The Cartoonists' Manifesto

Written by Casey Ishitani

These aren’t so much rules as much as they are philosophies and ideas that most cartoonists should at least consider. Given that you are all students, I thought this Manifesto would be mainly utilitarian without shouting down and setting dogmatic guidelines. You don’t have to follow the Manifesto to the letter, but it wouldn’t hurt to glance over it once in a while.

------------------

First, the basics …

INTENT
All of your cartoons should be made with some kind of intent behind them. If the intent is to just draw something and get paid (as most cartoonists often do), then at least put a little effort into it. There have been too many instances where a cartoon exists just to fill the page, and that is should always be unacceptable.

As artists, you don’t have to tell us the intent of the cartoon, but you do need to at least ask yourself three things: Why do I draw this cartoon? What is this cartoon about? Why would anyone read this cartoon? Even the most surreal, insane cartoons are made with some kind of thought and purpose.

I can’t stand to hear cartoonists give run-around answers to honest questions. “What’s your comic about?” “Uhh … I don’t know … I like to draw … so …”

If you give an answer like that, then you probably have no idea what your art is about and that is complete, pretentious bullshit. You don’t want to be complete, pretentious bullshit, do you?

CHARACTER
Cartoonists need to know character from caricature. There is a distinct difference between a character generated from research, knowledge, and respectful detail, and another character culled from generalized stereotypes and misnomers. Cartoon characters are important because they allow readers to relate to situations, in that there is an element of humanity within the panels.

They don’t have to be humans, either. They can be stuffed animals, rocks, or trees or whatever. As long as they are in some way a relative translator for the reader, using the intent we talked about earlier as a leader-line, and emphasizing that intent in a way that is important to the cartoon. It would also help if they were funny.

What really helps with building characters is something called BACKSTORY, wherein you develop a history for your creation and get deep within their heads and souls so that writing them comes naturally and fluidly. It pays to know the characters and to give them distinct personalities. Like popular kids in high school, people who all sound and look the same are boring and deserve no more than antagonism.

SETTING
Where and when is your cartoon taking place? Why does it matter? How does this environment affect your characters?

The setting of you cartoon is, in essence, another character. How does it emphasize the point of the cartoon? Given the format we have, this should be kept to a bare minimum, but it should be constant and unobtrusive to the characters and actions they take.

ACTION
This is where most cartoons go to die. Basically, we are all guilty of repetition, but there are instances of overload on the cartoons page. Either it’s tracing or a copy+paste job on your computers, but it seems like most cartoonists’ characters are all just standing around doing the same thing. I know I do this, and I intend to fix it.

Cartoons aren’t sermons with drawings attached to them. Cartoon characters aren’t meant to just stand around and talk to each other. They need to be doing something … anything. Even when you’re doing nothing, you’re doing something. If your characters are slacking off, what are they doing while slacking off? How can it be important and meaningful?

This is also a good place to talk about timing. The space in between your panels is actually where all the action takes place. That’s closure, the natural ability of the human brain to decipher and imagine events that happen without actually seeing them in practice and motion. The space in between the panels is where the reader goes to work, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

DIALOGUE
If action is where most cartoons go to die, then dialogue is what buries them. Do something crazy, like speak the lines you wrote. Does it sound natural or does it sound like you’re just vomiting words? The placement of the word bubbles helps create a sense of beats within the panel. The closer the bubbles are to each other, the faster the dialogue will seem.

Another thing about dialogue: pop-culture references are fun, but if you keep using them, people will think that all you do is sit around and watch TV. In that case, they’ll stop reading your comics and watch TV. Try to add variety to your dialogue while keeping the voices true to the characters. Humans are animals that depend on speech and your characters need to embody that somehow.

Unless you have the world’s best penmanship, or you use a computer to write your dialogue, you could have the most beautiful sonnet from Restoration England, but it wouldn’t mean shit if it’s not legible.

------------------------

CRIMES:
The Seven Deadly Sins of Cartooning

All right, enough with the basics. Here are a few things that are unforgivable crimes for cartoonists:

1) Cartoons where the cartoonist was too goddamn lazy to come up with a cartoon so they drew a cartoon that basically says they were too lazy to draw a cartoon. This is almost as bad as racism. It’s an insult to your readers and your fans (if you have any) because it means that you aren’t driven or dedicated to your art and you don’t care about your own strip to the point where you openly admit that this cartoon isn’t even a priority. Well, fuck you, too, buddy. Maybe we don’t need you around here.

2) Cute shit.
“Hi, I’m a cute little manga bunny!! Look at me be all cute!! Hee hee!!”

Oh yeah, look at you not being run on the page. How cute are you now? Cuteness is not a priority. Readability and humor are. If you are drawing things just so they can be cute, please limit such inept pen jizm to scribbles on your folders or your bio notes. You can make a charming cartoon that is also insightful and funny (Calvin and Hobbes, Pogo, etc.). It’s a challenge, but it’s one that you should take without a cheap cop-out like cute bullshit.

3) Pop-cultural references that have a shelf-life of less than two days.
Remember when everyone did that whole “Yo/Yao” thing a couple of years ago? Neither do I. Know why no one remembers? Because it wasn’t funny to begin with.

Here’s something you can do to avoid referring to such dreck and making yourself sound like a complete, TV-saturated dipshit. Take a pop-cultural phrase you heard and want to make a comic about. Repeat it a hundred times. If it sounds a little less amusing after the one-hundredth repetition, it wasn’t all that funny to begin with.

4) Self-referential humor …
… is not funny. It’s like watching a guy laugh his ass off about something he saw. Just laughing and laughing, struggling to calm himself down to the point where he can tell you what’s so goddamn funny. And, when he finally gets his shit together, the little anecdote that he tells you isn’t nearly as funny as he made it sound. Then, you just want to slit his throat because he wasted your time.

That’s because there is no relatable context in between the person who is telling the story and the person who is hearing the story. On the other hand, lampooning the jackass who doesn’t get that is quite hilarious … but, don’t do that, because Calvin and Hobbes beat you to it.

Self-referential humor is artistic masturbation.

5) Advocacy and advertisement.
I’ve done this once or twice … or ten times before, and I still feel like a dirty whore. Please limit the whoring to the house ads and stick to the art.

6) Toilet humor just for the sake of being dirty.
Not funny, guys. Toilet humor with a funny context (that is at least implied within the strip) is my cup of tea, but toilet humor just for the sake of toilet humor is infantile and cloying. You know how Carlos Mencia swears and blurts out offensive nomenclatures just so he can shock people? Okay, you know how Carlos Mencia fucking sucks?

7) Ripping-off of characters.
I’m very lax on characters that are tributes or references to other characters, but when you’re taking someone’s character and placing them in your strip without their permission, you’re just asking for a lawsuit.

---------------------

WHAT MAKES A CARTOON BETTER THAN GARFIELD

I apologize to any Garfield fans, but it sucks. The cartoon is totally uninspired and repetitive and it goes nowhere. The same with Dennis the Menace and Family Circus. They all suck in ways that would make a ten-dollar whore jealous. You know when someone tells you a joke once and then tells it again, and how it’s kind of charming that they’re so stupid they forgot they told you the joke already? Okay, cartoons like Garfield, Dennis the Menace, and Family Circus are like someone telling you the joke for the fifty-five-hundred-thousandth time. It gets to the point where you won’t even use the cartoon to pick up your worst enemy’s dog shit.

Garfield is fat and sarcastic, Dennis is a brat, and the Keane kids are … white. We get it. What else do you have? Maybe Garfield could contract dysentery, Dennis could get lost and end up in Kalihi at night, and the Keane kids could grow the fuck up already. Something has to happen to break the mold.

One of the wonders of Calvin and Hobbes is that it used repetition to tackle subjects that varied in degree. Bill Watterson never told the same joke twice. More importantly, his strip evolved over time. Sure, Calvin stayed ten for over a decade, but the world around him changed. Something new always disrupted the safety and comfort of his reality, allowing both the cartoonist and the reader to grow, even if the character didn’t. No such luck for Garfield, Dennis, and the Keane kids.

You should be asking yourself, “How can I not be stagnant and repetitive? How can I progress as an artist? How can I be better than Garfield?”

------------------------

PRETENTIOUS ASSHOLES, BEWARE

You may hear from a lot of artists that comics and cartoons are Low-Art. In other words, they are the lowest common denominator in art, that they aren’t nearly abstract or avant-garde enough to be considered challenging and intelligent.

Know what I say to that? Frederico Fellini. That’s right, the director of 8½ was a huge comic book and cartoon fan because he considered it to be the ultimate in abstract and avant-garde, a nonlinear visual art form, an exercise for one’s ocular abilities, a radical pulp mass. Okay, he didn’t say the last few things, but those are attributes people have given his films, which he admitted were inspired by comics and cartoons.

You are not taking part in some kind of degradation. Cartooning is an art and you should at least respect yourself enough to take what you put on the page seriously. If you can’t do that, if you’re just going to be drawing and shitting out a punchline with each run, then maybe you should seriously reconsider what you are doing when you put pen to paper.

Not all Art School kids will be total snobs, but you need to be able to defend yourself and your art if they were. Don’t take any shit from them, just because they drop names like “Blake” and “Monet.” I got a word, too: “Lichtenstein.”

----------------------

OFFENSES

Offense is a subjective viewpoint from a party who feels that they have been violated in some way. Something that is offensive to one person can be seen as kid-gloves to someone else, so don’t let your subjectivity get in the way of responsibility. Like, say, I’m offended by emo music because it sucks and the singers sound like a bunch of women-hating homophobes with hair that looks like someone’s permed ass-pubes, but I wouldn’t dream of telling them to stop singing because that would make me an irresponsible and hypocritical artist, plus I can always listen to something else.

When drawing a comic, it might be wise to think about how others might react to it, but if only in the way to achieve maximum effect. Work for the joke or the message, not for the shock. Believe me, I know about self-righteous wrath. Not a pretty sight.

-------------------------

SUGGESTIONS

Here are some things that might work for you as budding cartoonists. These aren’t proven methods, but they can’t hurt.

1) Research.
When doing a cartoon that is topical or that carries a certain theme based in reality, a little research can’t hurt. If you’re distressed about learning things, go draw your whimsical little doodles, but realize that people won’t get anything from them. Remember, even the Monty Pythons did research.

2) Respect.
You’re not drawing cartoons for sixth-graders, okay? You’re not expected to reach the lowest common denominator. You guys aren’t being run in Highlights. You are college cartoonists and your readers will most likely be college students. I know some will argue that certain elements (political, cultural, zoological) don’t belong on the cartoons page because cartoons are made to be light, funny entertainment. Well, those people watch anime and think Meg Ryan is awesome, so fuck those people.

You need to respect your audience and have enough faith in them to connect the goddamn dots, once in while. You don’t have to explain the joke to them. Why write five words when one will work? The more you respect your target audience and your vague wealth of readers (average passerby readers) the less inclined they will be to have their intelligence insulted. I’m not talking about overestimation and blind faith so much as I’m talking about cartoons that look and read like they should be run in a college fucking newspaper.

3) Awareness.
Who reads your cartoons? Do you know who your audience is? Do you know how many people even read the cartoons page?
I got one: Do you know who the most likely presidential candidates are for the 2008 Elections?
It pays to know shit. It means everything to learn more.

4) Practice.
Do some sketches. Write a short story with your characters. Get one of your professors to look at your strips and tell you what parts are strong and what parts were lazily coddled together like booger-tissue. Flex your muscles before the real deal (and print is the real deal, I don’t care how small the paper).

5) Accessibility.
The best way to know yourself is to find a way to bring you and your audience together so that you can see the strengths you possess. While this may be a compromise of values, it will at least establish you within an artistic niche. In an accessible format, within a structure, you can learn the basics. You need to know the rules before you can break them.

------------------------

YOU DON’T KNOW? YOU BETTER ASK SOMEBODY

I hear a lot of writers and artists say the same stupid thing: “I have no one I can turn to.” Don’t be stupid.

It’s not like you write and draw in a vacuum. I’m here. You’ve got your fellow cartoonists. You’re in college. You know, if you have a life, if you reside in a certain area for a certain amount of time, you meet a few people. If you need help, there are a lot of people you can talk to. Your college newspaper has an advisor, editors, and people who will not bullshit you. They will hear your grievances and give you honest feedback. Don’t be a bunch of shrinkydinks.

People say the cartoons are out of touch with the UH Mānoa community (despite all of our egregiously self-referential, in-jokes at UH Mānoa’s expense). Let’s try to change that.