Teaching Gag Cartooning

I’m currently teaching two two-week sections of comics art for the Sawtooth School’s Summer Art Honors program for rising 8th through 12th graders. Today I did a section on gag cartooning, which–aside from the occasional Nickelodeon Magazine reader–seems to be a pretty much unknown art form among this age group. I took in a couple of Peter Arno and Whitney Darrow books, but hesitated to hand them around too freely, as a quick glance through them reminded me how many of the gags, while pretty funny in most cases, are also terribly sexist and/or feature “bone through the nose”-type “natives.”

I generally try to do timed exercises in these classes, so today I gave them randomly chosen scenarios to draw in five minutes to start with. They got one person, place and event each from this list on teachingcomics.org, then had five minutes to do the drawing. Then they had five minutes to come up with at least five possible captions. I did this a few times, sometimes with other scenarios, and sometimes getting one student to draw and another to write the captions. Finally, they each selected what they thought were the two best ones and presented them to the class. Whatever got the most laughs, went on to be their final cartoon, that they redrew on bristol board and inked.

In order to have something to demonstrate ink washes and the litho crayon on, I did one round with them: a random scenario in five minutes, five potential gag lines in five minutes, 15 minutes to redraw and ink, then about five minutes of litho and ink wash. They’re not particularly hilarious, but the point is just to get the juices flowing and produce a finished gag cartoon in a relatively short amount of time. Here are mine along with the random person/place/event I received.

An alien losing his temper at a playground:

A dinosaur being confrontational in a doctor’s office: