40 Hilarious Cartoons I Created Convey The Message With Little To No Words

I enjoyed the story-based comic strips (especially Calvin and Hobbes), but it was the single-panel cartoons that really drew my attention. One day you'd get a joke set in ancient Egypt, the next day it could be in outer space, or a classroom, or a bar, and maybe it would be Dracula speaking, or a frog, or a married couple. The possibilities were endless! The panels that influenced me the most were Brevity by Guy and Rodd, F Minus by Tony Carrillo, Cornered by Mike Baldwin, Off the Mark by Mark Parisi, Speed Bump by Dave Coverly, and of course, The Far Side by Gary Larson.

I drew a lot as a kid, but I was never particularly good. By the time I was in college, it was mostly restricted to the margins of my class notes. I had a night shift job at a youth detention facility, and that's where I started drawing cartoon ideas in order to make the long nights pass a little faster. In January 2011 (the same month I got married) my new wife encouraged me to take my sketches to the editor of the university's newspaper. Pretty soon I was doing three cartoons a week for the Utah Statesman.

To practice and hone my skills, I'd regularly compete in a weekly caption contest game with the Cartoonists Club of Great Britain (I was the only American) where we would all try to create a cartoon with the same caption or based on the same theme and vote on a winner.

In 2013, I won a competition held by a group called The Cartoonists Studio called "So You Wanna Be A Cartoonist." Cartoonists from all over the country would submit one cartoon per week and people would be eliminated until there was a winner. As part of my prize, I won a mentorship by one of my idols, Dave Coverly. He helped me get into the Funny Times magazine, and it just grew from there.

When I first started, I would draw on computer paper and ink with a Pigma Micron pen, but I quickly transitioned to working digitally. The main reason was that I was living in a tiny apartment and working digitally saved a lot of space. There weren't a lot of digital options yet, but I found a small laptop called an HP Touchsmart TM2 that had a stylus with it. Later I got a Cintiq Companion, and now I work on an iPad Pro. Occasionally I work traditionally, and I really love it. I hope to pull out the ink and pens more often in the future. It's satisfying to create something physical that you can hold (and sell!).