I don’t know what happened when I scanned this piece, and I have absolutely no memory of what that last word should be!

Send your answers to “Past Lee Needs To Learn How to Fucking Crop Properly”, care of the email link somewhere on this website……

“Huh, whaddya know. Turns out it’s (illegible due to shitty cropping. Squirrels? Who the fuck knows?)”

I drew this over twenty years ago.

My issue comes out next month.

“Apparently, we’re due to be the centrefold in next month’s issue of Debt Collector Monthly.”

Ayyyyyyyyyyyyyy, housewife jokes, amirite!

I can’t think of single excuse for this one. I was young, it was a different time, it doesn’t represent me as a person, etc etc and so forth.

Seriously, I was such a dumbass in my younger days.

“Does my femglax look big in this?”

Ghosts and ghouls and things that go bump in the night. Shove them into a domestic setting, and it’s automatically funny, and then you can make a really shit Thor film that people love for some reason and maybe also JoJo Rabbit.

Anyway, here’s a vampire one. I’ll have my Thor film, now.

“Call it intellectual curiosity if you like, Vlad, but I still say it’s sick.”

Medical stuff is funny. Fact. It’s probably something to do with our deep-seated psychological need to address our mortality without giving into the fear that the subject prompts within us. Or it might just be that squishy bits make us laugh.

Either way, it’s been at least 20 years since I scratched this out, and it still makes me snork.

“Something bit me!”

Take the framework of one subject, apply it to a second subject that is similar enough to be familiar but different enough to be risible. Comedy gold, amirite?

I beg to differ. Exhibit A:

“Tragedy strikes when Rona gets her yoga book mixed up with John’s furniture-making manual.”

Yeah, so when I was trying to work out whether or not I wanted to try for a career in cartooning, (Morgan Freeman voiceover: Naaaahhhhh.) I read that it was important to be able to work up a portfolio of subject-specific cartoons, to show that you can attract work across a wide spectrum of magazines. Sports. Sports is always a good one.

This is a sports cartoon. And that is all I have to say about that.

“It can happen to anyone.”

Okay, I admit it: I have absolutely no idea what that little figure at the top left is. It looks like a teaspoon playing the maracas while shooting a laser out of its eye, but that can’t be right… can it?

Can it?

Hadrian’s back fence.

I don’t know what God’s reaction would be if a couple of religious loons knocked him up first thing on a Sunday morning wanting to talk about how the adult son he can’t get out of the bloody house and into a real job is some sort of superman figure with the power to forgive humanity all of the evils it should have known better than to pull in the first place… but I’m guessing ‘smite’ figures large in the calculations.

“I’m guessing you won’t need a copy of The Watchtower, then.”

Okay, I have no idea what prompted this cartoon, but I can pretty much guarantee I drew it before I found out that chicken farms do almost exactly this.

Bloody oracle, me.

“You’re supposed to sex them by locating a tiny, almost invisible spur on the back of the leg, but I just work on the assumption that I’ve got to be right roughly 50% of the time.”

Tyrannosaurus Rexs are funny. Okay, maybe not if you’re a ceratopsian, or if you’re stuck in a jeep with Jeff Goldblum’s sweaty chest, but for illustration purposes, anything with a giant, oversized head and teensy, tiny little arms is downright hilarious.

Look at how many Donald Trump cartoons there have been over the last five years.

So, yeah. Teensy tiny arms + activity that requires using teensy tiny arms = 70% of every tee shirt on Redbubble and comedy gold.

Here is some comedy gold. Unwrap it and enjoy the chocolate.

“Aww, but Mummmm…”
“I said no. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

All I’m saying is, Madagascar came out in 2005. I must have sketched this out no later than 1999, because I’d pretty much abandoned all hope of cartooning in favour of concentrating on writing by then (and look how well that didn’t turn out…).

I’m owed at least a fiver, and my law firm — Madeup, Daydream, and Delusion — agrees.

Also, note: some words just automatically make things funnier. ‘Fling’ is one of those words. Try it. You’ll see.

“Of course I’m aware of the Jungian notion that physical rebellion is an extension of psychological unhappiness, but mostly I just like to fling poo.”

All fictions are created equal, but some are more equal than others.

The Bible is far more equal to far too many people. Animal Farm is not equal enough. Let’s put them together, and let one point out the absurdity of the other, shall we?

Let’s be honest, if the only reason Man sits above the animals is because God said so, and God just destroyed the entire world under a deluge because Man fucked up so badly, and you’re now one of only two of your entire race shoved into a cramped, smelly, leaking boat with every other carnivore on the planet, wouldn’t you begin asking a question or two?

“Father, one of the pigs just said ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’…”

Transposing childhood games onto adult pursuits is part of the starter-for-ten pack when it comes to cartooning, comedy, fandom, the arts, and my Lego obsession. Shut up, you’re not my Mum.

So here I am, doing it again.

Also, proof that editing exists: witness the insertion of ‘court marshall’ to make the joke more explicit, and witness the fact that I’d have to edit it again in the final draft because some dickheads can’t tell the difference between ‘marshall’ and ‘martial’. Past Lee: what a dildo.

“What do you mean, court marshall(sic)? I got their flag. We won.”

Or, as I’m now stuck teaching for the foreseeable future, perhaps it’s my adult nightmares. Either way, it’s the classic “turning up to school naked” dream made, uh, flesh, and let’s be honest, somebody better probably did it before me. Probably Bill Watterson. Yeah. Bet it was Watterson.

(Which is is good a time as any to remind you all that Thumbnail Thursday is a segment in which I upload old cartoons I sketched back in the days when I thought I might have a shot at being a cartoonist. We’re talking 25-odd years ago. Times change, tastes, change, and other people — actual actual cartoonists — have undoubtedly published the odd idea in the meantime off their own bat. Life happens.)

“It is not a dream, Mister Adams. It is also the third time this week.”

Some things are universal.

So, an explanation is required: that’s Lucifer in the middle, flanked by Hitler and Brutus. It’s Hell, and it’s the interview question from, quite literally, Hell. Because wocka wocka satire or something, and none of that is apparent from a thumbnail that is pretty damn crappy even by the low quality bar of my thumbnails to begin with.

“Tell me where you see yourself in five years.”