Toonpool.com’s cartoon collections are a great way to find cartoons on a certain topic and to dig up older cartoons that you would hardly have discovered any other way. Only thing is, there are more than 200 of these collections. And no one can really be bothered to browse through all of them. Well… I did. Think of this as a meta-collection.
Animals
Let’s start with a simple one: cartoons about different kinds of animals. Of course there’s a collection about animals in general, but this is only the beginning: we may not have a collection about dogs, but we’ve got cats, wolves, pigs, whales & dolphins, sharks, fish in general, frogs, penguins, owls, and white doves. Then, there are dinosaurs, animal/human hybrids, and.. my favourite (although it’s only a small collection): tentacles. All hail to the tentacle.
Music and Art
Apart from a general collection about cartoons and painting, we have all the usual suspects: there’s Picasso, Dalí, Van Gogh, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” and, of course, Mona Lisa.
There are several collections about single musicians that can be easily replicated by entering the artist’s name as a search term. Still, I liked both the Bob Dylan and the Elvis Presley collections for their diversity. I would also like to point out the more general collections about Blues & Jazz and a broad definition of Rock ‘n Roll.
Professions and Places
Among others, people have collected cartoons about pirates, beggars, cooks, monsters & vampires, and cavemen. And they collected cartoons that are set in prisons, restaurants, on desert islands or in the circus.
Things
I somewhat admire these collections… some of them are huge and the items connecting the cartoons usually aren’t listed in the tags. We’ve got cartoons including barcodes, flags, tattoos, books, and bags. There are also collections about cartoons on shoes, cigarettes, beer, wine, and sausage. the good life, y’know.. If you’re less of a materialist, there are things like beauty, time, migration, and evolution.
Religion
There’s a pretty big collection of cartoons that make fun of Christianity and Pope Benedict XVI even has his own pretty big collection. There are collections on major Christian holidays as there are on Biblical stories like Noah’s Ark (yeah, I know… technically that one’s being shared by all Abrahamic religions). Unfortunately, especially regarding the number of Muslim members on toonpol.com, the one collection devoted to Islam is titled “Islamophobia”. All cartoons on Islam, whether they criticize it or just mention it are included in it. Something’s going wrong here, if you ask me.
The Bad Taste
There actually is a collection devoted to “Bad Taste Cartoons”. Other than that, there’s one about death (well, acually there are two, but I made my choice), there’s one about missing body parts, one about toilets and, finally, one that’s exclusively concerned with feces.
Cartoon Types
This is my favourite category, because it demonstrates an abstract view on cartoons. While black-and-white cartoons are easy to collect, cartoons including a lot of red are a bit more complicated. There’s also someone collecting cartoons with a lot of text, cartoons in which the bubbles are part of the joke, and cartoons that look similar to other cartoons. The last two are about caricatures rather – there’s one collection about smiling people and one that collects pictures that look like the evil version of the original person.
toonpool.com
Our collection about cartoons that have been broadcast in the berlin subway system probably isn’t that interesting. But there’s also a collection about images including toonpool.com and an exhibition of the first 13 cartoons ever posted. And, of course, there’s the infamous “Draw Me” collection, collecting caricatures of cartoonists.
Again, no one could ever be bothered to brose through all the collections. Not even the small part that I’ve linked to in this post (about 64 collections). But maybe there are some that sound interesting to you. And maybe you will set up your own little collection or contribute to a cool one that needs some participation. Who knows. Anyway: Thanks to everyone who created a collection, you’re doing a great job!
© toonpool.com
Gee, Paul, this is a great post… I like the title picture as well – maybe we should put the collection avatars in such stamp frames? Looks cool. And you succeeded in putting the collection in categories… this might be helpful if we adopted this idea, too (someday).
cheers, max
Yap, I agree… a great post! My “organizer” deep in my mind finds this deeply satisfying! And the stamps are great too!!
Well done! Bravo!