Here's the latest WaynoVision comic for your enjoyment:
I've mentioned in previous posts that it's always satisfying to come up with a wordless gag. (We're not counting "EXIT," since that's a bit of scenery, not dialog or a caption.) This is the second silent comic to appear since we launched WaynoVision back in December. You might recall the earlier one, which puzzled a few readers. I sometimes preview gags with friends and colleagues to get a feel for how successful they are. This one got a delayed reaction from some of my test subjects, which is nice. The teenage cyclops blends in with the other patrons, but once you notice him, he becomes very prominent, so the unresolved tension lasts for an extra beat, resulting in a little more relieved laughter when you put the pieces together.
This drawing is a bit unusual, in that crucial information is supplied by the color (in the lenses of the 3D glasses). If the gag had run in black and white, it would be difficult for the glasses to be recognizable as 3D lenses. Gray tones could have been used, but wouldn't have worked very well. In this case, having the comic run online only, in color, is an advantage. The final comic was pretty close to my original sketch. And, yes, I drew the sketch in July of last year.
When I looked at the sketch later, I realized that the layout was reminiscent of a classic Charles Addams cartoon, showing Uncle Fester in a theater, giggling at a sad movie. The gag is different, though there's a similarity in concept, with one moviegoer being somehow different from all the others.
A little research revealed that this appeared in The New Yorker back in 1946, and that the original art sold for a little over $40,000 at an auction in 2012.
My research also confirmed that the characters who came to be known as The Addams Family, by way of the mid-1960s TV show, only acquired their names when the show was in development. They were never given names in his cartoons.
New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff discussed the work of Charles Addams in reply to a series of questions from New York Times writer Patrick Healy back in 2010.
Thank you for reading the blog. Please check out WaynoVision every Monday. Each mouse click brings me closer to that new pencil sharpener I've had my eye on.
Today's WaynoVision comic presents a familiar domestic scene, with an apian twist.
This panel is a replacement for an earlier (and much less elegant) gag based on the idea of bees being sexually attracted to flowers.
Last December, I was talking shop with fellow cartoonist Hilary Price over drinks (naturally), and shared some comics I had in the pipeline. We've collaborated in the past, and both enjoy dissecting and analyzing comics. I asked Hilary and her knowledgeable, literate, and funny girlfriend Kristin about this specific panel, because after I'd completed it, it seemed a little crude in its execution. They both agreed, and we brainstormed over other ways to present the premise. We thought that there were several elements to like in the original version. Depicting worker bees as construction workers was fun; the magazine title Playbee made us giggle; and the plaid Thermos bottle was a nice prop. However, the line "I'd pollinate that!" brings to mind an all-too-common vulgarism that's truly ugly. Also, the worker bees shown here are obviously male and hetero, and the stamen is the male part of a flower's anatomy, so the whole thing breaks down (certainly for an over-thinker like your humble cartoonist). Riffing on the flower on the magazine cover, Kristin, Hilary, and I then discussed the possibility of working a Georgia O'Keeffe book into the gag. O'Keeffe's paintings of flowers were (and still are) widely interpreted in Freudian terms, as representations of female genitalia—a view the artist rejected. And the drawing in the comic was in fact based on her work. A minute later, Kristin suggested a mother bee discovering an O'Keeffe volume under her kid's mattress. We all laughed out loud at that, and I knew we'd hit gold. The final comic is funnier, subtler, and much more effective, and is a testament to alcohol-assisted collaboration.
I do miss that plaid Thermos, though.
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Once again, while drawing the comic, I had music playing in my mind's ear. This time it was "Momma Bee," by the wonderful Neil Innes, whose music I have enjoyed since my youth.
Today's WaynoVision comic features one bad-ass Cupid.
This guy's serious about romance! The gag was inspired by that old standby character, the rogue cop, typified by Clint Eastwood in his Dirty Harry films. In an earlier sketch, I showed the pugnacious cherub toting an Uzi with a heart painted on its side.
Revisiting the drawing a few weeks later, I felt ambivalent about the choice of weaponry. It just didn't seem very funny to me, what with the numbing regularity of gun-related deaths taking place in the US. Although I'm not an editorial cartoonist, the gag looked to me as if it might be championing guns, which is certainly not my intent. The subject of guns, particularly automatic weapons is so loaded (sorry), that I felt it distracted attention away from the gag. Not wanting to abandon the idea, I pondered it for a few more days, and decided to try it with a crossbow, which delivers the gag without the baggage an Uzi brings to mind. Perhaps I over-think these things, but the crossbow struck me as funnier, being a ridiculously souped-up version of the simple apparatus usually associated with Cupid. Thanks for following the blog, and please visit the GoComics WaynoVision page regularly. Remember, every click puts a fraction of a penny into my pocket! We'll close today's post with a musical take on the Eros myth, from good old Martin Fry and ABC: "Poison Arrow," from their 1982 debut LP The Lexicon of Love. This song was playing in my head when I drew the cartoon. Enjoy.
