The search for style

Originality, I was reminded recently, is so very important.

A very, very old cartoon I drew in maybe 1986.

In cartooning it’s not enough to have funny idea. The best cartoonists also have a distinctive drawing style. But style is a tricky business for some of us.

You don’t have to draw “well” particularly. Edward Steed, one of my favourite New Yorker cartoonists, has a scratchy dry pen style that gives you the feeling it’s all he can do to get the idea down. The gags are similarly desperate you might say. It’s all of piece. He’s one of a kind and a great artist imho. (New Yorker conveniently collects contributors’ work into personal pages, e.g. for Steed.)

One of the old New Yorker school, James Thurber, had an abbreviated way of drawing that looked “dashed off.” (Dorothy Parker described his characters as “having the semblance of unbaked cookies.”) But his style was unmistakable, authentic and charming. He was championed by fellow New Yorker staffer E. B. White who argued Thurber’s cartoons could stand alone as art. Indeed. (For more on Thurber see Wikipedia.)

Here are a few more cartoons I drew back in the day, way back. You’ll see a drift in style. I’m a bit embarrassed to say I still haven’t settled.

This was drawn in maybe 1982. Pre-cell phones not so obviously. Should there have been a landline handset on the desk? Perhaps with no cord? No matter, the cartoon stands as a reminder that issues of precarity, how poverty compounds like interest to defeat the wage labourer, are not just a problem of today and the gig economy.

Same early 80s vintage, my reflection on the collective that produced Midcontinental, a arts magazine in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. An idea superbly captured by another New Yorker cartoonist, Kaamran Hafeez, here. You can also buy his uncaptioned sketch, here.

At some point mid-80s, I gave up on the idea of working in the arts and went to law school. I couldn’t get away entirely of course; I got involved in the student paper, editing and also contributing the occasional cartoon. Style changed to something brushier, more Japanese.

IS IT FUNNY OR MERELY SAD THAT ISSUES OF IMMIGRATION ARE VIRTUALLY THE SAME NOW AS THEY WERE 50 YEARS AGO?

I used to think that art schools should teach students how to develop a style; as in give assignments to come up with different but distinctive styles. But how would you then choose one over the others? Ask an art critic? The professor? And then are you locked into that style forever? It’s a pretty cynical idea in retrospect.

Last night over dinner a friend suggested that original style emerges unselfconsciously if you are working hard enough, like, fully, deeply immersed. There’s a lot of truth to that idea I think, so back to the drawing board. I have a lot of work to do.

Stay ‘tooned.