Reversal

As I drew today's cartoon, I knew it needed a guy driving a car, a speech balloon and a comment box--the voice-over, if you will. Lately, I've been sketching out the cartoon as quickly as possible in pencil, then changing it as little as I can when tracing with pen, while still trying to keep some fluidity in the lines.

After the whole thing was sketched, I realized that I had laid it out backwards. I wanted the comment to be the last thing you read, and the speech to be the first. Wanting to keep the looseness of the original sketch, I decided to just reverse it after I scanned it into the computer.  So I inked, scanned, lettered and flipped it. After it was all cleaned up--there are generally little dots or lines where some of the light penciling gets picked up by the scanner, or little overshot lines that I decide to erase, and the process can take half an hour--I was ready to color it.

And as I began to color, I saw the problem: now the clown was driving on the left side of the car! This would be fine if part of the joke was that he was driving in the UK, but this wasn't the case. So I switched it back to the way I'd originally drawn it.

The result is a cartoon in which the punchline comes at the beginning instead of the end. I could have redrawn the whole thing, but that would take the spontaneity out of the drawing. I don't do well on second drawings. Especially if I'm really happy with the first one. The second is a burden, and it never satisfies me. Besides, I'm busy working on my house when I'm not cartooning, and a do-over just seems like time stolen from house projects. So it goes to the website as a frontwards illustration of a backwards joke.

I hope people still find it funny. Maybe I'll fix it someday. There are cartoons I've drawn over the last year and a half that I plan to revisit eventually. Maybe when they go onto a calendar, hopefully when I'm preparing them for a book. (No plans for that yet.) But for now, they stay as they were originally. Not all do-overs have to be done right away.

(By the way, after I had this whole post put together, I realized that the dashboard and the outside of the car were the same. I went back and fixed this on the original, and that's the version you'll see if you check it out at www.qlowntown.com...but I'm leaving these two versions here. This just shows you how long it can take to finish a cartoon that takes about two minutes to sketch---and still not get it right!)

WWII story

Starting in 1941, an increasing number of British Airmen found themselves as the involuntary guests of the Third Reich, and the Crown was casting about for ways and means to facilitate their escape. Obviously, one of the most helpful aids to that end is a useful and accurate map, one showing not only where stuff was, but also showing the locations of 'safe houses' where a POW on-the-lam could go for   food and shelter.  Paper maps had some real drawbacks -- they make a lot of noise when you open and fold them, they wear out rapidly, and if they get wet, they turn into mush.
Someone in MI-5 (similar to America's  OSS) got the idea of printing escape maps on silk. It's durable, can be scrunched-up into tiny wads and unfolded as many times as needed, and makes no noise whatsoever.

At that time, there was only one manufacturer in Great Britain that had perfected the technology of printing on silk, and that was John Waddington, Ltd. When approached by the government, the firm was only too happy to do its bit for the war effort.

By pure coincidence, Waddington was also the U.K. Licensee for the popular American board game, Monopoly. As it happened, 'games and pastimes' was a category of item qualified for insertion into 'CARE packages', dispatched by the International Red Cross to prisoners of war.

Under the strictest of secrecy, in a securely guarded and inaccessible old workshop on the grounds of Waddington's, a group of sworn-to-secrecy employees began mass-producing escape maps, keyed to     each region of Germany or Italy where Allied POW camps were known to exist). When processed, these maps could be folded into such tiny dots that they would actually fit inside a Monopoly playing piece.

As long as they were at it, the clever workmen at Waddington's also managed to add:
        1. A playing token, containing a small magnetic compass
        2. A two-part metal file that could easily be screwed together
        3. Useful amounts of genuine high-denomination German, Italian, and French currency, hidden within the piles of Monopoly money!

British and American air crews were advised, before taking off on their first mission, how to identify a 'rigged' Monopoly set -- by means of a tiny red dot, one cleverly rigged to look like an ordinary printing glitch, located in the corner of the Free Parking square.

Of the estimated 35,000 Allied POWS who successfully escaped, an estimated one-third were aided in their flight by the rigged Monopoly sets. Everyone who did so was sworn to secrecy indefinitely, since  the British Government might want to use this highly successful ruse in still another, future war. The story wasn't declassified until 2007, when the surviving craftsmen from Waddington's, as well as the firm itself, were finally honored in a public ceremony.

It's always nice when you can play that 'Get Out of Jail' Free' card!

The above is, as I recall (it's been sitting in my "Drafts" file for months) someone else's account of this historical factoid. I make no claim to authorship. But it's a very cool story, don't you think?