The blog of Richard Thompson, caricaturist, creator of "Cul de Sac," and winner of the 2011 Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year.

Showing posts with label fresh hell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fresh hell. Show all posts

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Today's Poor Almanack


I've been wanting to do a cartoon about the Twitterverse ever since I heard the word, and figured it'd be something like the Blogosphere cartoon I did a year and a half ago. The plan was to end the cartoon with a link to a Twitter site that would, once you got there, provide the ultimate punchline. Well, that part didn't work, and I was so far behind when I got to drawing the final cartoon that I left out half the jokes I thought up (and they were classics, each and every one). And the cartoon goes off on a weird, pointless tangent about Twitterature, a word I made up after 120,000 people had already thought of it. A better cartoonist would've done a Twitterized version of Absalom, Absalom, but I've never read it and I'm lazy.

But what I'm left with is a stupid Twitter account with no ultimate punchline on it. Twitter seems to perfectly fit Dorothy Parker's implied definition of a fresh hell, but I figure let's keep our hells nice and fresh, so I'll try it until the banality and tedium of what I tweet becomes too starkly apparent. I read somewhere years ago that birdsong is really just a way for the bird to say, "bird here!" and all the music is just lagniappe, which can be extrapolated in humans to "Mozart here!" or "Leadbelly here!" or "Britney Spears here!" This doesn't have much to do with Twitter, but it is a little depressing.