Uncaptioning Cartoons

Recently I was listening to the Nick Downes episode of the Cartoon Caption Contest Podcast and he told a story, which may be apocryphal, but he said he heard that one time a cartoonist submitted their weekly batch of cartoons, and then, after it was too late, realized they had forgotten to put the captions on the cartoons. That week they sold three of them!

Whether the story is true or not, it got me thinking, how many of my cartoons could stand on their own without the captions? Time and again I hear people saying that they think captionless cartoons are like the epitome of cartoons. I don’t necessarily agree because part of what I love about cartoons is the alchemy that occurs between the combination of image and text. Still, I do understand that captionless ones often have a quiet, subtle, poetic kind of beauty that is unique and special and hard to pull off.

So I went through all of my cartoons and removed the captions on ones that I thought could maybe stand on their own. I’m currently in the process of submitting them, so we’ll see how they do. Here are a few of them.