Matt Bors made a quilt out of 'Odd Couple' cartoons by cartoonist Mike Luckovich (click to go to Bors blog)
As an editorial cartoonist, coming up with ideas is the most difficult process of producing a cartoon. Somedays, the idea just seems to magically appear, and others it’s like pulling teeth.
If you can’t come up with an idea about a news story, or you have an editor breathing down your neck, a cartoonist can play his ‘get out of jail free’ card by drawing a cartoon of people reacting to the news.
This can take the form of a person reading a newspaper with the headline being an important news story, and a person nearby commenting on it. Other variations include commenting about something on a computer monitor or a billboard. But in the world of editorial cartooning, the latest trend is to have a couple commenting on the news of the day on television.
Over on his blog, syndicated cartoonist Matt Bors has noticed this trend, and poked fun at its largest purveyor, Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Luckovich’s ‘Odd Couple’ appear often in his cartoons, generally placed in front of a large flat-screen television, commenting on the news. There is even a collection of them on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s website.
Bors, who often criticizes what he considers to be poor cartoons on his blog, was curious to know how often he really does it, so he decided to stroll though Luckovich’s archive and has made a quilt out of them.
“A New York Times editor dubbed him the “alpha male” of our field,” Bors says on his blog. “That’s a lot of TVs! Is this laziness or does recycling a scene for your joke delivery help the cartoon in some way?”
Mike Luckovich is a Cagle.com cartoonist. View more of his cartoons here.
