Funny Times Cartoon Playground Help

Welcome to the Funny Times Cartoon Playground. A playground for your imagination. A chance to create your very own cartoon; a political cartoon, absurd pop-cultural moment, or gem of observational humor.

First, explore the cartoon elements listed on the upper right. You'll find a gallery of characters, torsos and heads (mix 'n match!), objects, scenery and word balloons, all drawn by our extremely talented and justifiably famous friend, Matt Wuerker (thanks a million, Matt!).

To begin, just drag and drop the elements you like into any of your cartoon panels and start building your masterpiece. You can create a single panel cartoon or a cartoon strip with 2-5 panels. Pop-up tabs above the panels ">>" and "<<" allow you to copy a panel either forward or back.

Click anywhere inside a word balloon to start typing. You'll recognize speech balloons and thought balloons. Scale elements up or down, rotate and flip them, push them in front of or behind other elements, even delete them, with the control buttons on the bottom, below your strip.

Type a caption for a panel by clicking in the blank space under it. Click on 'Title' and 'Anonymous' to add a title and your name so the world knows who your brainchild belongs to.

'PRINT', 'CLEAR', 'UNDO', and 'REDO' all do what you expect. 'ADD window' inserts a new panel and 'REMOVE window' taketh away. 'PUBLISH' saves your completed cartoon and posts it to the online gallery for the world to see. Be sure you're completely happy with your cartoon before you click PUBLISH; you can't edit it after that. When you publish your completed cartoon, you'll have a chance to send an e-mail link. We recommend that you send the link to your own e-mail address. Once it arrives in your e-mail inbox, you can get to your cartoon quickly and you can also send the link to as many friends as you like using your own e-mail address book. Hey, you've gone viral!

Visit the GALLERY to see what readers from around the world come up with every week. Cartoons in the gallery are listed newest first. Be sure to save your own cartoon's URL with the e-mail to yourself if you want to find it more quickly than leafing through the gallery.

Before we let you kids out for recess, please remember a few simple guidelines, so no one loses an eye:

• Please, no profanity. It's the cartoon PLAYGROUND, for goodness' sake; think of the children.
• Be Nice. Please don't post a cartoon that says, "d00d, that last cartoon sux." Cartoons like that, uhh, suk.
• Funny Times reserves the right to delist cartoons for whatever reason we deem necessary, or for reasons that we deem unnecessary.
• Now go have fun and lots of it.

We are hoping to keep published cartoons available in the GALLERY for about two months; we may change this interval in response to level of usage. C'mon, everyone gets a turn!

Any time you're done with these instructions go back to create your cartoon.