Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Cartoon Class: Finish This Comic Strip

As you may or may not know, I teach cartooning. recently, I've been teaching some junior high and high school kids in Milton, NH. Last week, the cartoon class was given five comic strips. The first 3 panels are drawn (see below), but the last one needs to be completed.

In the first one, it's one of those birds that cleans the alligator's mouth and the alligator never harms it. What happens when the evil bird above shakes some pepper onto the alligator?

And here is man in space, poking the American flag onto a large, unpleasant looking alien.
And here is another: Rapunzel, Rapunzel! Let down your hair! And what is the gag?
I'll post some of the final panels from the class later this week. Give it a shot and see if you can finish up that last panel. If you do, please let me see it. I'm at fatcats3 [at] gmail.com.

I took the idea for this exercise from Draw Your Own Conclusions, a Milt Gross comic strip that ran in the 1930s. Readers were challenged to draw the final gag panel and mail it in. The prize: $25 -- and in the depression, $25 was Big Money!

Quite a number of Mr. Gross's Draw Your Own Conclusions strips are reprinted in the forthcoming (June '08 publication date)of the Comic Arf book by the one and only Craig Yoe. He found a lot of the old Milt Gross strips and sent them onto his cartoonist pals for their take on that final panel. Some of the cartoonists are: Sergio Aragones, R. Crumb, Charles Barsotti, Hunt Emerson, Glenn Head, Al Jaffee, Mike Mignola, Richard Sala, Joost Swarte, Mort Walker, Dean Yeagle and others. This cool chapter in Craig's terrific new book is reason enough to part with your hard earned money!

Check out Craig's Arflovers blog.

1 comment:

Mark Anderson said...

Hey, isn't that the bird from your old strip?