I was talking to a co-worker and the phrase struck and amused me. While it
might not be a completely obvious pun, sadly I must admit I'm not the first
to think of it. Doing a quick Internet search, I found that phrase popping
up on a few people's web sites, but mostly they had old political cartoons
of a SINGLE octopus strangling Washington or the U.S. or the Workers
or whatever with its evil tentacles.
I must admit, I had
higher ambitions for this drawing. I first thought of some distant view of
the NY city streets, with huge octopi clamped to different buildings, their
tentacles wandering through the streets wrecking havoc, while a long figure
in the foreground is running away from the chaos, one hand cupped over his
mouth, the other hand with his thumb pointing behind him yelling 'octopi
wall street!' as a warning.
Then I quickly discovered that that's kind of complicated. And I'm not
particularly good at drawing straight lines. Like lots of them, all in
perspective to form buildings and a whole city's worth of them. And then
I'd need some reference pictures which take time to look up. And so on,
and so on. I also was talking to a friend last night and mentioned that
I wanted to draw this cartoon and then realized that I should just do
something quick. And the single person, wrapped by a tentacle next to
a Wall Street sign seemed to qualify as both "good" and "good enough"
in my mind, and thus, I pretty quickly generated this. The overlapping
tentacles aren't perfect as is a lot of it. But it's done, which counts
for more in my book. And after all, it is just a weak pun. But
that means I have a contribution for December. Yay!
Oh yeah, and this was completely generated digitally, using Photoshop
and a Wacom tablet.
