Shhhhh

[presented without subtitle]

Amy K here. I’ll tell you something about me: I really like words. Let the family newspaper I slipped into The Boston Globe every Sunday for a stint when I was a kid, the boxes of diaries I’ve kept since I was 14, the musicals I wrote about orphans and the novel I started about a group of sweet, cool girls who decide to take a trip to a beach town over the summer and plan to raise money by babysitting (I like to write, I didn’t say I have original ideas. Sidenote: Did The Baby-Sitters Club ever actually …babysit? I just recall fun-filled adventures and interpersonal drama. I don’t remember them working.) Anyway, I like words, and I’ve always had a problem with using too many of them. I remember when the report I did on The Yukon Territories (Prompt: “Write about a Province or Territory of Canada”) was thirty-four pages instead of…. like, three. (TLDR: epic adventure about mining for gold.) I cringe at all the long notes I wrote ex-boyfriends. I have to wait several days before sending important emails so I can cut them down to readable length. I have 226 notes in my Notes app currently, where I’m typing a draft of this intro. It’s too much!!

The point of this story is that I became a cartoonist because the cure for WORDS is… you guessed it: PICTURES. What a relief for me to discover that if I just drew my ideas and stories, I could live peaceably with my word-itis and never again bore another workshop full of MFA writing students. 

Last week, Ellis brought you captions full o’ words. He mentioned that the opposite, the cartoon with no caption, is our crowning cartoon achievement. The wordless cartoon: an idea completely cured of its words! Here we go, Toonstackers, show us the pinnacle of our form. Bring us… the silent cartoon! 

Johnny DiNapoli

Me? I’m a word guy. Probably 99 out of 100 cartoons I draw have captions. One of my favorite cartoonists is Saul Steinberg, the GOAT of the captionless cartoon. His work is smart, sophisticated, and ever so elegant. In other words, three things I am not. But hey, sometimes it’s fun to step out of our artistic comfort zones, and for me that led to drawing this cartoon. Also, for the record, I am VERY bad at chess.

Navied Mahdavian

In one of my favorite scenes in Children of Paradise, the 1945 French romantic epic set in the theatrical world of 1830’s Paris (I was a film major in college for a year, you know), a man in the audience shouts, “Shut up! I can’t hear the mime!” That’s kinda how I feel about captionless cartoons–shut up! Let the image do the talking. 

Maggie Larson

Captionless cartoons are my favorite kind of cartoons to draw. Without words to rely on, the image itself has to do a lot of work and can be especially imaginative and playful. That said, drawing them can be challenging. It has to be clear, but not too obvious, but it also has to be inviting and not present as a puzzle. No one wants an unfunny puzzle! Otto Soglow is one of my favorite cartoonists and a master of the captionless subgenre. I remember encountering his work and finding it so eloquent and well captured. I also dig the captionless cartoons that have sequential images which is what I modeled my cartoon after. It may or may not be based on my own experience with a fly in my apartment. 

Hilary Campbell

Silent cartoons are one of those rare things for me. I wish I thought of them all the time but alas, I love to talk. But sometimes they come to me, and when they do, they’re usually about dogs. By the time I die I expect to have drawn what people will call “way too many dog toons.” My favorite part of this one is the door they have to get through.

Ellis Rosen

This topic put me through a bit of a cartooning existential crisis. First, I went through my files looking for cartoons without captions. Found a bunch, no big deal. But then I thought, does signage count? If it has words doesn't that basically function the same way as a caption? So then I went through my cartoons that did not have any words at all. Now I have a narrower field to choose from. But then it occurred to me, what about symbolism? Do tally marks count? or maps?  What about pictorial representation in general? Isn't a picture worth a thousand words? In that sense, is there even such a thing as a silent cartoon? What are letters if not little pictures, and vice versa? Meaning can be found in every tiny mark! I started to panic, but then I thought: “Wait a second. Ellis, you're probably just hungry!” So I had a bagel and now I feel much better. Anyway, here’s a captionless cartoon:

Amy Kurzweil

How did I come up with this cartoon? Fishing —> line —> floss —> big teeth —> shark.

Here’s another:

Mouse —> maze —> wandering path —> Plinko

I love captionless cartoons because they let your mind free-associate through visual shapes. Try it at home! What things look like other things?

---

As always…

• Have you checked out cartoonstock.com? Thanks to New Yorker cartoon editor emeritus, Bob Mankoff, this is the place to license and buy prints and merch of the best cartoons in the world, from The New Yorker, Wired, Airmail and...ToonStack! 

• Amy Kurzweil teaches cartoon classes on Patreon! (She did a whole class on silent cartoons!) Sign up now to get the recording of every past class, and join the next live class April 24.

• A new session of Kendra’s drawing class starts April 12th at the 92Y

• Order Send Help! a desert island cartoon collection by Ellis Rosen and Jon Adams, out now!

• Order Hilary Campbell’s Murder Book, out now! And check out her substack!

• Pre-order Sofia Warren’s book, Radical!

• Be sure to check out Shelby Lorman’s newsletter, Please Clap!

• The same goes for Sofia Warren’s advice newsletter, You’re Doing Great!

• See more cartoons from Ellis Rosen’s weekly Junk Drawer!

And hey, we always would love it if ya: