ReviMo Day 2 with Joe Berger

I adore Joe's art in the Hubble Bubble Series. The colors! Perfect for such a fun story. And his book My Special One and Only is near and dear to me. My daughter has a beanie pony that goes EVERYWHERE with us and has for years. Okay, enough gushing, take it away Joe!

My name is Joe Berger, and I’m a writer and illustrator of children’s picture books. For the last 12 years or so, I have also contributed a weekly single-panel cartoon to the Guardian newspaper, as one half of cartooning duo Berger & Wyse (Pascal Wyse and I co-write, I draw).

It might seem at first like these two strands of my work are only superficially related. But actually, the distillation and revision of an idea into a single drawing, perhaps with a few words, which creates a response in the viewer (hopefully a chuckle), is really a distillation of the art of picture book making. It’s a haiku-like form, perhaps, and one I find endlessly fascinating. And like all these creative endeavours, it’s a process of revision. Writing is re-writing. Even if the end point is pretty much back where you started.

And before I go any further, a caveat: there's nothing more insufferable than a comedian explaining why she/he is funny, and I'm afraid what follows may out of necessity veer into that territory. Console yourself that if our cartoons leave you cold you're probably smarter than us, maybe funnier too.

The background

For six years, beginning in 2001, Pascal Wyse and I produced a four-panel strip for the Film and Music pages of the Guardian, called the Pitchers, about a couple of hapless Hollywood screenwriters. Whilst we had no insider knowledge of tinseltown, the strip was really about the creative process, and the agony and ecstasy of working in a creative partnership.

Click images to enlarge                                                                                                       



In 2007, the Pitchers ended and we were commissioned to produce a single panel cartoon for the food pages of the Weekend magazine. The Pitchers comic strip was the first writing I had done, and it gave me the confidence to attempt my first children’s books. But after 330-odd strips, a single-panel cartoon made a refreshing change. Often with the strip we’d come up with a gag, and then have to write the three panels leading up to the gag, which sometimes felt labored. 

Our remit with the new single-panel was simply that it had to be food-related: anything from talking carrots to dinner-party mores; neurotic biscuits to psychotic chefs, gastronomic astronauts and beyond.

Seven years and another 334 cartoons later, we moved off the food pages and into a new slot where our single-panel cartoon could be about, well, anything.
This was at once a relief and a daunting challenge; without the subject-matter to confine us, we just had to be funny. Funnier than before, perhaps, because we no longer had the context of the food pages to make the joke ‘relevant’. Now the cartoon's only reason for being there at all was to raise a smile, so it had bloody well better do that.
 

The process

In the twelve or thirteen years we’ve been doing this, the process has remained largely the same. We meet or Skype for a few hours on a monday morning, and hopefully settle on an idea. I then draw a pencil rough, and we consider if we’ve got all the elements right - the angle, the characters, the wording. I might do more roughs, or, if we’re happy, I’ll go to a final drawing (occasionally we abandon the idea altogether and go back to square one at this stage, but let’s not talk about that - it’s too painful).

The final, coloured drawing will then be considered, and maybe the words or a facial expression tweaked - once we’re both happy, I’ll file it before the end of the day.
Very occasionally we’ll hit a brick wall, and spend six hours or more coming up with nothing. This usually requires stepping away, making a call to the paper requesting an extension til tuesday, and having a fraught, sleepless night imagining that there are no new jokes left in the world, before starting the process afresh. This was easier in the Pitchers days, since our staple subject was Chet and Foley, our protagonists, being unable to come up with ideas.

Revising the idea

Creating cartoons breaks down into two main areas: inspiration and execution - the idea and the drawing. And although these two parts are often inextricably interwoven, revision plays a key role in both of them.

The starting point for each cartoon is very often an idea I've jotted in a notebook - I keep one with me at all times. Whenever Pascal and I are stuck for inspiration, I can trawl through the stack of notebooks on my desk and inevitably find some forgotten shard of an idea that raises a smile. This is particularly valuable to the process, when you consider how cartoons are read.

A reader will leaf through the magazine, and perhaps this small colourful panel near the bottom of the page will catch their eye. They’ll glance at it, and if the speech bubble isn’t too long, they might give it a go. If it doesn’t make them laugh, or even make sense, within about 7 seconds, they’ll shrug and turn the page. Otherwise they’ll smile, maybe chuckle, and still turn the page.

So it’s really only when you’re looking through pages of old ideas that you experience them the way the reader will experience the finished thing, from a cold start.
It’s equally important to consider, when you’ve found an idea you like, how best to work it in to a finished cartoon. We both felt sure there was something in this notebook sketch, but the analogy of sharks to diners didn’t feel quite strong enough. And for me at least, the unpleasantness of the real-life situation made the joke feel slightly crass.

We abandoned the idea, but returned to it a few months later, and by turning it on its head we ended up with this.

Revising at the drawing stage

One of the key things to consider when it comes to finessing a cartoon, is how much ‘space’ you’ve created between the set-up and the joke. Cartoons are often most satisfying to read if, as the reader, you have to do a little decoding, join the dots. Here’s a few examples from our back catalogue:

On the other hand, if you leave too much space, the reader may give up altogether - here’s an example where we may have a left a little too much space . . . it may take you longer than 7 seconds to decode the joke, in which case you're probably going to feel you've worked too hard for the reward!
    

I could blather on for pages - talking about cartoons is almost as fun as drawing them - though I suspect, more so for me than the reader. So I'll end my guest spot here, with a final example of how revision can alter the original inspiration.
A few years ago, during our monday morning conference, Pascal mentioned an idea he’d had for a food cartoon about mice contemplating the moon. I quickly jotted down the following sketch in my notebook, as he described it.
 

We both liked the 'story', but didn't feel like there was quite enough of a joke there. Through a long, convoluted process of discussion (which I can’t now remember) we ended up filing the following cartoon.

I'm particularly fond of this example of the distance travelled between inspiration and execution, because although it took Pascal and me only a few hours to revise, the journey the mice take is rather longer. Having heard that the moon may be made of cheese, they have had to evolve to the point where they have (presumably) rid the earth of humans, taken over, invented space travel and sent a huge colony to their new utopia, only to be disappointed.

Happy revising - and a huge thank you to Meg for the invitation to talk about myself a little - something I’m disconcertingly happy to do. Please feel free to peruse the archive of Berger & Wyse cartoons at:

www.bergerandwyse.com

Our cartoons are also syndicated on GoComics:

www.gocomics.com/berger-and-wyse/

and my solo work can be found at:
www.joeberger.co.uk

Thank you Joe! Can't wait to see more of your books!

Joe Berger is the author and illustrator of Bridget Fidget and Bridget Fidget and The Most Perfect Pet. He is the illustrator of many other books, including  the Hubble Bubble series of picture books and young readers by Tracey Corderoy, Princess in Training by Tammi Sauer, Hattie the Bad by Jane Devlin, Dot by Randi Zuckerberg, and three new Chitty Chitty Bang Bang stories by Frank Cottrell Boyce. Joe has just finished illustrating Girl & Gorilla, by Rick Walton, to be published in the US in 2016.