Best Cartoons from Imgur

It's taken a few years, but I have masterfully constructed an internet-based network for all my art influences. It is a veritable interstellar-highway of that art-I-wish-I-could-do pumping into my computer all day, every day. This comprises of an engorged NetVibes feed art pages and art groups, a painstakingly-categorised (that was a long evening) bookmarks folder for artists and art networks, a huge list of art pages I've subscribed to on Facebook, and many bulging volumes of files for art I find about the internet that I will definitely, definitely need later for copying.

The particuarly inspiring cartoon images I have saved to my "Cartooning and Caricatures Ideas" folder (oh, how it heaves, whilst my "Finished Work" folder does not). These are specifically three-panel-style cartoons, funnies and gags, not illustration per se. Anything that's .jpg and that makes me want to draw and write a better cartoon strip ends up in here.

These cartoons can have a particuarly good layout, a great sense of humour that gets me completely, a message that I want to communicate, an art style that speaks to me the most, etc. And sometimes you get a cartoon that boasts all of these.


All personal and overly nostalgic cartoon-taste aside, where do I frequent the most to find the very best of cartoon-commentary? That diffuses straight out of the zeitgeist, the media that speaks the truth about the unique experience of our generation? That is the most relevant to our times?

Sometimes, just sometimes, it can be genuinely productive to fall into procrastination pits like Imgur (queue the inspirational quotes for sensitive artists about procrastionation being useful for creatives). But I think it is one of the best places to find cartoons for inspiration.

There are lots of funny, meme and image-sharing websites about the place, but so many cartoons get posted on Imgur. Besides making me super jealous and more and more anxious to copy their style and content, I find the variety and type to be terrifically telling for art and audiences. The way I see it, the cartoons that gain the most popularity on Imgur's up-voting system are the art and ideas that are generally fashionable and that impress the current generation of user-consumers the most. Unfortunately, I won't be depending on this for an Ozymandius-wall-of-TVs-style litmus test of artistic trends for very much longer. An insular community culture has taken over Imgur by it's "imgurian" users to an extent that it's ability to reveal trends and ideas about the broader internet shrinks more and more every day.

"Twitter is like Ozymandias' wall of tv's in Watchmen. You don't read every tweet, but from the whole you can absorb the zeitgeist." - Mike Pohjola, on Twitter

However, one major problem I have with this constant stream of cartoon variety is that, more often than not, the artist of said artwork will not be credited, unless it is the artist himself who has uploaded the image. This displeases me greatly. Let that be a lesson to you cartoonists and artists to stick your name and website at the bottom of every image you let loose into the internet. Which is why I will now post just a few of the best from my personal collection of winners:


The Irreverant and Damn Funny

The Political

The Artistic

And these are a few of the online comics that I admire the most, for style, content, humour and spirit. The ones that have it all:

Zen Pencils by Gavin Aung Than

Stop Paying Attention by Lucy Knisley

Doodletime by SaraSeeAnderson

Fires and Boxes of Tissues

A lot has happened in the bosom of the Gomez clan.

As I spend my office hours in the doctor's surgery downstairs type type typing away and recording the deepest despair of mental illness in cool, clinical language, my family upstairs has exploded. The phone calls began and this contagion of bewildering tragedy suddenly splintered across the Atlantic and the Irish sea to afflict more Gomez's. The as-of-yet un-scathed Gomez's across the globe board up their windows and hope to wait out this hereditary plague.

When personal tragedy and hardship hits families, as is inevitable, it hits them like a tsunami; hard, heavy, and one thrashing wave after the another. Then it leaves the residual flooding, the electric fires, the power outages and a major life readjustment.

And yet, somehow, when things seem so desperate and numbing, there are straws to be clutched at.

My artistic flame has kept alight. In fact, against all sense of decency, it has ignited. Like a firecracker.

I know these aren't firecrackers, but it's a Halloween-irony thing

The thing is that I don't struggle to get my creativity going anymore. At all. This is incrediby hard for me to believe. I really accepted for a while there that the fairy muses had finally given up on me. I wouldn't blame them; my decision to study Corporate Law probably didn't do anything to make them feel welcome. I was very much the lost cause of art inspiration. I sat through a few years of Art Soc classes sitting at my sketchpad like a zombie, supressing low squirmings of jealousy like maggots inside my gut. I eventually stopped attending them entirely and dabbled with the Arts Admin side of things instead.

Now, anything gives me ideas. Markings on the wooden floor, bites of the news, splinters of sentances, jewelery on a news reader's neck, flashes of scenery out of the car window, the shape of someone's nose, flies caught in the lamps, shreds of tissue in the washing machine, half collated fragments of memories, the shape of a box...

When I have a moment of repose, like when I sit on the bus for a consolatory Galway visit, the ideas just pour out and explode and sizzle and evolve over and over. For hours. I can't keep up with it.

The glorious Feda Bus from Donegal to Galway. Four hours of boring? Not anymore.

I am constantly reaching for my phone to record slivers of ideas, stories and dialogues in my drafts folder (of course, about 30% of these ideas are pure brilliance, the other 70% are strange, questionable shite). When I squeeze my mobile back into my skinny jean pocket, I will have invariably thought of another entirely unconnected idea and have to squrim all over the seat to maneouver it back out again. Derp.

I'm having a genuine Degas moment, in the sense that I'm falling in love with everyday life. It's like being a child again. There are stories spilling out from under the doorframes, whilst the sadness barks in through the windows.I will definitely have to research this as it feels like a definite phenomena - shock to the system induces long-anticipated art attack? I won't like what this already seems to suggest.

Before deciding that moving back was more financially viable, I had seriously considered a good stint of hermitage. Cezanne style, in the middle of Beautiful Fucking No-Where. I came home to discover the origins of my artistic process, to get the addiction back and let the bug bite and drink deep. Cezanne painted glorious rocks and fruit, space and dimension. The good, hard stuff of being. I will have to be like water.

The Gomez family explosion continues unabated. I feel a little like I'm 16 again, blocaded under the stairs, listening to power metal, and scribbling away furiously out of my Buffy comics to cope with the anxiety of the formative years. There is now a strong sense of powerlessness that pervades everything.

I am always less powerless when I am arting.

The momentum has started, for both ideas, and arting, and art blogging. The synapses are firing and glowing urgently.

So I keep filing, making labels, calling solicitors and trying to be cool and professional (they could employ me one day, better look good, the dreary and boring Heron says), making appointments and keeping the box of tissues stocked. In the office and in the house. I will keep being here for the Gomez's.

Whilst the mugs of tea pile up, I will keep gratefully idea gathering. The fairy muses are being generous to me now. The planting and harvesting of the finished products, however, will have to lay in wait. I trust that Gods of Diligence will appear in a shower of stars and toss me into the field with my arting boots on when the time is right.

(You are absolutely welcome for that Ted talk link btw. And you thought the Ken Robinson one was good? Pah!)

One of those work in progress. Massive antipation towards inkscaping it.  Never stop believing!

24HourComic

I attempted a 24 hour comic at the weekend. It was organised by the ever-admirable and fantastic Galway PubScrawl.

Art Everywhere! Yay!

Well, I got to the venue - 091labs in Galway city - about 6 hours late, so I attempted an 18 hour comic and fell pray to a very Gomez mistake -> coming up with a massive idea, tripping over myself to adequately brainstorm and physically create it, crashed onto the couch and slept for about 2 hours. All things considered however, I'm pretty proud of my idea and my execution was much better than expected. I think that this idea is worth a lot more care and detail. Here's 10 of the pages, including the original brainstorm. Most are not finished:

Brainstorming.

 The brainstorming process for me, from beginning a painting to formulating a blogpost, comprises of a big A4 sheet of paper from one of my many categorised notebooks (refuge of the obsessive and of the person-who-can-never-get-any-work-done) and a big circle in the middle with the theme written in it. For the 24 hour comic, I pulled out my phone and opened up my drafts folder. In there I have scribbled every random idea that is story or art related that came to me on the the go, whether I was cleaning the chandeliers (see giant chandelier monsters) or sitting on bus (which I'm at a lot).

Page 1. Cross-hatching is megahard.

 Two ideas have been knocking around my head these past few weeks - how I want to rewrite pretty much every film I watch these days and coming to terms with my aspergers syndrome traits. Oh, and of course, the early twenties, just out of college, mid-life crisis. So I managed to squeeze a comic idea out of that.

Page 2. The other 24comic people looked at this and saw a whale blowhole fetished. SIGH.

Page 3. It was around midnight and suddenly CYBORGS for 3 pages

I had a great few pages about cyborgs and I drew the most marvelous non-sexualised robot woman and it was great. You may have noticed that I dislike using panels - I read too many absolutely gorgeous, flowing, nubile manga art growing up and it stayed with me.

I really liked my cookie-cut outs in this.

I've been at this feminism-in-comics theme since I was thirteen I discovered recently whilst looking through my old sketchpads. That's right, before it was cool. Are you getting the cyborg-aspergers metaphor yet? Also I didn't want to imply that asexuality = respect for women. That would have been truly terrible.

Didn't touch up this one very much because it wasn't finished and I wanted the pencil lines and roughness to be clear.

This turned out too Ghost-in-the-Shell for me, even though I did try to normalise her as a woman by making one of her boobs a little bit wonkier than the other.

This is blue and relatively untouched up because I was playing with the Curve option and then suddenly BLUE so it stayed.

 Naturally I didn't finish this page either (I was skimming over pages and then coming back to them when I felt ready to) and those blank rectangles are DVD cases that I was going to fill in with many other films that..just could have gone a much better way.

You, Me and Dupree alternative plotline. How I really wished it went.

You, Me and Dupree was a fascinating film for it's lessons on Hollywood's How-To-Write-A-Popular-Comedy inventory sheets and the lowest current demoniator masculinity issues of the beginning of the 21st century. It will be studied in history and sociology classes in the future. Well, so I see it.

I also had ideas prepared for King Kong (shudder), Inglorious Basterds (at the request of another 24hour comic-er) and X-Men 3 (shudder again). This was the closest I came to finishing one.

Ed Wood as the Dickens-esque Ghost of Artist Integrity

I fucking love Ed Wood. He was the perfect character who could provide a breach from reality to the surreal and fantasy in this comic, as Jack Temple travels through time and space to make all the movies he hates not crap. Also yes I am implying that aspies have super powers, because they do :)

The Elemental Causes that kill Artist Integrity in the movies.

Seeing as the Phantom Tollbooth made me, I like to turn abstract concepts that effect personality and happiness into cartoony manifestations. Here are the 4 (I had yet to draw number three) causes of all films going to crap, in my opinion. The conflict here is that all of these causes are traits that aspergers as a syndrome fight against every day -> being aspergers means that you often don't understand a lot of jokes and sarcasm or take everything very literally, constant distraction and often ADD are part of everyday life, and aspies can be super naive and fall trap to manipulation easily (which they also often can't understand or fathom).


This idea definitely got a bit too heavy for the method I chose to deal with it. And too dense. But I would LOVE to make this idea my first definitive comic project. A comic dealing with aspergers primarily, and with surreal and fantasy elements, and the often sexist, racist, classist agenda in popular film culture.

Preamble

You know the story. It's the story of our 2000's everyman. You live in a tiny Irish back-arse of no where town (rather, your family does). You have your green fields childhood. You make art all the time. You have an uncomfortable and secluded, supremely nerdy adolescence. You still make art all the time. Then, you go to the big city for College. You are born. Experiences and friendships and relationships flood and whirl around you like glorious colourful magic. It's all wonderful and exciting. You grow delirious, dizzy and confused. You haven't made any art in a long time. You start to hear and read a lot about the economic crisis. You get to study it in college. And unemployment. And emigration. More and more of your friends post on their facebook feeds about the comedic dole-collecting videos made by their Youtube sensation friends and about their own arrangements to leave the country.

You walk out of your last exam. You move out. You go home. To that place that you haven't thought of as home in years. Maybe you tried to find a job, maybe you didn't. You move back in with your parents. You take a good look around, settle back in front of your laptop and throw up Facebook.

I never thought that I'd find myself in that predicament.

And yet, here we are. Back up in Donegal. All around my bedroom lie the scaffolding and half-constructed castles of my teenage ambitions. When I wanted nothing more than to draw comicbooks and bring a delicious, fat portfolio to Image Comics headquarters. How things change. How much I have convinced myself of. Up until I moved back home, I was contemplating internships and masters. And even...for about two seconds...the dreaded LLB.

**shudders**

I didn't want to butcher my inner-child's self-esteem that much.

So, now that I'm out of the system, there is only one left to do: make art. All the time. Fantastic, massive art, all the time. Fill my house with stacks of canvases leaning against each other, clogging the hallways, shelves of resource books and magazines, infinite folders on my laptop with cropped cuttings of jpegs and loaded, catalogued online galleries. Nothing left but do exactly what 16 year old me has been waiting for me to start doing for these centuries of self-development.

But it's terrifying.

Making art and following my art to wherever it decides to take me is monstrously scary. It is overwhelming; full of doubt and paranoia. Forget that I'm faced with the underdevelopment of a cohesive and accessible “art market”, in Ireland and everywhere (I have a LOT to write about with regards that, you'll see); the tremors and tempests of the self is the worst. The. Worst. And for being an artist, unfortunately, it's more than relevant. It's the deal breaker. The clincher. The figurative be-all and end-all for real commitment to the field. And how easily that commitment comes in and out of breathing, like the living dead. It dies, then resurrects itself, then dies again, leaving you, the artist, completely self-admonished.

The self.

The self-trust, the self-discipline, the self-discovery and solidifying self-determination. The massive self-confrontation you have to do and the self-deconstruction you have to do, along-side that hideous dismantlement of systemic habits and side effects about 20 years of the conventional education and career system has afflicted you with. You're like a small nation after a revolution or a dog staring into a mirror - you have to be ready to rewrite everything.

All of this art-exercising and art-exorcising (wahey) will definitely provide more than enough content for my blog all on it's own (I still need to design my header, logo, profile...stay connected). Besides, there is my need to comment on art, on art developments, on the art world and on artists, those quirky, kamikaze creatures. On why we need art to stay alive, on why RIGHT NOW IN 2012 art is more important that ever (yadda yadda)...

For the first time in about eight years, I have the time, the lack of dire money shortages (I work for my mum as a psychiatric secretary, our office is downstairs, my living quarters are upstairs) and I have the physical space necessary to start arting the fuck out of my generational lethargy. This is it. As Rob Lowe's character, Billy Hicks, from one of my favourite coming-of-age films of all time, St. Elmo's Fire, famously says to his break-down, clinically depressed mess of a friend, “We're all going through this. It's our time at the edge.”

Some people go to Australia or Thailand or back to college to find themselves. I went home.

Oh, and RSS feed me, bro.