The bad cartoonist

If there is one thing that Ken Catalino is known for, aside from his predictable puns and astute ability to state the obvious, it is his amazing ability to draw people that look completely lifeless.  Trust me, it’s not easy to make everyone look as though they were just pulled from the ground board-stiff but, somehow, Ken pulls it of almost daily.  This caricature of a zombified Hillary sets a new standard for drawing someone who looks fossilized.  This joke, by the way, got laughs out of exactly two people: Ken and his editor.  One of those people was laughing out of courtesy.

I hate to say it, but I think he traced it.  You be the judge.

Take one ping-pong ball.  Cut it in half.  Draw little black circles on each half.  Stick them on your face.  Congratulations, you’re now a Ken Catalino caricature.

Things only get worse when you look at more of his recent work.  Aside from his glass-fisted punch lines, it also appears if he has had a recent case of the lazies.  I hear it’s been going around.  Pay attention to his caricature of Obama (the jittery photoshop effects are there just to distract you). 

Now imagine that you’ve spent an exhausting fifteen minutes thinking up an idea and you’re just about ready to call it a day but you still have to do that pesky thing I like to call drawing.  The easiest way to get around this is to just open up photoshop and copy what you did the day before.  Add a hand over his face (Ken, are you trying to hide something?), a photoshop filter, three or four garish colors, and you’re almost there!

Hey, if it works, go with it.

Nice newspaper in this one.  It’s a subliminal message that marketing came up with.  They thought that if readers saw more people actually reading newspapers then circulation would increase.  They didn’t realize that it also INSTANTLY makes the reader an idiot.

Here are the three faces for comparison.  Yup, he didn’t even bother to take the extra 10 minutes to draw Barak’s face again.  Not only are these kinds of jokes one of the true plagues of our profession but a cartoonist who doesn’t have the time of day to actually DRAW a major political figure deserves public mocking and a severe finger-wagging. 

Save for the hand, added so that Obama would be showing some kind of emotion (note to self- putting a hand over someones mouth is a good way of showing that someone is overcome with laughter) they are the same.

 Here they are overlaid, just to show that he took a mini-vacation from his job for a couple of days.

 You’re a cartoonist.  That means you should draw.  Now you know.  And knowing is half the battle.