Joe Beer

Here's a card that will be on the stands soon. It seemed like a natural. Don't know why I haven't seen it done elsewhere. Ideas like this are so obvious you wonder why there haven't been a hundred versions done by now. Perhaps there has been someone who has done a similar one, I just haven't seen it yet. Editorial cartoonists are prone to doing very similar cartoons. They have to crank them out daily and work with the same concepts that a hundred other cartoonists are also ruminating upon, so it often happens that the very same light bulbs click on in multiple noggins within a small time frame. That must annoy an editorial cartoonist no end. You come up with a great concept, a 'natural' and then three or four of your fellow artists print the same idea the same week. It just neutralizes your genius moment! This happens on a lesser scale in magazine cartoons. However in that genre it happens in a larger time frame which leads one to consider that the duplication may owe itself to idea theft. Which in some cases of creative desperation it is. Some ideas are so attractive that a starving artist can be seduced into thinking that he can make it his own and hopefully nobody will notice. What they don't realize is that an idea that intriguing spreads virally and is known to many in a short time. But the public is fickle and sometimes don't even remember or even notice the name that appears in the bottom corner of a cartoon. Once they are both in print who is to say which came first. I have had many of my ideas lifted over the years. It is frustrating since the options for recourse are limited and not usually successful monetarily. The only good thing you can take away from it is that the offending person will be branded as such if they continue the behavior and also that if they can't think of their own stuff, they have a limited career prospect. And in a perverse way it is a nod to your own brilliance that someone liked it enough to commit plagiarism. So I'm waiting for the cartoon clones to happen not long after this card spreads through the populace. This business is a fluid one and the sea of ideas is a soup in which our brains commingle with each other like jellyfish on the tides. Hows that for a metaphor? That might make a good cartoon! I hope it hasn't been done before.