Today’s modern-day American cartoon is generally all about humor and getting the humor fast. in the 1980’s Gary Larson and his Far Side perfected this by creating a single-panel offbeat cartoon with a fast message, when most other newspaper cartoons were three to four panel strips and often filled with talk-bubble text. A decade later Rick London and his Londons Times Cartoons even took that a step further utilizing the Internet, and very colorful images, generally with even less text than The Far Side, to accomodate the fast-track cyber-world. A decade later, Londons Times Cartoons remains a top Internet icon.

Today’s single panel gag cartoons can be easily found on the Internet, magazines and newspapers, are usually single-panels with a caption immediately beneath and occasionally a speech/text balloon depicting the characters or a character talking. . Peter Arno of New Yorker Magazine fame, is consideredthe father of the modern gag cartoon. Arno, not one known for humility, often labeled himself that title. Gag cartoonists of note include Charles Addams, Gary Larson, Rick London, Dave Coverly, Leigh Rubin, and Charles Barsotti.

Editorial cartoons are a bit of a “different animal” and a type of gag cartoon generally seen in newspapers and periodicals. Although they also utilize humor, they more often purvey more serious in tone, commonly using irony or satire. The art usually acts as a visual metaphor to illustrate a point of view on current social and/or political topics. Editorial cartoons often include speech balloons and, sometimes, multiple panels. Some of the more popular editorial cartoonists of note include Herblock, Oliphant Mike Peters, and David Low.

Comic strips (in the U.S and most other countries), also known as “strip cartoons” in the United Kingdom, are found daily in newspapers worldwide, and are usually a short series of cartoon illustrations in sequence. In the United States they are not as commonly called “cartoons” themselves, but rather “comics” or “funnies”. Nonetheless, the creators of comic strips-as well as comic books and graphic novels-are referred to as “cartoonists”.

In many instances, a cartoon is a team effort consisting of a writer and illustrator (or more than one writer and illustrator. Take the case of Londons Times Cartoons www.londonstimes.us which, for over a decade, has utilized one writer, the founder Rick London, who also creates all the concepts, and a team of illustrators. London utilized the “Early Disney model” but not using animation. Unlike London, Disney often drew his own early cartoon characters (or made them out of paper clips), but London prefers to simply create the concepts and write the cartoons and assign them to the appropriate team illustrator.

In cartooning, humor is the most prevalent subject matter, adventure and drama are also represented in this medium. Noteworthy cartoonists in this sense include Mort Walker, Steve Bell, Charles Schulz, Bill Watterson, Scott Adams, and others. Though cartooning dates back to ancient Egypt, Martin Luther was the first to use cartooning in modern-age to communicate what he perceived to be important information to his following. Being keenly aware that the majority of his early following was illiterate, he drew his message in comical cartoon style, printed, and distributed it.

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