Quotes & Sayings About Cartooning

Cartooning is for people who can't quite draw and can't quite write. You combine the two half-talents and come up with a career. — Matt Groening

I was drawing professionally by the time I was 12. I used to do very detailed sort of photorealistic pen-and-ink work, and I burned out on it around, like, high school. And cartooning really got me back into drawing. — Dan Povenmire

Cincinnati at that time was also beginning to realize it had major cartooning talent in Jim Borgman, at the city's other paper, and I didn't benefit from the comparison.His footsteps seemed like good ones to follow, so I cultivated an interest in politics, and Borgman helped me a lot in learning how to construct an editorial cartoon. Neither of us dreamed I'd end up in the same town on the opposite paper. — Bill Watterson

I've been interested in cartooning all my life. I read the comics as a kid, and I did cartoons for high school publications - the newspaper and yearbook and soon. In college, I got interested in political cartooning and did political cartoons. — Bill Watterson

In many ways, cartooning is my therapy. I've always said they're like my diaries. It's thoughts and feelings and things I've seen on any particular day. — Bruce Eric Kaplan

And to celebrate I will create a series of masterpieces showing how wrong-headed and primitive you and your ideologies are, and it is this that will pave the way to the new truth! As the artist, everyone will pay attention to me, while without a body of art to speak for you... no one will ever even remember your name!" Monsters 101, Book Ten: Class Dismissed — Muhammad Rasheed

Admittedly, art is somewhat like spit. It does not repulse or even worry is while it is still inside of us, but once it exits our body, it becomes disgusting. — Ivan Brunetti

What I've noticed in a lot of other cartoonists is a sullen resentfulness about their lack of attention and tiny checking accounts. I vowed back in the days when I had no money that I would not allow that kind of bitterness to overtake me ... Cartooning, in general, is a very solitary occupation, and it breeds all sorts of self-punishing thinking — Matt Groening

If I'm writing about a modern-day suburb, there's going to be details of the home and furniture, and if I'm writing about a historical period, those details, those pieces of the world are going to be there as well, but they'll be simplified, because I'm cartooning it. — Gene Luen Yang

In middle school, I started to draw, and my pencil sketches were huge. They were these 4ft by 3ft drawings, and I got a lot of attention for that, so that was very validating. But I didn't start cartooning until I was in college. — Jeff Kinney

All of my cartoons are better than each other. — Brian Spellman

I wasn't having any luck getting accepted anyway and it forced me to re-examine what it was that I really wanted to do. In my experience in political cartooning, I was never one of those people who read the headlines and foams at the mouth with rabid opinion that I've just got to get down on paper. — Bill Watterson

I hope to actually get back to painting someday ... soon. I sort of transitioned into cartooning from painting. — Max Cannon

Cartooning is a wonderful career, and I'd like more women to get to have it. I can't think of any reason why we won't see more syndicated female cartoonists in the future. — Cathy Guisewite

I think funny is just the foundation. I don't really think, to some extent, funny is the absolute most important thing. It should also communicate some idea through the medium of cartooning. Just to be funny is ... You know what, the things that you laugh hardest at aren't cartoons. — Robert Mankoff

It's a reality of art that the fewer lines you get, the harder it is. Cartooning is actually harder than realism. You have less to work with. It's like trying to build a house-if you have unlimited resources, you're in much better shape than if you get two bricks, a hammer, and a bent nail. — Ursula Vernon

But to me what seems to be missing in a lot of portfolios is Cartooning. — Craig McCracken

I started sharpening pencils at the census and how that was a difficult time in my life because my marriage was ending and I had quit cartooning and I didn't know what to do with myself. — David Rees

Cartooning really is just designing. — Charles M. Schulz

I don't think that what I'm doing [political cartooning] is necessarily left versus right. What I'm addressing is top versus bottom. If I'm not spending a lot of time making fun of the more extreme elements of the Green Party, it's because what I do is to critique power. — Tom Tomorrow

The journalism school helped me develop writing skills, and I had been enjoying cartooning from a very young age. My interest in puppetry, however, came much later. — William Jackson

Cartooning will destroy you; it will break your heart. — Charles M. Schulz

The art of cartooning is vulgarity. The only reason for cartooning to exist is to be on the edge. If you only take apart what they allow you to take apart, you're Disney. Cartooning is a low-class, for-the-public art, just like graffiti art and rap music. Vulgar but believable, that's the line I kept walking. — Ralph Bakshi

The cartooning was always just an abstraction. It was an income. It was making me famous. It was allowing me to go and do other things that I'd wanted to do. — Berkeley Breathed

If you want to be a cartoonist, live the life of a cartoonist. — Oliver Gaspirtz

I separate cartooning, which is fun and wacky and soulful, from illustration, which is very well-drawn and extremely uptight to look at. There's a difference. I'm a cartoonist. — Ralph Bakshi

I was doing illustration work, and the cartooning slowly took over. — Max Cannon

I've always defined myself not as a cartoonist, but as an entrepreneur. That was true before I tried cartooning. I always imagined cartooning would be how I got my seed capital. I always thought my other businesses would be the less dominant part of my life. — Scott Adams

I attended the Columbus College Of Art & Design for a little while, until I realized they didn't take cartooning very seriously. — Jeff Smith

I think the experience forced me to consider how interested I was in political cartooning. After I was fired, I applied to other papers but political cartooning, like all cartooning, is a very tough field to break into. Newspapers are very reluctant to hire their own cartoonists when they can get Oliphant or MacNelly through syndication for a twentieth of the price. — Bill Watterson

Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T. — Russell Baker

There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir= and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney. — Roy Lichtenstein

But now that I'm cartooning full-time, I'm more of an observer. I'm talking to people who are experiencing these things. But it's not like being in the trenches. — Ted Rall

So cartooning, for me, is an honorable thing. It's pushing the envelope. It's the truth of something through exaggeration. — Bill Sienkiewicz

The type of cartooning that I think is generally referred to as 'alternative' or 'underground' is usually - the distinction is usually in terms of whether it's made by one person, the entire thing is done by one hand or more of a production line process, which is how the comics that we grew up reading were made. — Adrian Tomine

I actually find a lot of parallels in jazz and cartooning. — Gary Larson

My future plans are hazy, and I've yet to experience how much cartooning is in my blood and therefore how much I'll miss it. But I have some other interests, especially in music, and I will probably take the opportunity to delve into those things more deeply. — Gary Larson

[Editorial cartooning] is essentially a destructive art. We are not pontificators, or molders of thought - or at least we shouldn't try to be. Ours is more the role of the lowly gadfly: circle and stab, circle and stab. Roughly put, our credo should be, if it's big, hit it. — Bill Mauldin

There was a teacher who recognized that I was interested in cartooning and he was great. — Jonathan Shapiro

I have a personal definition of cartooning, which is, simply, "imaginative drawing." Anything you're drawing that is not in front of you but is a mental construct that you want to express in a drawing is, to me, a cartoon. — Jim Woodring

Cartooning is preaching. And I think we have a right to do some preaching. I hate shallow humor. I hate shallow religious humor, I hate shallow sports humor, I hate shallowness of any kind. — Charles M. Schulz

It is more raw and unfettered and I'm more likely going into something you could call extreme cartooning. There's a lot of that in the course of 'Holy Terror.' There are interludes where there are pictures - cartoon pictures - of modern figures and they are all wordless. It's up to readers to put the words in. — Frank Miller

Cartooning is about deconstruction: you gotta tear something down to make a joke. — Berkeley Breathed

Certainly in cartooning I'm given huge free rein at the moment. — Jonathan Shapiro

You know, comics were created at the same time as the cinema. And the cinema very quickly became a major art. Cartooning didn't become a major art. There's a reason for that. People don't know how to deal with drawings. — Marjane Satrapi

Cartooning is an honorable thing. — Bill Sienkiewicz

People go into cartooning because they're shy and they're angry. That's when you're sitting in the back of a classroom drawing the teacher. — Matt Groening

Politics remained archaically unchanged in 1999. America was economically strong but morally complacent. It was a year of evil in many ways - another great year for cartooning. — Michael Ramirez

I had the impression in art school that cartooning was thought of as a lesser art than painting because cartoons are reproduced, so the "work" is not the single thing like a painting, but instead is the reproduced image. — Roz Chast

I'm discovering there are innumerable ways to package, promote and sell my humor, as long as I reserve a little for myself to keep bouncing back and laughing off the rejections that are also part of the art of cartooning. — Mark Evelyn Heath

I'm really interested in making a mark on a paper and letting that be cursive shorthand for an idea - that's the origin of cartooning. — Craig Thompson

On the list of things I cannot draw, wedding dresses are right there next to cars. — Stephan Pastis

I think cartooning gets at, and re-creates on the page, some sixth sense ... in a way no other medium can. — Chris Ware

Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons. — Ralph Bakshi

I'm skeptical of the 'go local' approach to cartooning to preserve your job. — David Horsey

All these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust — Nathanael West

I do think that many Americans have a limited view of what constitutes Japanese cartooning based on what gets translated, so it's great to see an increase in diversity. — Adrian Tomine

Cartooning was a good fit for me. And yet now, years later, I almost never think about it. — Gary Larson