Creativity, cartoons, comics

As an artist, I feel that none of the ideas I come up with are really mine, and this feeling only gets stronger with time.

To get ideas, one has to put in the work, but then the idea just drops into your head. Just appears fully formed. Sometimes I know I have to wait for the idea. Paintings maybe more about actual brushstrokes and style, but most art forms need a good concept.

I've noticed that when I try to create music, the ideas seem to come from the air. (As long as I put in the work.)

Recently, I found this also happens trying to create cartoons.

I'm working all the time: watching the news while taking notes, reading the news, looking at memes and comments, and writing down every possible idea. I watch the nightly comedy shows to learn how to craft a joke. I see how they news topics and spin them into a joke in each style.

More often than not, the ideas I go with are the ones that just popped into my head while I am cooking or doing something else. These ideas seem more elegant, more classic and not as forced as the idea I struggled over.

When writing taglines, I try to focus the original concept. And try to make them read well. If they make me chuckle, they’re done. Often, the longer I work on them, the better they get.

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The award-winning journalist who was nice enough to edit Ladybird: My Eight Lives, Gabrielle Banks, told me the book was really too dark for children. I listed it for older children.

When I was a kid, I didn’t read comic books. I can’t remember ever reading Superhero comic books. I borrowed some Betty and Veronica comics from a friend, and I liked them, but they were not that interesting characters.

(My sister gave me some Charles Addams books when I was so young that she had to explain some of them to me. The Addams family was pretty twisted and that was quite comforting. 
We had Mad magazine, and we always had New Yorker magazines lying around. We had Eloise and Madeline  and lots of other books.)

During the time my mother was trying to get her divorce, I developed a love for one comic book, a really sad comic book called Sad Sack. It featured a soldier, a lowly private, who everybody hated. He was always getting in trouble. Art the end of each chapter, he got kicked by his sergeant. Pathetic really but the only comic book I liked.

Maybe there are some gothic children or other children that are very dark like I was.

I hoped that Ladybird: My Eight Lives would help children (and adults) develop empathy for their pets. I believe that all animals and possibly insects, have feelings and inner lives, and can feel pain. We just learned that trees communicate through their roots and through the air with other trees.