Cartoon Pencils Quotes

The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle.

Saturday-morning cartoon sure aren't what they used to be. The animation is lazy. Too clean. He misses being able to detect pencil lines and paint strokes in his favorite cartoon characters, his mind never quite separating the creatures from the art that brought them to life.

College students were asked to rate the humor of cartoons from Gary Larson’s The Far Side while holding a pencil in their mouth. Those who were “smiling” (without any awareness of doing so) found the cartoons funnier than did those who were “frowning.” In another experiment, people whose face was shaped into a frown (by squeezing their eyebrows together) reported an enhanced emotional response to upsetting pictures—starving children, people arguing, maimed accident victims.

You will need 12 index cards and the pen/pencil of your choice. Draw one panel per card, spending no more than 3–4 minutes per card. Do not use any words. Draw the following scenarios: (A) The beginning of the world; (B) The end of the world; (C) A self-portrait, including your entire body; (D) Something that happened at lunchtime (or breakfast, if it’s still morning); (E) An image from a dream you had recently; (F) Something that happened in the middle of the world’s existence, i.e., between drawings A and B; (G) What happened right after that?; (H) Something that happened early this morning; (I) Something that has yet to happen; (J) Pick any of the above panels and draw something that happened immediately afterward; (K) Draw a “riff” on panel J; for example, a different perspective, another character’s viewpoint, something that happened off-panel, or a close-up on some detail or aspect of the drawing; (L) Finally, draw something that has absolutely nothing to do with anything else you have drawn in the other panels. Spread the 12 panels out in front of you. Try to create a comic strip by choosing 4 of the panels in any order.

I knew more things in the first ten years of my life than I believe I have known at any time since. I knew everything there was to know about our house for a start. I knew what was written on the undersides of tables and what the view was like from the tops of bookcases and wardrobes. I knew what was to be found at the back of every closet, which beds had the most dust balls beneath them, which ceilings the most interesting stains, where exactly the patterns in wallpaper repeated. I knew how to cross every room in the house without touching the floor, where my father kept his spare change and how much you could safely take without his noticing (one-seventh of the quarters, one-fifth of the nickels and dimes, as many of the pennies as you could carry). I knew how to relax in an armchair in more than one hundred positions and on the floor in approximately seventy- five more. I knew what the world looked like when viewed through a Jell-O lens. I knew how things tasted—damp washcloths, pencil ferrules, coins and buttons, almost anything made of plastic that was smaller than, say, a clock radio, mucus of every variety of course—in a way that I have more or less forgotten now. I knew and could take you at once to any illustration of naked women anywhere in our house, from a Rubens painting of fleshy chubbos in Masterpieces of World Painting to a cartoon by Peter Arno in the latest issue of The New Yorker to my father’s small private library of girlie magazines in a secret place known only to him, me, and 111 of my closest friends in his bedroom.

Feedback smile. Smiling itself produces a weak feeling of happiness. The facial feedback hypothesis proposes that ". . . involuntary facial movements provide sufficient peripheral information to drive emotional experience" (Bernstein et al. 2000). According to Davis and Palladino (2000), ". . . feedback from facial expression [e.g., smiling or frowning] affects emotional expression and behavior." In one study, e.g., participants were instructed to hold a pencil in their mouths, either between their lips or between their teeth. The latter, who were able to smile, rated cartoons funnier than did the former, who could not smile (Davis and Palladino 2000).

I have now scoured your Internet, and have identified several ersatz concierges that were created by your own society, and are in current and active use throughout it. I strongly suggest that you allow me to import and implement one of them.” I caught Manda’s eye. She shrugged. “Sure,” I said. “Earth’s most popular ersatz concierge has had hundreds of millions of users—although its usage has declined rather dramatically in recent years. Shall we try that one?” I really, really, really should have asked why the thing was shedding users. Instead I shrugged and said, “Why not?” The dazzling, octodimensional projection instantly transformed into a flat rendering of a paperclip with googly eyes. “That’s an ersatz concierge?” Manda whispered after a shocked silence. “Dear God …” As she said this, the paperclip’s eyes darted cunningly from side to side. Then a cartoon bubble appeared above its head reading, “It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?” It was Clippy—the despised emcee of Microsoft Office. I knew him well. Because while he had allegedly retired long ago, my firm—like so many others—had clung to the Clippy-infested Windows XP operating system for years beyond its expiration date, staving off the expense and trauma of a Windows upgrade. That process had finally started eighteen months back. But copyright associates are low in the priority queue—and I had been slated to get upgraded “next month” for as long as I could remember. “Okay, go back,” I said. Clippy stared at me impassively. “Stop it. Cut it out. Go back. Use the other interface. Use the gem thing.” As I said this, Clippy’s eyes started darting again as he scribbled on a notepad with an animated pencil. Another cartoon bubble appeared. “It looks like you’re making a list. Should I format it?” I fell into an appalled silence. Then Manda gave it a shot. “We do not want to use this ersatz concierge,” she enunciated clearly. “Please return us to the previous one.” Clippy gazed back with bovine incomprehension. We went on to try every command, plea, and threat that we could think of. But we couldn’t get back to the prior concierge. Luckily, the stereopticon’s projector mode was still working fine (“If you download Windows Media Player, I’m throwing you under a bus,” Manda warned it).