Rich Sparks: Black Socks, Bad Ideas, and the Comedy of Imperfection

This week on The Cartoon Pad, Marty and Shaw welcome the wonderfully unclassifiable Rich Sparks—cartoonist, musician, testicle enthusiast, and one of the most delightfully strange voices in modern gag cartooning. If you’ve stumbled across Sparks on Facebook or in places like The New Yorker, Air Mail, American Bystander, or Weekly Humorist, you already know: his cartoons arrive like a tonic in a sea of sameness.

We dive into Rich’s peculiar visual universe—mid-century characters in horn-rim glasses, men inexplicably wearing black socks and dress shoes while otherwise naked, and the eternal comic truth that imperfection is funnier than perfection. Along the way we discuss cartoon influences (M.K. Brown, Everett Peck, Cal Schenkel), the mysterious durability of tardigrades, and why pudgy, vulnerable humans make better comedy than flawless ones.

Rich also shares his unusual path into publishing cartoons—selling from his very first New Yorker batch, yet originally planning a career in illustration instead of gag cartoons. We talk sketchbooks, Facebook as a public cartoon laboratory, and the slow grind of finding your line after years of hating your own drawings.

Plus: Chicago trivia, band life in power-pop groups, trade-journal illustration gigs, the lost art of drawing weird things that make people slightly uncomfortable—and Rich’s new collection Horseshoes and Tardigrades: And other drawings by Rich Sparks, a book packed with the kind of offbeat, beautifully odd humor that only Sparks seems able to deliver. Come for the cartoon craft, stay for the socks-and-shoes philosophy of comedy. Follow Rich on Facebook or Instagram (@rich.sparks) for a steady stream of wonderfully inappropriate cartoons.

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