Thursday, December 3, 2009

Invisible Poop

Today's Bizarro is brought to you by A Better Magician Cartoon.

This cartoon raised some eyebrows and caused a few readers to tap on their keyboards and ask me what it meant. The deal is that the guy forgot to do the rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick, so the rabbit is still there and bunny droppings are falling out, leaving a trail behind.

This is one of those gags that seemed a lot funnier in my head than it did when I tried to draw it. The problem is that the magician has to be in the background to show the trail, which makes the droppings tiny dots. The ones falling past his cape are more-or-less unnoticeable as a result, especially in the newspapers that print my cartoon about the size of a business card. I thought I did a decent job illustrating it, given the limitations, but the questions from readers tell me otherwise.

You can't win them all, tomorrow is another day.

9 comments:

Luis said...

I have to say, I was one of the head-scratchers. The bunny-droppings scenario came immediately to mind, but it didn't compute for three reasons: first of all, rabbits leave round droppings slightly larger than pea-size (at least the ones my family raised when I was a kid did), and the illustration shows what looks more like rat droppings. Second, the cartoon shows one heck of a lot of droppings. (Maybe the gag should have read, "I don't think you ever did the pull-a-pack-of-feral-rats-out-of-your-hat trick.") Third, I didn't see how they could be coming from a hat which fits rather snugly around the head.

The thing is, the bunny-droppings explanation made the most sense, but it didn't make enough sense... easy enough for me to say since I don't have to come up with one of these every day, of course.

Maybe a gag could be a magician bowing and doffing his top hat to a lady, and a pile of bunny droppings falls to the ground in front of him while the lady looks on in disgust, the caption reading, "The down-side to the rabbit-in-the-hat trick."

Neil J Murphy said...

Hey Dan, did you see this?


http://comicbooth.com/blogengine.net/post/Under-the-Couch.aspx

Madhypnotist said...

lol... glad I subscribe to your blog.... Im a variety performer and magic is one of my skills... so I always love your clown/magic/vent comments... but yeah... the droppings were definitely to small in the Pasadena paper...lol. Didnt matter... I still saved it.

Anonymous said...

Don't worry, Dan, I got it.

RaleighRob said...

It's good, I guess it's just kinda hard to see the droppings. Either people thought that was just a path the people were walking on, or it was random ink dots left by the printing process.

e said...

I read it quickly and thought it was a dirty joke.

Plan 9 Studios said...

Luis thinks your ability to accurately illustrate poo needs development. I love the internets.

alt-gramma said...

I got it too and the joke is funny, even though I know rabbit droppings are round. And if the wild rabbits around my place can be used as evidence, rabbits do poop a lot. Being a professional, maybe the rabbit was holding it all through the show.

doug nicodemus said...

i absolutely did not get that cartoon...thank god for the blog