Collaborative Cartoons
Toonstack#4
Well, well, well. Look who came crawling back to to ToonStack #4. That’s right, YOU did. And boy did you make a mistake because this week, I’m the editor, and I’m NOT playing around! Who am I, you ask? Why it’s none other than Ellis Rosen, the “Bad Boy” of cartoonists age 35 and older. Listen, those other editors? They took it easy on you. But not me. I expect you to read through this newsletter and laugh at least 46 times. And if you learn a little something along the way? Well, GOOD, even BETTER. I LIKE learning. Unless it’s in a CLASSROOM setting. I never really EXCELLED in school.
What were we talking about?
Anyway, this week's topic is Collaborative Cartoons, which means cartoons that were created by two or more cartoonists. Usually that means somebody thought up the concept and caption and the other somebody drew it. But not always! Sometimes the cartoon is the result of a wild brainstorming session, or a funny conversation. The following cartoons are collaborations, and these are their stories
DUN DUN
(that was the Law and Order sound)
Amy Kurzweil
Setting: iMessage threads, various
Characters: Very Attractive Cartoonists
Occasion: Working on weekly batches
Mood: Stressed, but in, like, a cool, attractive-person way
One time Ellis “the bad boy of cartooning” showed me a rough sketch and was like, “Hey do you get this cartoon?” And I was like, “No. But that word has a lot of weird letters in it.” He was like, “Why don’t you draw it?” and I was like “Okay, I like drawing sheep.” I later learned that Kosciuszko (which is really hard to google because it’s really hard to spell) was a Polish-Lithuaninan military engineer, statesman, and military leader who became a national hero in Poland. And it’s also a bridge in New York and apparently I am a hack New Yorker.
Another time I was like hey Jason do you like this idea [sketch of bad idea about a wolf] and he was like here’s a better idea! So I drew that.
The other day, Navied was showing off how many good cartoon ideas he had and I stole one and drew it then my moral compass was like “nooo” so I had to put his name on it too, sigh.
The moral of my stories is that my friends teach me new words, have good ideas, and inspire moral growth, and I like drawing animals.
Navied Mahdavian
The other day, I was showing Amy how many bad ideas I have. She politely nodded her head and said things like, “That is an idea” and “Wow, you have great handwriting!” Pretty soon, she was speechless (I knew this because she stopped replying). Being a fan of lab rat cartoons herself, I shared the idea for the above cartoon, a nod to the rom-com Notting Hill (which, incidentally, was inspired by another frequent collaborator of mine, Marta Florio). Typically when I’m brainstorming ideas, I tend to riff off of the same idea until I (hopefully) get something that works. Lab rats is an idea I frequently return to because of their noble and under-recognized contributions to, like, everything. This idea didn’t survive the process, so I was happy Amy liked it and drew it. It sometimes takes another pair of eyes to help recognize a good idea, which is why it is not uncommon to see an over-caffeinated, pleading-eyed cartoonist walking down the street asking passersby, “Is this funny?” And hearing in response “Wow, you have great handwriting!”
Originally, I sent a sketch of a completely different lab rat cartoon to Ellis for feedback (which incidentally ended up being bought as a Caption Contest cartoon). He responded, “How did you get this number?” He’s funny that way. One time he texted me, “Please stop knocking on my door and running away.” What a joker. In any event, he ended up suggesting this, which is how I’ve gotten some of my favorite cartoon ideas. I added the name Gary, which is my go-to cartoon name (my apologies to any Garys out there) and submitted it.
So, who wants to go knock on Ellis’s door and run away?
Kendra Allenby
I don’t do a lot of collaborations on gag cartoons. Partly, they seem like such scanty plots of ground for collaboration and partly because it takes so much time to draw my own ideas that there’s not a lot of time leftover. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m more open to collaborations in the coming years though.
The exception has been my husband, Evan. He’s my in-house editor, caption sounding board and most important line of defense against my terrible spelling. He has looked over almost every cartoon I’ve ever submitted. He’s also the only person where after he said “I have an idea for a cartoon,” I drew the cartoon.
We call the cartoon above “Evan’s first cartoon in the New Yorker.” I had it drawn and the caption was there in idea form, but in a word-smithing session Evan realigned the words so they really hit the mark. He was perfectly set up for this from a “write what you know” perspective since it’s basically us at the beach.
And here’s the rough with a few proto captions squirming around, waiting to be aligned into pithy perfection.
Jason Chatfield
In 2018, after 15 years of freelancing as a cartoonist and having been published many times flying solo, I started collaborating with my friend and fellow comic, Scott Dooley to share the frequent anxiety (and sporadic joy) of submitting New Yorker cartoons.
I hadn’t done this before and immediately found it so enlightening. Watching one of my own ideas go through the filter of somebody else’s comedy brain-wiring and come out the other end with a lateral tag or alt punch I’d never have considered myself was addictive, and it suddenly clicked as to why there were such things as ‘writers rooms’. (I’m slow on the uptake.)
There is an aspect to our trade with which every cartoonist or stand-up comic is intimately familiar: and that is the solitude of being a ‘one-man-band’. For the highest of highs (rare) and the lowest of lows (frequent), there is nobody to share it with, outside of an on-looking spouse or a flatulent dog at your feet.
More “Thoughts on Having a Writing Partner” here.
Hilary Campbell
When it comes to coming up with cartoons, I have a sketchbook that I’m constantly doodling when I’m both sober and not sober or sometimes even asleep. On Sundays, when it’s time to attempt to make money out of my doodles, I sit with my sketchbooks and sift through them. Some of them are a more obvious idea that can be immediately turned into a final cartoon, but most of them are just the beginning of an idea. At which point, I take a picture of it and send it to everyone I know and just go “help.” Some people don’t respond (we are no longer friends obviously) but other people like my friend Ellis are always there to *WORKSHOP*!!!
Workshopping sentences often start with the words:
“What if it was like…”
“Or it could be…”
“This is stupid but…”
Cartooning, in my opinion, would be literally impossible without my cartoon friends. The job is already what some might say “extremely isolating” - and I for one would be lost without my fellow cartoonists. It’s amazing what a new perspective can provide! Also, if you think too hard about it you’ll be like “omg I’m not really that funny, my friends are funnier than me and I’m just feeding off of their ideas, I’m a fraud!” But you have to ignore those thoughts, because everyone needs help.
This cartoon I made with Ellis started from a text thread where Ellis was thinking about some old sad guy gossiping in an office (this would be me if I was in an office). Then we were laughing about if he had a flavor or a scent. What would it be? We spent forever deciding what his name should be. For whatever reason I love to use the name Steve. I just want to make fun of people named Steve CONSTANTLY. But is that… cruel of me? Am I hurting the Steves of the world? Oh well!!!! Once we decided on the idea Ellis drew it and I was like “it’s perfect.” And this one actually sold to The New Yorker which is very exciting.
David Ostow
If you’ve chosen to be a cartoonist over, say, anything else, it’s just as likely as not that it’s because g-d or nature or the universe or whatever you want to call it endowed you with a novel but extremely limited skillset. So when you get the inevitable “I got a cartoon idea for you!” from a well-meaning friend / family / associate it can make you defensive. After all, when was the last time you told your dentist you had some great ideas for root canals that maybe he hadn’t thought of?
It’s easy enough to shrug these ideas off. Until the day you get a good one. The above cartoon idea was brought to me by my best friend of three decades, Dan Salomon, and it’s pure gold if you ask me. Which is problematic because it’s like the dentist who hears his patient out and has to say to himself “eight years of schooling and I never thought of that?!”
I guess sometimes non-dentists have a knack for dentistry and non-cartoonists have a knack for humor. Dan’s since come to me with a string of good ideas and he’s good to have on hand when I’m having a spell of writer’s block. Nice set of teeth on him too.
Ellis Rosen
Ah, the collaborative process. Sorry, that came out wrong. What I meant was AHHHH! THE COLLABORATIVE PROCESS! I personally have a love/hate relationship with collaborating. I love the person I'm working with and I hate myself. It is, however, a great method for making great cartoons. This is usually how a collaborative cartoon comes about:
Me: Hey, what do you think of this cartoon?
Them: AHHH! Get out of my house!
Me: Sorry, wrong house.
Then after I find the right house:
Me: Hey, what do you think of this cartoon?
Them: It’s OK, but I have an idea that would make it better
Usually their idea makes it so much better that it’s a different cartoon. At this point I could say “thanks!” slap my signature on it and pretend it's all mine. But the guilt, you see. It would eat me up. It would follow me for years. I could hide the cartoon under my floor boards, but the caption would play through my mind, teasing me, slowly driving me mad until I shout out “I ADMIT IT! IT WASN'T MY CAPTION! I CONFESS!” and really confuse my dog.
It’s much simpler to slap both of our signatures on it. With all that in mind, here are some cartoons that I collaborated on, and a comment from the collaborator:
Tom Chitty
The only time I've had more fun working with another artist was when I collaborated with Leonardo da Vinci, by signing the Mona Lisa with a sharpie.
Brendan Loper
The best way to figure out if someone is mad at you is to force them into a collaborative project. The project must be a) time consuming and b) public facing. Some of these projects, like this cartoon, end up inconclusive but if you keep upping the ante you’ll eventually end up with a successful collaborator/enemy situation also known as “Simon and Garfunkeling.” Best of luck to you.
Jerald Lewis
As part of my court order community service I had to help up-and-coming cartoonist Ellis Rosen. So this was not the most natural collaborative team up. My role in this collab was to add the visuals for the cartoon and give feedback on the caption. I believe that this turned out to be a great creative collaboration and would do it again, even without a court order.
Sofia Warren
When I was applying to college, Bard asked its applicants to respond to the question, "What is art?" Sometimes, I still think about her: that poor, poor admissions officer who had to read through thousands of 17-year-olds’ opinions on the nature of art. I weep for her. I weep artfully. My weeping is art.
In my experience, what art is not, thank the Lord, is divinely ordained. That would be lonely for us art-makers. Turns out art (at least the cartoon kind) is made by a bunch of slobs like me, toiling away, thinking about cartoons a lot, getting sprains in their fingers. And that means that when my cartoon-making gears are all gummed up, I get to text my friend Jason a picture of a crime scene with dance steps coming out of it and say, "I need a caption," and he can text me back one second later with "He can't have salsa'd far." And then, because neither of us are even a little bit divine, we can call it a day at 4:30pm, go eat tacos in the park, and talk shit about Los Angeles and/or the movie Crash.
Jason Katzenstein
One time eight years ago I accidentally said the malapropism “gristle for the mill.” Sofia has never let me live it down. But when I think about collaboration I just think about the fiction that I’ve ever made something on my own, whatever that means. I’ve spent many a lovely Monday next to the folks included in this newsletter, offering up some raw material that isn’t quite a joke and asking for help, advice, support, assurance that I’m not a complete fraud. The truth is that without drawing next to my brilliant friends who inspire me endlessly I see no reason to be a cartoonist. And it’s not just the drawing! The tacos in the park and shit-talking Los Angeles and the movie Crash are equally important. Friends, tacos, parks, conversation; it’s all gristle.
Sofia is so good at drawing, and so driven to be better, that you can’t really be around her and not want to rise to the occasion. So I did the easy part, which is I came up with the few words in the caption. I can’t remember if this is before or after we saw Gus Van Sant’s John Callahan biopic Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, but no doubt my brain was reaching back into some room in the memory palace and referencing that Callahan cartoon. I love cartoons whose stories extend in time and space beyond the boundaries of the drawing.
One of my favorite contributions to the “just off panel” genre is a tweet by Nathan Fielder with the caption, “Out on the town having the time of my life with a bunch of friends. They're all just out of frame, laughing too.” You can imagine all of my cartoons that way, impossible without all of my friends, just out of frame, laughing too.
COOL CARTOON EXTRAS
Amy’s next Toon Zoom cartooning class is April 11th! Sign up for her Creative Community tier on Patreon to join, plus access recordings of past classes and a digital space to share your work with others.
Shelby Lorman’s newsletter, Please Clap is a must read
The same goes for Sofia Warren’s advice newsletter, You’re Doing Great
Sofia, Amy and Hilary, as well as lots more cartoonists and comedians are featured in this new anthology Notes from the Bathroom Line
Go read Ellis’ weekly cartoon series Junk Drawer!
You made it to the end, but you only laughed 42 times. Don’t just stand there! Get down and give me two more laughs!