Mike Lynch Cartoon in December 17, 2013 Wall Street Journal

A cartoon of mine is in today's Wall Street Journal.

This is one of those "I painted myself into a corner" cartoons. I mean, I drew a picture of Santa sitting at a board room table. I stopped, and thought I would then draw some elves around it next. But, no. That's not too interesting.

Then, I drew more Santas around the table. Santa, Santa, Santa. And I just stopped and looked at it, trying to figure my way out of the drawing.

Sometimes you just sketch something and then try and come up with a gag. Sometimes this works for me and sometimes it does not.

So: what is Santa? Santa is management. He's the boss. And you can't have a room full of bosses. No way. Not in a properly run business. You need those elves!

So, it dawned on me that the problem with the situation was that it was, in a real world sense, way too top heavy with management.

Here's the version I originally drew. The one that WSJ saw for its OK:

I had to redraw it. WSJ does not have a horizontal format.

Confession: I forgot that. I did a redraw in a square style and was told that that was wrong. So I did another redraw. Let that be a lesson: pay attention to your editor when they tell you the format. D'oh!

Going backward in time, here's the first sketch from a sketchbook. The for-my-eyes-only sketch. You can see how quickly it's done: 3 Santa heads and an oval to represent the table.

My thanks to Randy Glasbergen for letting me know that my cartoon was in WSJ this morning! Thanks, Randy!