Left it in the Drafts

ToonStack #9

Woah woah woah! You can't just waltz into the latest issue of ToonStack and start reading like you own the place! You gotta slow down, take some time for us to get to know you. Tell us about yourself. Who are you? What’s your story?

Oh, mmm-hmm. I see. That’s very interesting. 

Okay, enough about you, this week's theme is called “Left it in the Drafts.” Let me explain something. Not every toon we think of is automatically going to make the cut. There’s a pyramid, see? On the top, published cartons. These toons are so sufficiently funny that someone actually paid us for them. One tier down, those cartoons that never got sold. That's where the vast majority of cartoons end up. You may see them on our collective websites and social media. Then, on the bottom tier, in the darkest corners of our sketchbooks, lives the outcast cartoons that were never drawn. These cursed toons will never be seen by anyone. 

Until now!

That’s right folks, today is the day you journey to the very bottom of the barrel! You will gaze into the abyss of ideas that are so bad, they only exist as a sketch, or a quickly jotted down note. So step right up and feast your eyes at the cruddiest, crappiest, cartoon concepts never to be seen! 

Did you catch any of that, or are you still droning on about yourself? Jeez, enough already. We didn't ask for your life story. 

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Jason Adam Katzenstein

(Sigh.) The New Yorker isn’t a fan of puns. I get it. Puns are often a way to show instead of tell, and the best gag cartoons are about the dance of meaning between word and image. Cover the caption and it shouldn’t work. Cover the image and it shouldn’t work.

(I’m stalling because I don’t want to show you this drawing.)

I am a fan of puns. Sometimes I can meet the magazine in the middle by literalizing an idiom. Behold, some compromises: 

But sometimes idiom wordplay gets even more dumb. Sometimes one comes up with something for which there is no excuse. Sometimes....ugh, just look for yourself: 

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Amy Kurzweil

Here goes. Ellis told me I should do this even though it’s DEEPLY EMBARRASSING FOR ME. Below are screenshots from the note on my iPhone in which I record fleeting ideas and non-ideas for cartoons. This note is very long now, and I stupidly made it so that I add new ideas to the bottom of the list instead of the top, and scrolling to the bottom of the list takes so long that I had to write TK at the bottom of the list so I can just search for TK whenever I want to add a new idea. Did you know T and K never appear together in the English language and that’s why it’s a good placeholder. I’m digressing… also it occurs to me that I may need a new system. 

It’s all to say that I don’t do much sketching and throwing out of cartoons. I work out the idea in my head and in words before drawing it. This does not prevent me from drawing bad ideas. But I, like a fool, almost always ink them. I guess I welcome the opportunity to practice inking even on bad ideas. But some ideas, as you’ll see below, are so bad that they should and do stay in the dark recesses of my phone, never to be shown the light of pencil, until Ellis asks me to show them to you. THANKS ELLIS.

(Annotations are from me, right now):

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Jason Chatfield

My sketchbook is a mass grave of half-formed or ill-conceived gags and sketches that will never see the light of day. Most of the time the cause of death was “I googled it and someone did a way better version of it” or “Nobody is going to buy that”. The latter is no good reason not to draw something, but an excuse is an excuse. Once in a while something will be so dumb that even I wouldn’t buy it if I were editor of some kind of futuristic cartoon magazine, and I had travelled forward in time to pitch to myself. I’d look up over my glasses which have slid down my crooked old nose, squint at myself across the desk and say, “This one ...should have been left in the Drafts.”

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Hilary Campbell

I drew this in my notebook because it felt like the only way to emulate how I feel when people think my name is spelled with two Ls. I thought it was so flippin’ funny. But when I looked at it more and thought about doing a finish on it, I realized, this could be wildly offensive to anyone with a disability. And so alas, it has been left in drafts. Except now it’s here on ToonStack. Please, no one get mad at me. I HAD GOOD INTENTIONS.

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Sara Lautman

I got invested in this idea that snowmen and clowns could have some kind of commonly regarded essential sameness. Like, “Snowmen! The Clowns of Winter.” Or “Clowns! The Snowmen of Summer.” “Clowns of the Tundra.” “Anytime Snowmen.” Something something. I wrote this in notes app.

I played with some transpositions (dating scenario where a snowman’s conservative parents are appalled when he’s dating a clown; obnoxious snowman at a party says something crass to a clown about being “the same”) but nothing clicked.

I ended up working with the existing adage that “dolphins are the clowns of the sea” and made a cartoon about a dolphin trying to attend a clown convention.

Sadly, rampant ignorance of dolphins being the clowns of the sea hurt the cartoon in test readings. Later on I realized that the joke itself is about this “clowns of the sea” thing being obscure.

Meanwhile, in order to get anything out of the cartoon, the reader has to be familiar with “clowns of the sea.” Which the cartoon itself believes they are most likely not. So pretty much what I’m saying with this is that the only reader who would care enough to recognize the clown/dolphin adage would be a dolphin. Pretty basic lesson of “who are you writing for.”

Does no one remember being told that dolphins are the clowns of the sea?? It was on the Simpsons and everything!

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Jerald Lewis

I was toying with the idea of balloon animal creation without the assistance of a clown. So I chose one of the most beloved balloon animals. It was pretty simple balloon plus dog equals balloon dog. I shopped this premise around with a few friends and didn't really get a reaction. This was way too funny to me at the time. Also this seemed like low hanging fruit in the haha department. 

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Ellis Rosen

The song “Sandstorm” by Darude is hilarious. However, the words “Sandstorm by Darude'' are not particularly hilarious. So until I can figure out a way to make the song “Sandstorm” by Darude actually play out of the image, this toon will have to stay in my sketchbook.

This is the only cartoon idea that I've ever shown my mother that she didn't like. That's gotta mean something.

And this is the worst thing I have ever done.

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Johnny DiNapoli

A recent go-to brainstorming method I’ve had is this: open a new google doc, set a target number of ideas, and type whatever comes to mind without too much thought. I try not to take more than ten seconds between each idea. This generates a lot of bad/unworkable ideas that’ll never get drawn. But I find this combination of speed, repetition, and non-judgment takes the pressure off, and every now and then a fun and surprising idea finds itself on the page. The late Jim Steinman wrote “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad”- for me, I’ll take one decent idea out of ten. 

This list from November is a good example of what usually happens. First three ideas are pretty meh. 4 and 5 are kinda fun. 6 and 7 meh. 9 and 10 are half-ideas I can maybe develop later. Number 8 seemed fun enough to draw, and here’s the final result. Ain’t bad!

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Asher Perlman:

I get most of my ideas when I do my daily Morning Pages, and I’m a huge fan of the “quantity over quality” approach. As a result, I usually have about five cartoons roughly sketched out by 7am, and, as you might expect, each and every one of them is a flawless masterpiece. That being said, every now and then I end up with a dud like one of these:

I really like dumb smart people, and I thought it would be funny to have two doctors trying to fix a car. The result was the above cartoon which is not really a joke. You can’t even tell that they’re doctors, which was an interesting choice, but they say cartoons are a great place for subtlety.

My worst ideas usually come out when I’m forcing myself a little too hard. On Valentine’s Day, I was determined to come up with a topical cartoon, and, Reader, as you can see, I did.

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For Your Pleasure: Cartoon Extras

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