| Today started out feeling like one of those days when you know what you want to draw about but you just can’t think of any image or setup that’s clever. I’d already done a cartoon about President Bush’s “troop surge” for Wednesday’s newspaper, and I used the somewhat clich?d image of a building on fire. Today I sketched up a few different germs of ideas, but nothing clicked.
If you work in a newsroom that employs a cartoonist, you may often see him/her leaning in a chair while staring blankly at nothing in particular. Don’t be alarmed, though. They’re not having a petit mal seizure, but are, in fact, searching feverishly in their darkened psyche for an idea that switches on the lightbulb. For part of today, that was me. All of a sudden, after traveling down a few dead-end alleys of thought, I came up with the “Clear, hold and build” concept. It seemed too good to pass up. I hope no one else has used it yet, though I wouldn’t be surprised if someone did. I knew I wanted Bush clutching onto his failed policies for the “Hold” part and Uncle Sam with the Iraq War cost for the “Billed” part. The “Clear” part took me a bit more time, though, before I settled on using the Democrats. Once I had all the pieces of the idea in place, it didn’t take too long to sketch out, ink and clean up. It would be very nice indeed if most days went like this. |
