Cartooning Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'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'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

[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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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