#13: A baker, a sleeper, and a crime

Hello noble people,

It’s that time of the week again.

This week’s cartoons explore the secret origin of bakers, the joy of humans, and a fall through several music genres.

Hold on tight,
Chris

Like what you see? Follow me on Instagram (@chrisshorten), or talk a friend into following me on Instagram.

Caption: "My father was a baker, his father was a baker, and his father was a stick of wheat."

Some professions run in the family.

I always smile at the idea of a profession that might be passed down from generation to generation, but I also like the idea of things coming from a largely unexpected source. In this instance, this generational job choice comes all the way from the source, literally.

A little artist’s note: This one was fairly simple to draw, although I’ll gladly admit that I had to put a lot of thought into exactly how the hands would look from this angle, especially when they were holding rolling pins. The challenge, however, came down to what the caption would be. Usually, I have a good idea of the caption before I start drawing, but in this instance, I was struggling to find it. I tried to think of what two bakers would be talking about and where the connective tissue could be and, before settling on wheat as the third thing, this was the original caption:

"My father was a baker, his father was a baker, and his father hit people over the head with rolling pins."

Better? Worse? You be the judge.

Caption: N/A

This is my first dinosaur cartoon, but likely not my last.

We caught up with some friends recently, and their little son’s clothes were covered in dinosaurs. And it was amazing. I often wonder why there aren’t more adult-sized dinosaur clothes. It seems like a lost market. However, this cartoon turns that upside down to ask the question: If kids everywhere are wearing things with dinosaurs on them, would dinosaurs everywhere be wearing things with humans on them. It’s a kind of adorable vision.

A little artist’s note: This cartoon fills me with joy every time I look at it, but it has gone through a few evolutions on its way to your inbox. It started out as just the bed and the poster. The second version included the lines for the wall, and the third added in the window. These last two parts weren’t really needed for the spirit of the cartoon to work, but they add an extra dimension to the scene.

Caption: "It looks like the victim started out in pop, stumbled into the blues, and ultimately fell in jazz."

I’m a huge music lover, but I just don’t think there are enough jokes about music out there.

I also find myself watching a lot of crime shows (read: NCIS), and it seemed right that the two of these things would be combined at some point. While this may not have been a murder, it seemed appropriate that a double bass player would transition through multiple genres as he played his way to an untimely grave.

A little artist’s note: The caption for this cartoon has had so many iterations that I was worried it would never see the light of day. I always knew I wanted to do something about changing genres as the victim fell, and so it started out with time signatures, 3/4 time, 4/4 time, but I realised that these weren’t quite descriptive enough to work. As in, anything that requires you to Google the explanation is probably not fit for a regular audience. In the end, I went with the genres those time signatures represent in a way that would also indicate the career path of a musician.

Thanks for reading MiddleSquiggle!

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