Family texting is fascinating. This is what inspired this cartoon above. In a family of four, texting reflects the dynamics and personalities of everyone. How quickly do you text back? How long are your messages? What kind of punctuation do you use, if any? And do you dive into the emoji bank of goodies, or not? Do you send videos, photos, drawings? How often and for what reason do you text your relatives? Do you, god forbid, ghost a family member?
Here is an older cartoon in a similar vein, only about twitter.
And then there’s this one, which I personally love.
And its negative twin
Twitter is not used by everyone in my family. In fact, I am the only one who actually tweets anything. So it’s hard to draw many conclusions about our family from that, except maybe I’m the crazy one.
I am also perpetually inspired by James Thurber’s work, which I know you have heard me say before. I wonder what his cartoons would be like now, how he would write about our age of social media. You can see the top cartoon is different in style a bit, in terms of my usage of wash and the fluidness of the characters. I learned to draw cartoons by tracing Thurber’s work, and I am trying to get back to drawing like that with every drawing I do.
Here is one of my favorites of his. The caption speaks volumes and does the drawing of these two people. With so few lines! Economy of line.
I love the simplicity of his cartoons, something we don’t see enough of, in my opinion!