Today begins what I call the Rejected Series. I’ll be posting finished illustrations that, for whatever reason, didn’t get used. The person who asked for this one wanted an illustration of someone laughing his head off. So that’s what he got. Trouble is, the person who asked for the drawing had a more staid picture of what he wanted than I produced.
Skookworks.com
Established 2003
This reminds me of a (possibly apocryphal) story about a classic New Yorker cartoon. The idea was that two fencers are having at it; one swishes the other’s head off and cries out, “Touche!” The original illustration showed (somewhat like yours) a good deal of anatomical explicitness. It was redone by James Thurber who in his typical outliney style shows the head up in the air, the rapier swishing through the neck, but no blood, no suggestion of internal structure. One version was gross, the other funny. Or so goes the story. Considering the rise of the Farrelly brothers & Jackass type humor I’m sure there are plenty of folks who find their yucks in spouts of blood.
That story sound familiar.
For this illustration it seemed like a matter of balance. If I’d drawn the characters more realistically then a lot of blood would have seemed ickier. Since the characters were done cartoony then an excess of blood seemed sillier.
To me. But what do I know?
The nephew watches South Park online regularly. Lots of gross out humor there. I usually find the blood and guts stuff funny, the poop and sex jokes tedious.
Nice “sploosh”. Is this gentleman laughing his head off?
Eric the Ex-Coworker
He is indeed. My instructions for the illustration were to show a group of people laughing. One of them was to have his head falling off. The others were either not to notice or to keep laughing but be disturbed at the same time.