One of my daily Rhymes With Orange cartoons is appearing in the New Yorker Magazine....by another cartoonist! Yes, it looks like my friend the New Yorker cartoonist Emily Flake and I had extremely similar cartoon ideas. And if you think that sounds suspicious, I’m here to tell you that this type of thing happens more often than you think!
This year alone, I’ve had similar ideas with a couple of King Features cartoonists, and they with me. It’s because we are writing with the same raw materials, working with the same memes, tropes, and cartoon cliches. In other words, we are all digging in the same mine.
Personally, it kills me when it happens. I have a little bit of an emotional meltdown. And if it’s too late to recall the cartoon from the syndicate, I just get over it, and move on.
Landing on similar ideas simultaneously happens now and then, and it happens to all of us cartoonists. Reminds me of that thing with the million monkeys on a million typewriters.... not that I’m saying cartoonists are like a bunch of monkeys.
Thanks for reading, and please share!