Recently, I’ve rediscovered my love of gag cartoons through a recent client of mine, Vasanth Sarathy, creator of Legally Drawn, gag cartoons and strips about “life in law.” I decided to take a stab at creating my own gag cartoons for fun and only one out of a dozen ideas was funny, pictured here for your amuzement where I was playing off the recent news at the time that Steve Jobs was going to leverage his position on the Disney Board and CEO of Apple to inspire the next iMac.

I realized that creating these types of cartoons is not easy. Had you asked me if they were easy before hand I would have said no, but after creating my own I think my new answer would be “Hell No!” You have to capture the attention of your reader and make them laugh in about 3 seconds.

[Gag] Cartooning Books

I remember a book I had purchased a couple years ago by the cartoon editor of the New Yorker magazine, The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity. It’s a great look into the mind of how a cartoonist might go about creating such cartoons and helps you to learn some techniques (I use this word loosely because I believe it’s more of a gift than a learned behavior) to create gag cartoons.

Vasanth told me about another book I haven’t yet had the time to read but did purchase called The Cartoonist’s Muse: A Guide to Generating and Developing Creative Ideas. It’s an older book and not currently in print but you may be able to locate a copy in the Amazon Market Place, Ebay or by Google searching the title.

Video: What’s the deal with New Yorker cartoons?

Below is a video from bigthink.com featuring David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, briefly talking about how hard it is to find young cartoonists and that cartooning is a hard living.