Finding time to cartoon...

My profile reads, Husband, Father, Cartoonist. Since I was a teenager I have wanted to make a career of cartooning. The original idea was newspaper syndication but I found that cartooning required more writing than I anticipated. (it's actually more writing than it is art when you think about it.) Great art can't save a bad gag...

I lost years because I had no faith in my ability to write a new gag every day for a few decades (providing I got such a contract with a syndicate). The newspapers changed, the strips got smaller and I got busy living. But I always had a note book around. I was always working on something...

But then, I started dating the girl who would become my wife, we made plans, I backed into a fruitless 12 year career in the hotel business, we needed benefits, planned to marry and start a family, buy a house...etc etc.

Life got in the way.
Exactly what John Lennon said would happen.

But I still work on the writing thing even as I fill sketch books with doodles that never see the light of day...because "a cartoonist is just a writer who draws." You would think with all this material/life experince to work from, cartooning would be easy. Marriage, kids, mortgage, bills...who can't relate?

Now cancer. Where's the funny?

Certainly lots of comic strips and gag cartoons if written well make us smile (or laugh) if we can relate to the situation, in my experience funny equals common ground. If we've been there, we can laugh about it. That's why I think stand up comics who often do "observational humor" can be the funniest people around and "Baby Blues" is still worth a look. And the pros make it look soooo easy.

I'm sure with the millions of people who have been exactly where I am today there is a lot of common ground to cover. But I seem to have a hard time finding the "Funny" in all of this right now. Yet my sense of humor seems to be in tact, I just can't translate my real life into a two dimensional cartoon.

Yet.

John Callahan http://www.callahanonline.com/index.php however has found the humor in his handicap and as sick and sometimes truly twisted his cartoons are he's gotten me to laugh out loud in the past. If he can find the funny, maybe I can too.

Maybe when I get past the preoccupation of what's going on now I will find the time to channel all of this experience into some kind of art. I have always leaned towards cartoons and elaborate doodles that look more abstract than traditional cartoons, but at least it's something.

Comic Strips are like situation comedies, Set up, Set up, Punch line. Gag cartoons are more like vaudeville, just punch line. I'm not writing much of either these days.

In fact I'm waiting for the punch line.

Maybe I'll be more Charles Addams than Charles Schulz after all of this, but I'm feeling the drag of not working on anything right now.

It's always something...