I must decorate more often. After weeks of not having a decent cartoony idea, I was starting to get worried that I had run out of gags. This week I have spent two days painting the kitchen and come up with half a dozen of the buggers in two afternoons. There is something about the monotony of painting a white ceiling even whiter that lets my brain go into freefall, hit the comedy trampoline which lies deep within me, and come back up clutching a wee nugget of funny.

Like This:


This one came as a shock. I've had the pencil drawing of this in my notebook for some six months now and I would look at it from time to time while deciding which of my many half started ideas to work on next and every time I saw it I would be filled with vague dissatisfaction - because the idea was good, but it wasn't funny (a major failing in a cartoon). Suddenly, yesterday, out of the blue, while I was washing up, not having thought about it for weeks, I knew what the joke SHOULD be. Wham! No warning at all. I had the wording reading "Walk for your lives!" instead of "Walk Away! Walk Away!" and I had the joke. It was suddenly funny. I didn't change anything else. I can't remember what I was thinking about (if anything) while I was doing the washing up but it wasn't anything to do with cartoonery. I rushed upstairs to get the idea written down before I forgot it.
When I came back down again three minutes later, feeling more than a little chuffed that I had finally solved this nagging little problem, I got another funny idea. Totally unrelated and fully worked out. Two gags in one day. Yipee!

Today I had another five.

What the hell do they put in emulsion paint?