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Tag: cartoons

Art: Crayon Calendar Cartoon

Posted in design by Adam
Posted on

Art was simpler as a child.

Somewhere I still have a Christmas plate from kindergarten where we had to draw a picture and they somehow turned it into a plastic plate. All the fingers of each hand come out of a single point. Spooky.

But this, it’s a simple word-replacement joke, instead of pencil you in it’s crayon. I like cartoons and jokes, but they’re tough to make art of, mainly because of the limitations of alternate text. Describing a joke feels wrong, but it also takes a lot of words.

There are lots of web comics, and as I understand it most don’t bother that much with alternate text because it’s sort of beside the point, but it also feels like:

  1. Lots of accessibility users miss out on some funny content.
  2. Having alt-text would make the future of AI-generating art from alt-texts way cooler.

Expanding on the second point, if I used those artificial intelligence image generator sites, I could pull my alt text for this image and see what they come up with. That could be fun, but it would also give some idea of their sophistication—whether their output even vaguely matches the described image.

It was also a lot of fun scribbling out the low-stakes stick-figure drawings, though I probably could have found a better way to give them that crayon-drawn texture.

Cartoons

Posted in warpath by Adam
Posted on

We must stop these infernal cartoons before we are all damned to the fireworks of hell.

Crude cartoon of a buddha with flamboyant coloration.
This cartoon insults some or all of the gods.

Cartoons really make us angry. All their funny little shapes and colors, insulting the myriad true gods. Like Hobbestrial of the Second Tiger Realm (salmon be unto him), turned into nothing but a stuffed animal to amuse a child. These cartoonists suck all that is holy out of the world and must be stopped.

The very idea of cartoons, simplistic representations of reality meant merely to amuse and insult, is at odds with everything we stand for as a people. We are deep people with deep needs and desires and only the spirit of the true gods can nourish our blighted spirits.

But how do we stop these diabolical pensmen? With their three-panels and their thought bubbles, how can we cease their blasphemies? Should we place banana peels in their vicinities? Surreptitiously put matches into their shoe-seams and ignite them? We have not the technological know-how, nor the ingenuity, but the gods will give us insight!

Yes, with the gods’ help we shall defeat these reckless painters of satire. Maybe we should buy billboard space and exhibit the worst of their crafts in public, to raise awareness. Or wear t-shirts bearing their work inside a circle with a crossbar. But we will await instructions from the gods. They know best, after all.

Over the centuries, we have dealt successfully with so many forms of insult and oppression against the gods. We have ended Vaudeville, we have stopped the telegraph, the use of witchcraft, the carrying of pocket potatoes, and bloodletting is all but vanished. How did we do it? By the gods, of course.

And soon the gods will instruct us on how to make the cartoons of today the powdered wigs of the past. They will bless us with their unfathomable wisdom of how to rid the world of cartoons. We have tried violence (oh, so much violence we have tried; you would think we’d try something else, but the hint from the gods, we do not seem to get it). We have tried canceling our newspaper subscriptions. We have even tried laughing at the cartoons until they feel bad and go away. Nothing has worked.

But surely the gods will come through. They must. It is either us or the cartoons, we cannot live in harmony with them. And surely the gods will choose us, for we do not insult them. We do not make the gods look bad. The cartoons do that.