Cartoon

Compresses a judgment into one drawn image with a target, so the verdict lands in a glance and the hedges do not come with it.

You drew the loop and it was right. Afternoon crash, coffee at three, sleep at half past midnight, short night, back to the crash. Four boxes, four arrows, taped to the fridge. Nobody has looked at it since, including you, and you are still making the coffee at three.

Cartoon is a treatment, not a shape. You keep the form you already have and compress the judgment it implies into one image, usually with a target. The target is the part you are pointing at: the coffee, the outline you keep rewriting, the first 20 minutes of an argument that decide the next two hours. Everything else gets smaller, simpler, or drawn out of the frame. That compression is the whole trade. A cartoon cannot say "sometimes" and it cannot say "on about half the days". It says one thing, and it says it before the reader has finished looking, which is why it survives a week and the four boxes did not.

It has a few working shapes. One panel with a caption. A strip of three panels where the third panel is the claim. A diagram you already drew, with a face or a speech bubble added to the single node that is behaving badly. A drawing where the parts are sized by how much they occupy you rather than by what they cost. An object with its parts labeled, where the labels are the argument and the object is only there to hold them still.

Two things to hold onto. Draw the plain version first, because a cartoon made with no form underneath it invents a verdict rather than compresses one. Then write down what the drawing dropped, and keep that sentence next to the drawing. The image is what people carry away. The caveat you said out loud while showing it is not.