It’s not often I title these exquisite corpse drawings nor will it become a habit, but I felt a little more inspired with this one. As you probably don’t know, I consider myself a big baseball fan and I have been researching a project regarding Duchamp’s ready-made In Advance of the Broken Arm. What comes to mind for me is pitching mechanics and the recent shut down of Stephen Strasburg of the Washington Nationals. Formerly my beloved Montreal Expos, but I just couldn’t bring myself to be a Nationals fan. His arm action has been the subject of scout analysis for a while now, mostly in an unfavourable light. The crux (not to be confused with Kruk) of his arm trouble seems to be the inverted “W” rather than the action inferred by the ready-made snow shovel of Duchamp. There is some difference in opinion on this, however it makes for interesting reading, if things like pitching mechanics, Tommy John and various ligament and rotator cuff surgeries spark your interest. All this to bring me to this corpse, that was done a while back and contained both a reference to Duchamp’s ready-made and what appears to be a televised MMA bout. Thoughts of this remind of my MMA junkie friends and the techniques required for arm bars, kimoras and that rather ugly episode in UFC 140 involving Frank Mir and Big Nog. All clear? Ready-made to baseball to mma to exquisite corpse. All comes together nicely if you ask me. Well, except for the Big Nog incident, which if you haven’t checked out already is a little gruesome.
Came across this in Bob Mankoff’s blog today.
You should check out Saul Steinberg’s cartoons, they are a nice blend of cartoon humour and art and philosophy as Bob points out and anyone with a headshot like this deserves a look.
Anyway what caught my eye was the word balloon. Something that I have been messing around with lately.
Does that need punctuation? Who cares? Who needs punctuation when your word balloons don’t necessarily contain words
Or at least words not necessary to read in sentences or spoken phrases. 
or in the case of my personal favourite balloons, maybe it should be punctuation only.
I often wonder about the hang up with words. I’ve been told many a time that it’s not just language. A while back I posted Bob’s investigation of captions vs. captionless cartoons. Personally, I enjoy the wordless joke, saying so much without the need for language, though I am fond of wordplay which I often find myself talking about while out for coffee (coffeeng?). Bit of a stretch there. I am not entirely against captions, but so often you get a bad gag or poorly written or readers can challenge it with something better, which I suppose is the nature of the New Yorker caption contest. Worst of all is the atrocity committed by Family Circus on a regular basis.
Word balloon and continued speaking part in the caption. Drives me crazy when I see cartoons put together like this. If you’re going to do word balloon and caption, at least do it right.
office of surrealist investigations 
