A Trek Through Tropes

Today I’m going to try a new idea I had: a deep dive into my “tropes list.“ I have a long list that I continue adding to of tropes that show up commonly in cartoons as well as tropes that are just generally well known in our culture. These function as great set ups for the jokes in cartoons and I often turn to them as starting points for brainstorming ideas. I’m thinking to take you on a tour, one trope at a time, reflecting on each trope a little bit, and looking at some examples of some of my cartoons that use those tropes. Let’s see how it goes. The list is literally hundreds of tropes long, so I’ll only start to scratch the surface today, covering the first few on my list.

0 Days Since Last Accident 

I think this is the only time I’ve used this trope. The idea of a factory with a sign on the wall that says how many days since the last accident is a cultural trope, though I wonder if it’s becoming less known as factory type work is less and less common for most Americans. For this one I was trying to come up with a Daily Cartoon about cooling temperatures in the fall and wanted to use the term “sweater weather.“ In the end, it didn’t really work. Sometimes you take a stab and it falls flat. On to the next cartoon!

3 Kids in a Trench Coat 

I love this trope. I’ve tried so many variations on three-kids-in-a-trenchcoat, but I have yet to sell one. I submitted this one as a Daily Cartoon for the Fourth of July. No dice.

10 Commandments 

For me, almost all Judeo-Christian religious stories and imagery are rich material for cartoons, especially the 10 Commandments. Everyone has heard of the 10 Commandments, and there’s so much that can be said about the human condition based on this set of 10 rules that supposedly sum up everything we shouldn’t do: the direct communication with God, the authority figure of Moses, writing on stone tablets - so many possibilities! This was one of my first Ten Commandments cartoons I ever drew and it ran in Seven Days. To be honest, I’m not crazy about the drawing these days, but you gotta start somewhere.