite scary how good he's getting, he can easily finish whole levels by himself, in both 3D and 2D Mario games! So Dash and I have been enjoying a fair amount of time playing New Mario on my WiiU, I know, it's a tough gig being a stay-at-home parent. 

I kind of had this vague idea about Mario getting big from mushrooms quite awhile ago, but during some 'Mario time' with Dash last week this full idea came to be about Mario using power-up mushrooms to 'power-up' his 'equipment'. I do enjoy drawing Mario as well, so any excuse will do. Oh and just in case you have no idea what I'm talking about, in the Mario games, Mario grows bigger when he grabs a power-up mushroom like the one I've drawn.

So, in the next couple of weeks I'm really hoping to get some extra 'toons saved up, as in about 2 weeks or so I'm going on a family trip to New Zealand for 2 weeks. If I get them done in time, I can set up Blogger to automatically upload them at the same time I usually do while I'm gone. I just need to find a way to automatically do some social network promotion at the same time, as most of my regular traffic comes from Facebook and other sites. I'll look into it, I'm sure there's a way to do it, I'll keep you posted.

Anyway, see you next time! Thanks for reading!

Mike

Man's Best Friend

Lately I've found I do my best brainstorming when I'm out and about, mainly due to less distractions and all. When I'm in my office I do tend to procrastinate on the Internet and stuff around a lot. When I'm on a bus/train or sitting in a cafe I have nothing better to do and I'm there for more focused. I've been taking bus rides into the city by myself with headphones on, on Fridays of late and it's been awesome. I've been working on some really good ideas. 

So anyway, this idea came from one day I bought the newspaper and I was having lunch at a cafe and one of the headlines literally was "Thief attacked by man's best friend". The first thing that popped into my head was a giant anthropomorphic dick beating up a thief. Anyway, I kind of liked that idea so I just wrote it down and I only just revisited it last week on one of my bus rides. Being me and over thinking it, I thought it didn't really make much sense that a guy's best friend is a giant dick, when really his own dick would be his best friend, so I then thought about a guy's dick shooting a thief with a gun. And I thought what better way of showing it then pretty much how I thought of it, have a guy reading the newspaper and thinking about it, done.

Until we meet again,

Mike

Fiddler Confusion

Greetings! This week's cartoon was originally meant to be a comic book cover inspired one, which if you follow me on any sort of social media, I posted an in progress sketch a few weeks back. But unfortunately I didn't have enough time, as it's one that will take a bit extra time to do properly and I didn't want to rush it and therefore stuff it up. So I just went with a good old quick 'normal' one this week instead! Hopefully next week I'll have the other one done.

My eldest son Dash is obsessed with Monster Trucks, amongst other things, so I've been watching a lot of Monster Jam on TV and playing the video game a fair bit of late. It's kind of sad that Penelope and I are starting to get into it now as well. So after so much monster trucks I started to wonder what would be the most 'montsery' monster truck you could possibly create?  And you know what the first 'monster' I thought of was? Yep, paedophiles.....So, I had an idea of this fearsome of all monster trucks called....The Kiddy Fiddler! Which, to be honest, I still really do like that idea....but I couldn't think of a good 'punch-line' for it (not yet anyway), but it did get me thinking about "Kiddy Fiddlers". It didn't take me long to think of the two different 'fiddlers' and come up with this final idea. 

For quite awhile though it was going to be a fiddler busker with the "Kiddy Fiddler" sign and he was getting dragged off by two cops. It wasn't until the day before I did this I thought it would be better if it was a guy at home advertising his services with a sign that would look like he's a convicted paedophile that was forced to put the sign up to warn the neighbourhood. Isn't it funny how things develop? And who said paedophiles aren't funny? Well, they aren't really I guess, but nothing wrong with making jokes about them right?

If this trend continues, it probably won't be long until I do some seedy joke about Toy Story next!

Until next time my friends!

Mike

At Least You'd Get Free Wine

Greetings! How are we all? This week I discovered another good brainstorming technique! I'm always searching for new ways to brainstorm cartoon ideas, so I often try many different methods. I have a notebook that has "'Almost There' Ideas Book" written on the front, which is full of single line descriptions of ideas I've had where I just know that it's a good idea, but it's just missing 'something' to make it usable and awesome. These ideas are transferred from one of my "Big Book of Ideas", which is full of random ideas, but I always earmark the "almost there" ideas to then transfer to my other book. I've been doing this for quite some time, but last week I thought I'd bring the book with me on a bus trip into the city. I usually only brainstorm in my office, but being out and about really helps with brainstorming. Nothing quite like a good old change of scenery to boost the old grey mater. So instead of just sitting there on a bus staring out into nothing I used that time well and nutted out some good ideas. And the few I did come up with I then, as I was walking around the city with headphones on, fine-tuned some more. So, not only did I get some errands done, I was also working at the same time! How's that for good time management? I've now started using this new method in my lunch breaks when I work on Saturdays at my 'real job' to. All over it!

So I had the basic idea of getting Cheeses and Jesus mixed up for some time, it just wasn't until my bus ride the last week that it finally came to me just how to do it. I think I really loved the idea of Jesus just standing there in the doorway not looking to impressed, honestly. Anyway, enjoy!

Mike     

Cow Tipping

Hello! So as I type this it's about 10:30 Sunday night and after being woken up this morning at about 5:45 or so by my 2 boys, I'm pretty tired. Just finished off this cartoon, so I think I'll keep this one brief so I can go to bed....

Brainstorming the other night and found a note that simply said "Cow Tipping" and thought I'd give it a go. Now my first thought was cow tipping at a restaurant or something, but I thought that's probably been done before and after a quick Google search I found that was the case. Quite a lot of other cartoonists had done something similar, which was pretty much about cows tipping or not tipping. So I thought I'd look at it from another angle and think of some other types of  "Tips" and being the gamer that I am, I very quickly came to the good old game 'tips'. And you know what else? I freakin' hate these guys who 'back seat game' on you and tell you what to do while you're playing. Especially you know what you're doing, ahhh!

Anyway I'm going to bed, good night....

Mike 

Limited Facial Vocabulary

This weeks idea came from my mate Ben, who has a secret crush on Kristen Stewart, who posted a funny image on my Facebook wall about her and her lack of facial expression. Here it is:

I saw it and for some reason I thought I'd set myself the challenge this week to do a Kristen Stewart joke. Now, I'm pretty sure if I wouldn't have thought of the whole robot angle if not for the help of my son Dash I have to admit. As last week, all he's wanted to watch on TV is his DVD's of Rob the Robot over and over, which I think influenced my thought process. Well, that's what I'm assuming anyway, maybe I would have got there anyway, who knows.

I think a rough version of the final idea, I got quite quickly, but I did keep working on it to see if I could improve it somewhat, or think of something better. For awhile there I was actually going to go with something about Facial Recognition software, whether as a machine at the airport or an App I wasn't sure. But I really liked the punch-line of this idea, the "That's 18 more than Kristen Stewart has", which was what made me go back to this idea in the end.

You know what? I'm just impress by the fact that this cartoon has the word "Facial" in the titled and it's pretty much a clean joke! There's a pat on my back right there...#pat#pat# Ahhhhhh, that's good.

Mike

Sexual Predator

I've mentioned a couple of times here just how much I tend to scrutinise all the statistics of this blog, such as pageviews and traffic sources. Being as this is a Google based blog, I get detailed stats on what Google search leads people here. Gotta tell you, there's some strange and interesting keyword searches that's for sure. The other day I had a look for the search words for the previous week, which looked like this:

Now I can understand most of these...except a couple there, yep, you know the ones I'm talking about. I wonder just how disappointed the people were who looked for "Slaughtering women the cocks and..." and "Blowjob on the phone cartoon insta..." were? Anyway, I posted the above photo on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter as I'm a social media whore, and my friend Bec mentioned the "Comic predator porn" one. Which I didn't think anything of as I knew it was because of the Predator cartoon I did (http://brinkscartoons.blogspot.com.au/2011/10/sly-predator.html) but she thought it was someone looking for sexual predator porn. Which, she may be right, so I really do hope that weirdo was disappointed. But it got me thinking about "Sexual Predator", which led to this new cartoon. I did spend a fair bit of time Friday morning working on some ideas while I was out for lunch and it did take me awhile to get this one out in the end. I thought of many different ways to visualise "Sexual Predator", like a teenage Predator getting a boner in a high-school class full of humans, a Predator in a human porn movie (I was going to do another "I've come to clean zee pool" again) just to name a few. As usual I was panicking a bit on the drive home as I didn't know what cartoon I was going to drawn that afternoon and boom! After thinking and thinking about Sexual Predators (never thought I'd say that) it came to me, a Predator hiring a prostitute! You think I'd have more faith and confidence in my ideas process by now wouldn't you? Nope, I still panic just beforehand...mind you if I was more organised and had final ideas ready to go before the day I have to do them then all would be good, but hey, I am the master of procrastination....

So I spent a couple of days debating whether to have the caption "Sexual Predator" on the bottom of this cartoon or not, as it's the title of the blog post and all. In the end I was worried that the joke might get missed if someone didn't see the title (especially if the cartoon is seen outside the blog as just an image) so I just put it in there. Which does kind of bug me, as you may know, I like people to think a bit to get a joke rather than just spell it out for them, it's more fun that way. And my favourite jokes always tend to be ones like that, hence also why I prefer them. Oh well, what do you think? Does it work as well without the caption?

See you next time!

Mike   

My Non-Literal, Visual Interpretation of Glee

Greetings! Look, there's no denying it, I hate Glee (not as much as Big Bang Theory), as you can guess. Kind of understandable as I'm not the biggest fan of musicals in general, it just bugs me when people act normal and next thing burst into song and well rehearsed dance numbers. I just don't get it honestly, I really don't. Often cartoon ideas come to me from something I just blurt out as it just pops into my head, like this one. I was at work a while ago and we were playing the soundtrack for that damn Rock of Ages movie, which was really annoying as it was all cool songs ripped to shithouse by someone else and I happen to say to my fellow colleague Scotty the first thing that popped into my head, which was: "Man not since Glee have I ever heard so many good songs so viciously bent over and anal raped". 

Can you guess what the original version of this cartoon looked like? Yep, one guy with a Glee t-shirt viciously anal raping another guy with "Your Favourite Song on his shirt. Now, I'm not one to usually shy away from inappropriate material and honestly, I haven't here...I don't think so anyway. But I was kind of worried about offending people, you know people who like anal sex....and rape victims. Did I pussy out on this one? I kind of prefer this version as it's a tad more subtler.....just a tad. Anyway, I wanted to refine it and work on it somewhat. Over the last couple of days I've been thinking about it, and up until yesterday I was planning on having a guy in a Glee shirt getting out of a really trashed rental car with "You Favourite Song" written on the bonnet with the guy tossing the keys to an upset car rental guy. So at some point today I realised that was maybe a bit vague so I thought about the fact that Glee 'kills' good songs, which led to me this final idea. In another effort to make the joke a tad easier to get, I used the stupidly long titled I went with, which is funny considering how I was only talking the other day in my Special Features post about how much I tend to avoid long titles. I think it helps, just in case people do look at the joke as a literal interpretation and think I'm having a dig at Glee fans. Which I'm not, if you like that bullshit than good for you, you weirdo.

Until next time!

Mike

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

Blow This

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