The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity

The people who draw comics or comic strips on a daily basis know that coming up with new ideas is not always the easiest thing to do. For anyone entering into the comics field...you will find this out. Comic characters: check. Coloring for the comic: check. Storyline: check. Creating new ideas for the comic day in and day out: NOT SO SURE...Uh,Oh. This book will help you come up with fresh new ideas that will help drive your comic.

As a longtime reader of the New Yorker -- and, more importantly, a longtime reader of its cartoons -- I was happy to see that the cartoon editor of the magazine had written a book. To be honest, I expected more about the inside dealings of the magazine: the idiosyncracies of famous cartoonists, the backstage intrigue that led to my favorite cartoons. That's not exaactly what this book is. It's more a solo performance by Robert Mankoff, who writes at great length about his own internal creative process. This was offputting at first, but by the end of the first chapter, I was hooked. He has an engaging voice and a real talent for illustrating his ideas (as you would expect), so the result is a pretty wonderful guidebook to human creativity and humor.

Perhaps that is an exaggeration: I have seen gold, held it, even watched as it was melted and molded into coins, and this book is not as valuable as gold. And yet, I cannot let go of the metaphor entirely. Gold comes from mines, where it begins life as brilliant flecks of value and inspiration amid the humid dark. And Mankoff's book, too, illustrates (literally and figuratively) how moments of comic gold can be identified, mined, and then shaped into something valuable. The mind reels, because the mind itself is shown to be a kind of reel. Auriferous artwork and puckish prose, all underpinned by a genuine interest in the alchemizing of human nature, ensure this book's success.

I come to United States to visit a cousin and took this book from his table. It is a wonderful amusement that will remain in my mind for many years.

Me, laughing my head off as I read this book. But this book also filled my head before I laughed it off. I thought it would be a hilarious collection of some of the best New Yorker cartoons, and it is, but it's also a complicated theory of creativity, humor, and art. The author keeps things light, but there are some serious points made as he investigates the links between cartooning, dreaming, surrealism, and so on.