When Cakes Square Off...

I'd like to introduce this cartoon with some intelligent, witty commentary about how I thought it up, but I can't.  I was eating cake, that's all.

Enjoy.

An Unsuitable Job for a Cat

I drew this effort some time ago, but it came too soon after this cartoon I did about a blind man, so I decided to wait a bit.

For the record, I do not think disability is funny per se, but blind people can have funny things happen to them just as easily as everybody else. As a partially-sighted person, I can personally attest to this.

I'm not sure what's going on with the minimalist landscape, though (I am: downright laziness - Ed).

Something for the Weekend

Hope you'll all be as happy as this guy is.....

Jubal - In the Wild

Here as threatened promised, is another one of my old cartoon strips, digitally remastered for your viewing pleasure.

Think Dungeons & Dragons....

Happy days...

Toys You Cannot Buy

Here's another cartoon.

It ocurred to me that the Action Man (GI Joe for our US friends?) is missing a trick.  You can get all kinds of costumes for him - but not, I suspect, the one in the cartoon below.

Perhaps, there's a series here.  Roman Catholic Chaplain, Rabbi Chaplain, dare I say Muslim Chaplain (mind you, that's a toy that's not getting made any time soon - no images of humans allowed and Action Man is just that).

Political Incorrectness Gone Maaad!

Sometimes, but travel can be boring.  At these times, my mind wanders..... and gets to here.

Bad, naughty brain!

The World Should Reflect the Data

Another cartoon that came out of a throwaway remark made by a colleague at work.

As some of you may know, my job is to support systems that provide management information (MI).  One of the annoying things that happens is when someone rings up and complains that the system is not showing the figures they expect.  A lot of times, this is just a case of the user not understanding what the report he/she is viewing is actually showing and is easily solved with a bit of explanation.   Sometimes, though, there is a genuine fault and we have to amend the information held in the database, which can be very tricky when lots of pieces of information are dependent upon each other. 

Sometimes, it'd just be easier to fix the world....

I tried out several ideas for this joke, like having someone fallng from a high window, having been pushed, or of having the IT chappie looking through the sights of a sniper's rifle about to shoot someone.  I tried having IT chappie running out of the room, snatching up the rifle as he went.  None of them really worked though.

In the end, I think this is more subtle and hopefully funnier (plus it was easier to draw!).

Lies Told by I.T. Support

This cartoon came about as a result of a joke conversation we had in the office today. 

It having been way too early this morning when I logged in, I had forgotten to put some files onto one of our web servers (a routine job we do every day).  The users spotted this and raised an enquiry about the missing files.  We quickly copied them over and told the users to look again (note the subtle psychological hint here that, somehow, the users were mistaken - it's a VERY important weapon in the IT Support arsenal).

Lo, and behold, the files were there, but the users then wanted to know WHY they had not been there before (our Jedi mind-tricks were not so potent after all it seemed). 

Now, seasoned IT professionals that we are, we did not want to admit to such a mundane thing as a case of numpty-itis, so we "forgot" to answer their email for a bit, hoping they'd get bored and drift away.

A bit later, one of the users, who clearly fancied himself as a bit of a techno whizz-kid, emailed in with this deathless theory: one of the files is bigger than the other two.  Is it possible that the big one blocked the other two from copying across?

Bless!

Anyway, I tried to get my boss to email the guy back with the explanation being touted in the cartoon below.  Sadly, he refused, but we had a great laugh out of the idea.

Hope you did too!

The future of tele-conferencing

Another cartoon that's been floating around in the old noggin for a while. 

I originally wanted there to be a hand coming out of the screen and delivering a stinging slap.  Wasn't happy with drawing that though, so came up with the above instead.  Not enough pain on the guy's face methinks, and not enough of a feeling of r-e-e-a-a-l-l-y-y-y squeezing coming from the hands.

Who has not wanted to do this to a colleague?

Some Assembly Required

OK, I know I said I wasn't going to turn this into cartoons and not much else, but they're a-coming thick and fast at the moment....

I had the idea for this one a while ago and sketched and inked it the other day.  After scanning, I loaded it into Windows Paint and tidied it up.  The square stick in the caveman's hand was made longer and the instructions stone on the ground was almost entirely re-worked because, quite frankly, it was pants.  I think the guy's head is too big (amongst other things wrong).  It was fun to do, though. 

Any real artists out there, please feel free to weigh in with critiques and constructive advice.

Magical Tech. Support

Digging out some of my old cartoons a couple of posts back seems to have ignited something in my head, as I went on to have the idea for a new cartoon.

When I had the initial idea for this (on the bus, where all the best ideas come to me), I had an image of a cute-looking young witch, complete with headset and computer and she would be saying the “Have you tried….” line. This seemed quite amusing to me, but maybe a little too bland and inoffensive.

Then I thought about having an angry and frustrated-looking Gandalf-type wizard on the phone and he would be hearing that line from the person at the other end.

Better, harder-hitting, but still not quite right.

So, how about having something going horribly wrong in the background – a monster climbing out of the grimoire or a massive explosion which has trashed the place?

Now this seemed like the way forward. When I started sketching, however, I just couldn’t seem to fit in the background detail and get it to be completely obvious what was going on whilst at the same time having the enraged wizard in the foreground. And where to put the speech balloon so it did not obstruct the image but still remain easily visible?

Meh!

It was when I began to draw a few try-outs for the monster’s head that I hit on the idea of the disaster already having happened and there being not much left of the hapless wizard (saves me having to draw him!). Now, if the creature could be munching on what was obviously an arm or leg, the message would be clear enough, I thought.

So that’s what I went with, adding a few touches like the torn hat, glasses, broken wand, etc. for extra gruesomeness.

There are a few technical prblems (OK, loads, probably) but it's turned out pretty much how I wanted it.

So there it is. That’s how things get done in my brain.

Don’t worry, this is not going to turn into a cartoons-only blog. I just thought it would be fun to share the picture and thought processes that went into making it.

Jubal

Back around the time when dinosaurs first roamed the earth (the mid- to late nineteen-eighties in fact), I went through a phase of drawing a cartoon strip. For fun, I thought I'd share a few of the least terrible ones in the first of an occasional series.

Sadly, I loaned all the original drawings to a friend to look at, but he split up with his then partner, left them behind at her house and then had the bad manners to die suddenly (yes, Sam, I do mean you, wherever you are!).  All I have are photocopies.

As I was seriously into Dungeons & Dragons and all things fantasy-related in those days (still am, as a matter of fact), the strip naturally got set in a typical fantasy world.

Jubal is our eponymous hero and he is a wizard who is not incompetent as such, but doesn't always think things through, and to whom strange things tend to happen.

His sidekick is Osric whose profession is completely unknown – even to me. He just seems to hang out with Jubal sometimes.

In this strip, named with staggering imagination, Pictures in the Fire. We see Jubal (on the left) and Osric out camping.

This next one is one of my favourites. I called it Rocky (oh, the wit!).  I think I like it because I took a bit more care with the drawing and lettering than usual. I like Jubal's irrascibility in it, too.

Note the odd-shaped frames. All the Jubal cartoons were enclosed in these originally (I removed them from the above strip as it looked really messy after scanning). The frames were made by drawing around a promotional coaster.

Hope you enjoyed.  I'll see if I can dig out some others and scan them in.