Ideas

I just put up a new comment on my Facebook page: "I wish I had a frigate, because it's a friggin' nice day". After posting it, I envisioned a cartoon featuring an old British Navy commodore on his poop deck saying "What a friggin' nice day".

This is something I encounter on a pretty frequent basis: If I--or someone else--says something funny, should I save it for a QlownTown cartoon? Do I jot down every funny thing I encounter?

No. I recognize that while I've made a choice to do this comic strip, I can't expect to save all the humor I encounter in life for the strip. I've already cataloged every strip I'll be doing through the end of 2009, anyway---so I don't have to stress about ideas. (At least not yet; we'll see how I am a year or five from now.)

Some things that I hear are very funny in the context of what's happening, anyway, not funny enough for a one-shot cartoon. [The strip may evolve over time into a more situational strip like For Better or For Worse or Monty, but I really like the punch of a self-contained comic. You don't need to know Mr. Binkles (yes, there will be regular characters in QlownTown soon, and they will have names) to laugh when smoke comes out of his stovepipe hat when he's grilling burgers, or know the two bears with clothes strewn about the forest floor around them who comment that "that was a grisly encounter".] Some things in my life are very funny and I/we laugh out loud, but they're a part of life and belong to me, not to my website. Real life is for living, not doing one's job all the time.

I'll admit that sometimes, when I come up with something that really tickles the person I'm talking to (or vice versa), I'll pull out my trusty phone/PDA/camera/jet pack and jot down the idea; but more often than not, I come up with ideas as a regular practice, as part of my workday. I sit at my desk, read the paper and online stuff, and sketch out ideas as they hit me. After all, who can complain about thinking up humorous stuff being part of your job?

So, for now at least, the frigate/friggin' joke will just remain a Facebook comment. Now, in a year or five from now...

Optimism

I recently commented on Facebook that I was finding it difficult to write a totally optimistic song without sounding maudlin or corny. For every Walking On Sunshine or Shiny Happy People, there are a dozen Afternoon Delights or Everything Is Beautifuls. A friend asked if that was because I was a "cynical old fart". I replied that indeed I was; but another friend corrected me. Point well taken. Yes, I am actually an overly optimistic optimist.

It's appropriate than I've wound up drawing cartoons. I'm better at coming up with a funny moment than an ongoing tale of tragedy and woe. If I had to come up with ongoing storylines all the time, I'd go crazy. The first real storyline that I'm planning for QlownTown involves a trip by some of the characters to work on a Indian reservation. It will deal will injustice, poverty and frustration, yet I plan to end every day's strip with a humorous moment. It may be humor born of sarcasm over a ridiculously wrong policy or a bitter humor that informs (one hopes) while it amuses, but I think I can find those funny moments in the pain that appears overwhelming from the outside. Even in my conscious goal of teaching people about the things I earned working on "The Rez" for a week, there's a conscious goal to amuse in the process. There's the old saying, "You catch more flies with honey than vinegar". (Of course, the two together make a nice vinaigrette, and I hope that's how the series turns out.)

Mission trip[

I just returned from a week on the Oglala Lakota Indian Reservation on South Dakota. It was a week of eye-opening lessons. The standard questions like "Why don't they just move away?" or "Why don't they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps?" become ridiculous when you've seen the conditions there. A combination of spiritual beliefs (isn't America supposed to promise freedom of religion?) and severe poverty exacerbates the problems. The US has violated every treaty it ever signed with the Indians, and yet we wonder why they can't dig themselves out of the rut we've put them in. We guaranteed to protect them--a compromise since we took away their lands just because we wanted them. There are no easy answers, but there are steps that can be taken. I'll try to educate anyone who will listen a bit over the next year...through blogs and, I hope, through cartoons.

The organization we worked with, Re-Member, is doing great work. A large part of that is to educate volunteers so we can spread the word. It was fun to watch people who were skeptical and who nonetheless took the trip with us change their attitude as they learned more.

Re-Member is also educating the people on the Rez to realize that some outsiders try to do right by them. Unfortunately, we're still in the minority on that. In a nation with a black president, increasingly equal treatment of women, and forward-moving attitudes on civil unions and/or same-sex marriage, we still treat the people who were here before us worse than we treat our pets. These are not "noble Indians", nor are they lazy. They are people, like you or me, who are in a financial morass not of their making.

Let's hope that we can correct this in this century.