Giraffe Tending Bonsai Tree
The Periodic Inscrutable by Arthur Trope
Arthur Trope
A sketch from the Paris/Seattle leg of Artie’s return trip. The comical treatment of the aurochs on the cave walls of Lascaux, which Amit Bhat had written about previously in TNEJSPC, lumbered their way into Artie’s Moleskin, where he drew them stuffed into Economy Class airplane seats, attempting to squeeze into the lavatory, and complaining about the meal service. Then inspiration came from the difficulty Artie had working on his laptop, which sat atop the Moleskin on the seat-back tray table and folded downward as the person in front of him reclined his seat. (Apparently the grant money didn’t cover First Class tickets, and Artie wasn’t prepared to try to expense an upgrade on the new corporate Amex card.) So the gag transitioned from aurochs in the lavatory and complaints about the meal service to the difficulties of managing a laptop in Economy Class when you’re an oversized auroch. But Artie realized he’s not very good at drawing aurochs, or not as good as the cave people of prehistoric France anyway. And so the aurochs were replaced with giraffes, despite there being (presumably) no giraffes in France’s fossil record. And then finally the laptop was traded for a tiny tree and the airplane was discarded entirely. Such is the creative process. Captions were debated, but in the end Artie felt this image stood on its own, and titled it simply “Giraffe Tending Bonsai Tree”. –Ed.
