About this project

This book is already designed, produced and ready to go. In fact, you can buy a black and white copy for $12 on John's website or a color copy for $33. These are produced by lulu, and are great books. But they are printed one by one and are pretty expensive. The goal of this project is to get 100 color copies produced more economically, so that we can sell the color version for the current price of the black and white version.

All of these cartoons were originally published on John's “Cartoon of the Word of the Day” website (http://www.cartoonoftheword.com) between December 8, 2011, when the website launched, and October 15, 2011. During this period, John Ambrosavage has responded every day, without fail, to the Word of the Day posted on their website by Merriam-Webster with a cartoon. As I write this, there have been over 365 cartoons drawn and posted. More, by the time you read this. Sometimes, this isn’t exactly easy. You never know where M-W is going to go with these. On more that one occassion, John has called and said “This is the one, Spud. I got nuttin’. This is the one that’s going to break the streak”, only to turn out the best cartoon of the week.

Many of these were originally animated, as shown here. This made the compilation of a book somewhat tricky. Unlike a traditional newspaper cartoonist, John isn’t limited to a fixed number of frames. In fact, all of these cartoons originally appeared in a single space. There are frames, but they are frames of animation, and not frames on the page. Therefore, we had to pull the cartoons apart to put them in a book. Although we tried to use the best cartoons, sometimes it came down to space. There are cartoons on the website with almost a hundred frames, because there is a lot of action going on. These wouldn’t translate well to print, because you don’t see the action, so we left those out. In the end, we selected those cartoons that would fit a single frame, four frames, or eight frames, in order to make the most effective use of the book format. We put numbers next to the frames so that you can more easily follow the flow.

Next, we turned to organization. Although the cartoons originally appeared in random order, in response the the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day, certain themes have appeared over the ensuing year since John began. Among our favorite repeating gags are the daily specials that the guy in the bar and grill is always inquiring about, the witticisms of the condemned man as he approaches the noose, the insults hurled at each other by tex and old red, and of course, the inevitable meta cartoons featuring John and I “Down at Cartoon of the Word HQ”, which are closer to the truth than you will ever know. Starting with these, we grouped the cartoons into rough categories, and tried to provide a sampling of each. Doctors, Lawyers, Mobsters, Priests, and Chickens crop up frequently, for some reason, and are all well represented here, as well as scenes from the office, the home, and nature.

Help us make this book more affordable, so that John can sell more, and continue to make more cartoons!