Butterfly Multi-Captioning

This cartoon recently ran in Scout Life. This one was something of a breakthrough for me, the first time I tried a new process that I’ve been getting good results from. I call it “multi – captioning.”

So I had the initial idea for this one and drew it up. This was the original:

I was on a camping trip with my family, and while my children were playing at a playground, I was sitting under a pavilion and drawing this cartoon on my iPad. Once I was done I was just sitting there, watching my kids, my mind wandering, and I thought up another caption, a reference to a quote from a war-on-drugs era TV commercial:

And then another about how even when we accomplish major goals, we end up still just feeling the same. Wherever we go, there we are:

What I love about this process is that the one that actually ended up being sold wasn’t my original idea. It was an off-the-cuff idea that just came in the moment after I had the drawing in hand.

And now I ask you, did Scout Life get it right? Vote for your favorite and let’s see which one comes out on top.

Shout out to New Yorker cartoonist Paul Noth whose Substack, Noth Things, is one of my favorites partly because of his “Cartoon Combats” pitting his own cartoons against each other, which inspired me to try this out. Check him out and subscribe!

In total I think I came up with about 8 different variations on that butterfly cartoon, all within like a 20 minute time span. I was like, “Wow, if I did this for all of my cartoons it would octuple my output!”

So on the next cartoon I drew, I tried it again. This was the initial conception, about how, even though it looks like a fun job, the seal is so jaded that he’s just in it to get paid: