It has come to our attention that our regular references to (censored) and his son (censored) may be considered as offensive by some people. We have therefore converted one of our toons into a non-offensive one, not just removing the names of (censored) and (censored), but also the common epithet (censored). In order to protect the identity of (censored) in this toon, a black bar has been placed before his eyes.
In a cartoon, you will typically want to tell a story or convey a message. That story or message can be just about anything: stuff you experienced in real life like your boss giving you an anal probe, or more absurd things like religion, or whatever. It’s your story and your message and you can do with it whatever you want.
Whatever you want? Well … no, not entirely. Caus’ you see, there’s a limitation that you need to take into account when you create cartoons, and that limitation is space. No, not the final frontier. Just the frontier. Period. You only have one, two, perhaps three small images that you can create to tell your story. OK, so Garfield has more than that on Sundays, but still, the number of images is still limited.
And within each image that you can create, there is another space limitation! You see? There really are different dimensions to space. The other dimension is that you are limited in the number of objects (characters, props) that you can put in an image. This also applies to the text inside each image. You can add a small explanation that situates the cartoon, but it should be concise. And so are the thoughts and words of your characters.
This means that the information you can give, should be limited. You may do a cartoon about your boss giving you an anal probe, but you can’t add information about his parents and grandparents, who lives next door to you and how you dog once caught a rabbit because in most cases, such information will not contribute to the story you want to tell. People might go “oh, poor rabbit” or “oh, yes, I knew his grandfather! He used to bugger his cat!” in stead of “oh, poor probe being stuck up someone’s anus!”
This is one of the things that sets aside a good cartoon from a bad one. Which does not imply that all cartoons that keep account of these limitations are good! Hell, nooooo! We’ve made several concise ones that weren’t that good. Yeah, yeah, I can already hear you thinking “since when did these guys (and girls!) make good cartoons”. But if you don’t like them, we’re not the ones forcing you to read them.
Similar limitations apply when one writes a poem. You have one thought, one feeling, one image that you want to convey. You only have a few lines to do so, so you cannot dilute your message with noise-information. Imagine you’re sitting in a restaurant with your loved one, and you’re just about to tell you love him or her, when someone drops a few gadgets in front of you asking for money. Wouldn’t you just love to shove those gadgets op that fellow’s rectum? (you thought I was going to say “ass” here, didn’t you?) Well, the same goes for poems. You have one message, one concise story and just a few lines to convey it, so you don’t want to spoil that by adding too much.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the poetry of cartoons …
This is the Whitsunday weekend, and it was bound to inspire a few cartoons even more than it did the apostles so many centuries ago. So I made a second exception to the rule not to do a variant on a joke immediately after the initial joke. But then, what is the purpose of rules, other than to be broken?
Some people … in fact, a lot of people … wonder why we keep on offending God in our cartoons. The question is, however, do we really offend God, or any Gods in our cartoons?
Let’s start with this: for the ease of writing this blog entry, I will use the 3rd person masculin singular pronouns (that is “He”, “Him”, “His” for those who did not eat the linguistics apple). This in no way means that I think God is masculin, and it is not a denial that He is feminin. God can be either masculin or feminin, or both, or neither. So, let’s stick to “He/Him/His” lest you would want me to add “(or She/Her, It/Its)” each time I use a pronoun to refer to God, okay?
Now then, God is supposed to be a perfect being. Perfect meaning “not having any flaws”. God has the perfect tan, the perfect type of hair, He is never ill, never has a bad temper, when He cooks a meal, it’s never overdone and He never comes home from grocery shopping having forgotten half of what He needed. He doesn’t go “I am perfect and your are noo-ot, I am perfect and you are noo-ot” at imperfect beings either.
No, God, the perfect being, does not have all those flaws that we, mere humans have. This means that He does not know vanity from personal experience, and He does not have an ego that needs to be nurtured all of the time. He won’t, for instance, ask you to kill your only son -you know, the one you spent your entire life on trying to produce?-, just to make Him feel loved. The perfect being that is God, does not need that.
You can spend an eternity cracking jokes about God, tell Him that His mother was of a canine nature or slap Him in the face with a dead fish all day long … He will not get annoyed, for that would indicate that He has a flawed ego. He won’t even tell you off about the dead fish actually being a Monty Python joke. He won’t feel hurt in any way, for a perfect being cannot be hurt. Nor offended.
So, claiming that God feels offended by a few jokes, implies that one diminishes Him to a flawed being, not better or worse than any of us. And wouldn’t that constitute the greatest blasphemy? Not that God would take offense at that either …
We have received many comments by Ancient Greeks stating that they consider our cartoons about Zeus, Hera, Leda and Danae to be blasphemous. How dare we defy the Gods of the Olympus by making jokes about them? How dare we mock their Gods? Note the use of the possessive pronoun here: “their” Gods, as if divine beings could be the property of us, simple humans.
There have even been threats by a fellow named Leonidas, king of the Spartans, that if we don’t stop mocking his gods, he will come and kick our asses. Of course, we will be glad if kicking will be the only thing he does to our asses
Not that we are impressed by these threats. They just go to show that no matter how much we esteem the Ancient Greeks, no matter how much we consider them as being a civilised and rational people, when push comes to shove, they behave like a violent bunch of barbarians uttering threats. Of course, the usually very bad grammar and even worse spelling does give them away as mere barbarians.
So, this one is for you, Leonidas … may the Persians do unto your ass what you have planned for ours
Most ToonDooers will probably have noticed that occasionally, the robot that converts our work into a cartoon, goofs up a bit. Text balloons don’t get placed; or the balloons do get placed bu some of the images are missing; or the props are not in the place where you want them to be …
I’ve learned that, when a cartoon gets a bit more complex, it is a good idea to save it as a private cartoon first. You can then view it and if it is not OK, change it, adapt it until it displays the way you want it, without any other visitor having noticed that you are still working on your cartoon. When the results are as you want them to be, you can then make your ToonDoo public, for each and every one of us to enjoy.
And for those of you who now think “hey, aMoeba is being serious for a change”, we are always serious, for humour is a serious matter.
Yes, today saw the birth of “God, Inc. - 200″. Actually, if you count the one that is not numbered, the one on the first page of the “God, Inc.” ToonBook as well as the few cartoons that got a b-number, “God, Inc. - 200″ is not the 200th cartoon in the series. That honour would go to the one number 197. But the again, the 21st century didn’t start in 2000 either, did it? It started in 2001, which also saw the start of the 3rd Millenium.
So, God, Inc. - 200 … I wanted to make something simple yet funny … hmmm … well, here’s an idea:
Six days into my vacation and I managed to find free internet access (you really didn’t expect me to PAY for this, did you?).
The bad news: I’m using a PDA, so no chance of even thinking of making a cartoon. The good news? The perverted mind never stops working tho, so I’ve written down the outlines of a few new Flocci cartoons. Thirty three so far to be precise. I seem to have taken a liking to the absurd and weird lass, it would appear…
At this rate, there might actually be some 70 odd toons awaiting birth by the time I get back home. If we publish 5 per day, we’re good for another two weeks from there. Scary, innit?
Anyways, this was just a word of warning, the ideas are still flowing. Freely…
Who knows what the future might still bring? (Well, actually I do…)
Suppose, your door bell rings. I take it that this isn’t too hard to imagine as door bells sometimes have a tendency to ring. It is their sole purpose in life. Ring. Not have a chat with you or go to a pub, no, just ring. It’s a sad and pathetic existance they have, but there’s nothing much we can do about that. Imagine someone wanted to ring your door bell and it was out shopping? People at the mall would be quite surprised if suddenly, next to them, a bell started ringing. It would be even worse than cell phones!
Anyhow, suppose your door bell rings. You aren’t expecting anyone in particular, so you wonder who it might be. You open the door. Nothing. Nobody. But just as you try and close your door again -damn kids, that’s the third time this week- you hear a scream coming from below. A highheeled foot is stuck between the door. Attached to it, a little fellow with a surprisingly deep voice. “I would like to talk to you about the Kingdom of Heaven”, the voice booms at you.
And then you recognise the high heels, the voice that masters so many tone ladders that it ranges from deeper than Barry White to higher than Michael Jackson. OK, the suite threw you off. There should have been women’s stockings or at least an 18th Century looking kind of shirt, but you recognise the fellow: The artist currently known as the artist formerly known as Prince.
As he glues the broken heel back to his tiny shoe, what do you do? Ask him in for a cup of coffee? Ask for an autograph? Or just slam the door in his face? Tough choices, huh …
It is said that there is a first time for everything. While I doubt that there will be a first time that I’ll try bungee-jumping (I’ll skip to the second attempt immediately ), today has seen a double first. Which is yet another first, but let’s not delve into that one . The birth of a twin cartoon, “God, Inc. - 188″ and “God, Inc. - 189″ and the fact that these two cartoons have a Godmother.
Although many cartoons in the “God, Inc.” series are variations or continuations of a previous cartoon, the variations never followed their predecessor immediately. That is, until today, when Apple announced that they rejected an iPhone App that enabled users to fashion their mugs into portraits resembling Jesus Christ.
Now you have to wonder about something. Yeshua ben Yussef, or Jesus Christ if you wish, lived some time before the invention of photography, and with nobody at that time bothering to draw a painting or make a sculpture of him, we actually have no idea at all what he may have looked like. There weren’t even any cartoonists around at that time! What is almost as good as certain is that it is unlikely that he resembled Jim Caviezel. Or Robert Powell for that matter, unless perhaps, through some ironic twist of fate. So basically, what Apple is saying is that it is defamatory to use a picture of a person an give that person long blond hair and a beard. Next thing, they’ll be shaving people who just happen to have those two features and say it is defamatory
In any case, this was too good an opportunity not to convert into a few cartoons and as news becomes old news very fast, I decided to make the variation cartoon immediately after its predecessor.
So far for the first “first thing” … The second “first thing”, but I only name it “second” because one has to make choices in which order to say things, is about the Godmother. The article that both cartoons were based on, was sent to me by none other than fellow cartoonist Meerasapra, who figured that this interesting bit of news would inspire me.
For your amusement, here are the two cartoons in question:
Entries (RSS)