The Cat Cartoon without the Cartoon

Let’s call this an experiment.

Two ideas collided in my mind and I have to act on the combined notion to move forward. Otherwise, every time I see my The 2011 Cat: Cartoon-A-Day Calendar (featuring art by Sam Gross in the Valley Cottage Calendar) this year I’ll think: man, shouldn’t I have just …

And the “… just …” part is “posted a description of each and every cartoon in my Cartoon-A-Day calendar.”

And if you’re saying, “what? why?”, you can join Suzy in saying that exact thing. Because she did.

Now the two ideas that spurred this experiment are as follows.

The Mensa Calendar

A few years back Suzy gave me a Mensa puzzle-of-the-day calendar. These were almost always word or simple math teasers but would occasionally involved a simple picture. I enjoyed them and had a few friends who liked to look at it, too. Then one day I typed the quiz into mail and I sent it out to a few people and, before you know it, I had a small distribution list and a daily following for the Mensa puzzle-of-the-day.

It was fun.

The Garfield Minus Garfield Cartoon

I like to chase odd links from odd sites: endgaget, boingboing, reddit, etc. Just little mind joggers to show me new things that may be of interest and are often discarded or forgotten immediately thereafter. On one such visit I was introduced to GarfieldMinusGarfield.net … which is described on the site as:

Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle.

Now, I don’t follow that comic and haven’t visited the site in years (… even now I remembered it as “garfield without the words” … a bing search set me right), but the idea of it stuck with me.

Cat Cartoon without the Cartoon

And so now, I’ll mix these two ideas and present to you the “cat cartoon-a-day without the cartoon”. That is, to avoid what would surely be a violation of Mr. Gross and his publishers copyrights, I’ll avoid posting the cartoon image from his Cat Cartoon-A-Day daily cartoon, but I’ll describe it and leave for you to enjoy. No pictures required or allowed.

I was hoping to find a WordPress widget that would let me post a small, discrete sidebar window that would both display text and allow me to archive them. No luck. Alas … I’ll just make these as standard posts.

And so … please, enjoy!

 

 

Addendum

2/8/2011

After posting a couple week’s worth of cartoons, I realized that the styles were varied and suspected they were not all drawn by the same hand. Then I noticed one cartoon signed by someone other than Sam Gross and I took a closer look.

The calendar is edited by Mr. Gross … the cartoons are the creation of many artists. A quick estimate suggests there are over 90 artists involved in the creation of this calendar. The names are printed on the last page of the calendar … if I feel guilty about not giving credit where due, I may update this post to recognize the talent that went into making this possible. For now … just know that it’s not all Sam Gross.