Like most cartoonists, when I was a child I was fascinated by cartoons. Specifically, I liked to see how they were drawn — for example, although I enjoyed Asterix books because they were funny, I also scrutinized the hands because they were so well drawn. Sometimes I'd look though a book just to compare all the hands, say, or the horses. Or the consistent way the buildings were drawn.
T-Rex. Sweet.
So Dinosaur Comics is something of an enigma: I read it more or less every day — and laugh out loud at T-Rex and his friends. Part of the amusement is that the drawings never change. Every day different words, but the same pictures. People who aren't into Dinosaur Comics (I was such a person, once) don't get how that works, how that can possibly work. Of course, the reason it does is because the characters' ideas are so smart and funny. But still, there's something disturbing, and amusing, about the implication that a cartoon doesn't need its pictures as much as most cartoonists think it should. Heh. Thanks T-Rex for pointing that out, every time.
Ryan North, the guy who does (I can't easily say "draws" there) Dinosaur Comics gave an interview last week. This quote is a little out of context, but he said:
"…if there were three otherwise-identical people in a room, one holding a big placard that read "CARTOONIST" while the other two had "ENTREPRENEUR" and "WRITER" signs, I'd really want to talk to the cartoonist."
Heh! Me too! That reminded me of the fabulous Kliban cartoon below. I had this cartoon on my door for many years, cut out from Kliban's obituary in a British broadsheet — "Out of the way, you swine! A cartoonist is coming!"
Cartoon by the late, great B. Kliban.