In order to split the cartoons into beginner and intermediate volumes, I need a way to classify the relative difficulty of the keywords. How am I going to solve that?
When I first started creating these cartoons, I was using them for my own learning and it didn’t matter if they were a bit rough around the edges. They worked, and that was good enough for me. But now that I’ve decided to actually publish them, everything has changed…
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It’s funny how much more critical we become of our ideas once the spectre of other people’s criticism comes into play. I know which cartoons I’m really proud of and which ones I just phoned in, but other readers won’t. They’ll assume I’m equally proud of all of them. So I’ll roast slowly in the fires of their imaginations every time they have to endure a weak pun or a sloppy caption. Or worse: a spelling mistake.
That’s why, for the last week, I’ve stopped working on almost everything else so I can review the entire set of cards and tighten things up. The problems lie in five distinct categories.
Problem One: Bad Cartoons
The worst sin I can imagine committing in a book of purported humor is to not be funny. I know I can’t tickle everybody’s funny-bone every time, but it becomes downright irresponsible if I don’t even tickle my own. So my first pass through the cards was to flag those few that had neither a funny image nor a funny caption. Those were thrown into the Replace pile, and they’ll need both a new graphic and a new punch line before I can put them back into the running.
There were about 30 of these - mostly from the early days, when I wasn’t particularly trying to be funny at all. Back then, I was just aiming to illustrate each word in a way that felt sticky to me. And then, when my ambitions slid predictably toward humor, I didn’t bother to go back and fix them. So I’m paying for that now.
Problem Two: Weak Punchlines
Sometimes, the image was humorous enough, but the punchline was weak. Either because it didn’t fully capitalize on the inherent humor of the image, or because it didn’t properly demonstrate the subject word in use. Either transgression was enough to get a candidate sent to the Rewrite gulag.
About 20 gags fell into this category, and I’m slowly working my way through the pile.
Problem Three: Boring Images
As I’ve said elsewhere, one of the reasons I think these cards work so well for me is because they show more than just a picture of the item in question. They show the item embedded within a rich context; some scenario in which the key item is relating to a variety of other items and concepts. Both the richness and the novelty of this web of connections are important nutrients for the memory formation process. So finding cartoons that fail in this dimension is just as disappointing for me as finding ones that aren’t funny.
These got marked as “Redraw” and placed onto the 3rd Heap of Purgatory.
Problem Four: Language Specificity
There are many jokes that depend entirely on the language in which they’re expressed. The most obvious are puns, which get their humor from the similar spelling or pronunciation of two otherwise very different words. Puns are not a crime, and I enjoy a really a clever one when I hear it. But if I want to adapt these cartoons for other languages, puns as a rule don’t translate well.
Some other jokes find their humor by depicting a literal interpretation of a colorful ideom. In English, “kicking the bucket” means to die, so a cartoon showing a man kicking a bucket at a funeral might be funny in English, but in Spanish? Why is Papa angry at the milk pail? See? Even if I change it to “pail” it stops being funny, so it wouldn’t stand a chance if I changed the entire language.
The reverse is also true. Some jokes might be completely innocuous in English, but trip over cultural sensitivities or language peculiarities in the other language. I have a cartoon about a princess playing basketball that is quite funny in English, but there’s at least one other language I know of that might earn me death threats if I tried to translate it. So jokes like these all get thrown on the Untranslatable pile.
But while the previous three piles are all getting full do-overs, this one is getting triaged instead. If the joke is strong enough, I don’t mind keeping it in. After all, funny = memorable, which is the name of this game. But I don’t want a whole mess of these language-specific jokes clogging up the process of releasing other language versions. So if the joke isn’t solid, or there’s any hint of offensiveness, these get forwarded to one of the three other piles, as appropriate.
Problem Five: Headless Cats
For creating these cartoons, I use several different generative AI tools, but that’s not as simple as it might sound; I often have to generate a hundred different images for a single cartoon as I try to find a good balance between depicting the keyword, illustrating the joke scenario, and creating a composition that reads as funny. It can be exhausting.
But AI is my cartoonist, and that means the images have flaws. Often enough and severe enough that I sometimes have to compromise on secondary details. A central character in an image I like might have no mouth or too many fingers, the policeman might be wearing 5 different watches, or yes, that room full of cats might include one that has no head. In many cases, I think these details add to the humor, but sometimes they’re distracting enough, or perplexing enough, that I need to fix them.
In other cases, the AI gods just outright seem to be laughing at me rather than with me, by giving me one good detail in this picture and a different good detail in that one, but never giving me everything I need all in one image. For those cases, I often have to stitch three or four candidates together into a single, cohesive gag.
So the last category is for Retouches, and that pile takes far and away the most of my time.
But as I said, I’ve been working on these all week and I’ve now got the pile down to about 20 images left to process. My objective is to have them done in the next 24 hours so I can get a preliminary draft out to my Norwegian editor and start the process of correcting my bad norsk. See you next week when we’ll find out if I hit my target.
