Desert Island Comics - REDUX.

This Time With Even More Marooning!

(First of all, Yes, Yes, for some of you we did this a while back, but I’ve since greatly improved and vastly expanded the original, so this one is 90% NEW - enjoy!)

..and if you’re not already subscribed - you can do that here! - Ok! Let’s do this.

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In the last installment of this series, we found ourselves halfway up a mountain, tasked with the Sisyphean task of drawing comics.

This time, we’re headed down to sea level, presumably the tropics, and specifically to a very familiar cartoon island…

Welcome (back) to Desert Islands!

So, let’s dive in, or rather… sit around and wait for rescue.

First things first; There are Rules* to the island:

1. The island must be impossibly small and completely ignore the existence of tides.

2. The island must always somehow support an entire fully grown palm tree.

3. The vast ocean must be oddly calm and weirdly lake-like.

*(Yes, always break the rules, obviously)

Usually, this impossible island with its unlikely palm tree also includes a bedraggled castaway marooned upon it.

Sometimes (mainly for the sake of dialogue) there’s two people.

So that’s the basic image composition accounted for…

Oh, sometimes there’s sharks.

Before we keep going though, it's time for some hastily researched history!

What’s the evolution of the Desert Island Cartoon? Just where did this idea originate from…

The Desert Island Cartoon is perhaps the most used cartoon trope; a quick search on the New Yorker Cartoon Bank will net you nearly 400 of them. In 1957 alone, The New Yorker published no less than 17 of them.

It should be noted, a fair few of the search results include that other classic cartoon trope: “People crawling through the desert in search of water”

(By the way, The Cartoon Bank is an incredible resource, be sure to check that out).

As for when the comic first appeared, I went and had a look at the New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons, a big red two-tome BEAST of a publication, which has an entire section devoted to Desert Island Cartoons and so surely, would have some answers…

Unfortunately, it had no information at all on where the cartoons came from and only offered up the vaguely specific “At The New Yorker, these cartoons made their appearance in the nineteen-thirties”

Since then, there have been many, many more. I’ve even submitted one myself, although why it was never published I’ll never know…

As for the very first one, Cartoonist Mike Lynch has devoted a blog post to finding just that, and ended up locating one published in 1887, presumably not long after pens were invented, and certainly a lot closer to the heyday of marooning.

In any case, our little island has been around for quite some time.

The trope is now so ingrained, it’s extended beyond the page to other media as well…

To be fair, Desert Island Discs has been going for 80 years, which is fairly significant in its own right.

The big, (or at least moderately sized) question is, just why is this very old trope still going strong after all these years?

The world has changed significantly since the first version of it appeared; and as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the number of people traveling by ship has really dropped off in the last hundred and a bit years, so (unless you buy tickets to a badly run festival) the chances of being stranded on an island are far slimmer than they used to be. And yet, the trope persists and cartoonists continue to perfect their palm fronds.

The reason, I suspect, is that the strength of the comic usually boils down to that familiar human emotion, which despite an increasingly connected world, only seems to get stronger…

Our good old friends, Isolation and Loneliness!

It’s specifically the isolation aspect where I think a lot of the comedy in the Desert Island trope can be found.

In The Sisyphean Task of Drawing Sisyphus, I looked at ‘shifting the perspective’ of a cartoon in order to find more comedy within it, and so by virtue of the very isolated subject matter of this cartoon being essentially shifted away from The Entire World, you can often choose a normal daily occurrence, apply it to the island, and find some unexpected comedy gold.

Even something as mundane as catching the bus suddenly becomes all the more entertaining when it’s applied to the island.

(As I’ve mentioned before, the no-words comic is always a joy to achieve — absolutely thrilled with this one)

Before we keep going here, Gotta throw in the standard “if you’re enjoying this…” shout-out!

Ok, back to it. As you’d expect with such a prolific trope, the comic has also become extremely self-referential over the years, and so drawing a Desert Island Cartoon about Desert Island Cartoons is absolutely fair game, and accounts for a very large portion of the genre.

You could even mix it up with another famous cartoon trope…

But let’s go further. What if we were to take this cartoon that hinges on the idea of isolation and then isolate some of its own essential visual components…

Or, maybe we move the island…

And while we’re taking the island on tour, we might as well make all the times I’ve misspelt it worth the trouble…

Or, we can make the island itself a character. (Yes we’re now drifting gloriously into the surreal).

Alternatively, we can isolate the water…

Meanwhile, the low-angle, face-on view of the island is also almost as consistent as the component visual parts, so we can also shift the camera angle…

It’s been while drawing the cartoons for this article that I’ve realised the strength of the Desert Island trope might simply be due to the fact that it’s relatively easy to draw. Other than our bedraggled castaway and a tree on a lump of sand surrounded by suspiciously calm water, the cartoon is relatively detail-free; an absolute dream for any cartoonist up against a deadline.

And it’s on that note, that I think I’ll wrap things up here.

You don’t even need to do the drawing! I’ll leave you with one last cartoon complete with those essential component parts, and even some empty speech bubbles for your own little contribution to the huge and constantly growing collection of Desert Island Cartoons.

Good luck, and happy drawing!

And that’s us done for this week, and certainly (you’d hope) for Desert Island comics for a while!

If you’ve apreciated the work and want to encourage the creation of more of this kind of stuff, as always - please do sign up for the OUTLINED newsletter and pick a plan option that works for you (FREE is FINE!) - Just hit subscribe there and have a look. I’ll leave the rest to you.

And of course, would love it if you felt like giving the whole thing a share! Thanks a bunch, and I promise this is it for Desert Islands for at least the rest of the year.