artwork

Here are some cartoons I've been drawing for the textbook we're working on. The idea, as I think I explained a while back, is that you have a six-panel cartoon story, but only five panels have content. The student matches the scrambled sentences of the story with the pictures (which are in order), then has to write the story's final sentence and draw the story's final panel. The images below are 1000 pixels wide, actual size, so click on them to enlarge.

This first toon isn't really sequential art; it's more like a list of things that biologists might study: land animals (represented by a tiger), terrestrial plants (Venus flytrap), sea creatures (octopus), and sea plants (seaweed). The fifth panel, when matched with the prose, deals with the question, "What don't biologists study?" The answer to that could be any number of things: planetary orbits, the composition of rocks, etc.

Once the following picture is colored, it ought to be easier to understand. An earthquake hits while class is in session; the students run out, but the teacher hides under a desk, per the usual instructions associated with earthquakes. But everyone leaves the building, and the school collapses. What has befallen the teacher?

This next one is lame, and I think I need to redo it. The chapter is on Gregor Mendel, father of genetics. I start with a Punnett Square showing two parents with dominant and recessive alleles: B for brown eyes, b for blue eyes. This means that such parents have a 25% chance of having a blue-eyed kid. The subsequent frames show kid after kid being born, all three with brown eyes. The fourth kid is coming, and the parents think this is their one shot at a blue-eyed baby. What comes out, though, is a Satan-eyed horror inspired by the movie "Rosemary's Baby." No blue eyes for you guys! Sorry! (Note that the parents' reasoning could be seen as a variant of the Gambler's Fallacy.)

The cartoon below is based on a true-life incident that I blogged about: a stupid criminal who marched into an establishment to raid the cash register. The proprietor, you'll recall, shooed everyone out the front door and locked the door, trapping the dumbass inside. The police weren't long in arriving.

This next one is about the fickleness of fame and fortune. A man sits alone and depressed, then he gets an idea for a book. He works furiously on it and gains fame, fortune, and glory... but it all fades, and he's once again alone and depressed, with nothing but copies of his book for company.

I kind of like the story for the toon below, even if the art isn't all that special. Some kids are running away from an unknown danger. A horrifying-looking clown beckons them to come with him, but the kids balk. The clown becomes more insistent while the kids continue to hesitate. Suddenly, a new, more menacing threat appears: a huge, muscular man dressed as a policeman and carrying a nasty-looking truncheon. Maybe the clown's not the real threat.

The toon below is for a chapter on Greenpeace. I'm not the biggest fan of that organization, although I'm sure some of its members mean well. I decided to portray Greenpeace in a dramatic, over-the-top way, which explains the story. Somewhere in the ocean, a whale-hunting vessel is chasing a whale that's desperate to get away. A Greenpeace Zodiac appears and pulls alongside the whaling ship, but this doesn't stop the harpoon operator from aiming and firing his weapon. The harpoon flies toward its target, and the stoic Greenpeace boatman heroically flings himself into the path of the harpoon. Kids ought to love drawing the panel that comes next. Some—the more morbid ones—will draw a man with a harpoon in his gut. Others, more clever, will draw the man snatching the harpoon, rolling in the air, and redirecting the deadly shaft away from the whale.

As you see, I sucked at drawing the Zodiac, and I sucked at Photoshopping the "Greenpeace" label onto the Zodiac's curved front. With more time, I might have been able to do a better job.

In the pic below, I totally stole the boy's image from the silhouetted boy who figures in the Amazon Kindle logo. I plead guilty. Just know that I hand-drew the boy: no tracing, no scanning-and-copying. Freehand. Anyway, as you see, a boy and girl are playing chess (I found a side-view pic of a chessboard and turned it into a silhouette). The girl makes a move that makes her smile while the boy frowns. The boy then makes a move that satisfies him and annoys her. The girl goes again, looking supremely smug. The boy, incensed, turns into a ravening monster. What happens next? A feminist might draw the girl as an even larger monster. A non-feminist might draw the girl, still human, screaming and running away.

In the pic below, a fortune-teller tries to persuade a skeptical man that there will be an earthquake (see the cracking ground in her crystal ball?). The man scoffs and leaves, still laughing. Once outside, though, the man feels the earth tremble as the quake begins. The earth splits beneath the man's feet, and he finds himself hanging on for dear life, calling out for help that will not come.

I used a lot of clip art for this final picture. My alterations and rearrangements ought to keep me safe from copyright claims; for instance, I added the guy's warding gesture in the fourth panel, the one where he's saying no-thanks to the offer of a cigarette. In the end, though, as the fifth panel's closeup implies, the guy feels tempted to smoke. What happens next? Does he walk away? Does he take a puff?

So that's a glimpse of my lame art. Given more time and care, I could doubtless draw better, but I've never been more than a chicken-scratch cartoonist. I'll never be a Picasso or a Rembrandt, or even a Bob Ross. But the boss thinks I draw well enough for us to make another textbook that would be full of my artwork, so I guess we'll see what happens.