Pocket Cartoons
With Gareth
With Gareth in the first two weeks, we made Pocket Cartoons. They're a kind of comedic illustration or like a single panel comic with a caption instead of speech balloons and are often found in magazines and newspapers both online and off. They're super hard to make due to having limited real estate to get a joke across and their general need to appeal to very wide audiences since the places they are found are often trying to reach out to more than one demographic. Although if you made one for say, a knitting magazine then you may have an easier time pinning down one specific audience
Political Pocket Cartoon
The first pocket cartoon we made needed to be based on stories we found in the newspaper of the day it was assigned. When I looked I saw a few options, many revolving around Covid and Trump but it was also the week the plastic straw ban was in effect. Despite the importance of changing our daily lives to help the environment, I wanted to poke some fun at it since the ban once more felt like companies putting the onus on the consumers to end global warming while they themselves continue dumping oil, owning big factories, overproducing items that take a lot of energy to make. While straws aren't even the only common disposable plastic item and actually help people with certain disabilities. I went through a couple of options such as a businessman stood on a pile of rubbish shouting at a person with a single plastic straw or maybe some sort of crazy billboard in a wasteland with the caption 'thank god we banned straws or things would have gone really wrong' but settled on the picture below mostly because the composition and legibility were coming through the best.
Initial Submission
After Crit
Theme of Choice Pocket Cartoon
The second Pocket Cartoon we got to choose from a set of possible themes. I don't remember all of them but one was Celebrity and another was Halloween. I ended up choosing Halloween and made a pocket cartoon about a monster who was the only person at their book club to show up in costume, dressed as a human, to try and flip that moment where you show up to a costume event to find everyone else in normal clothes. It didn't really go well, I tried a few things and the illustration itself looked nice with the composition but I tried to shove in too many small gags into the image and struggled to design the dressed-up character which would up with it being very hard to get the joke. I did run it past a few people who said they liked it but I'm not sure we communicated well. In the future, I'd probably try to simplify the joke and maybe run it past people who can express critique more effectively. The one improvement from the previous is that it has a good, easy to read, font.
First concept sketch
Overall I find Pocket cartooning really hard, it's an interesting medium but very high pressure, and comedy without space to set up a beginning, middle and end really strays far from how my brain likes to work. I don't regret trying it out but I doubt it'll be for me. Though I will try to take the lessons I've learned about trying to make certain the thing I make is easy to read and understand and attempting to appeal to audiences I may not have thought to try and tap into future work.