Doede Okkema (41) from Uden has already made more than 300 funny cartoons. With one of them he now has a chance to win an international prize: a drawing of table football players who walk sick off the field. “Not everyone has the same sense of humor. But if I find something funny, it’s worth drawing it,” he says from his studio.
A man who has to switch off his sandwich maker when his plane takes off. A goldfish hanging a picture in its bowl. Doede has to laugh about it himself. “When the painting hangs, you can imagine what happens to its glass house. I find that funny,” says the cartoonist, drawing the cracks in the bowl.
When Doede still drew with pencil on paper ten years ago, he spent hours working on a cartoon. Now he has a colored drawing on his laptop within two hours. “Sketching, drawing and coloring takes two hours. But figuring it out takes much longer. Sometimes up to two years.”
“I have a lot of bad ideas before I get a good one.”
The cartoonist is inspired all day long. When he comes across things he finds funny, he saves them in his phone. “I have a lot of bad ideas before I get a good one.”
The artist sees something in a cartoon about the World Cup football for heavyweights. “I see a field with very fat football players in front of me. It has to look nice and unsportsmanlike,” he says, laughing out loud. “Then you realize you’re watching the World Heavyweight Championship.”
Doede is a lecturer in Industrial Engineering and Management at Avans University of Applied Sciences in Den Bosch. That is also a source of inspiration. “After a meeting about deadlines, I made a comic in which big muscular deadlines overtake the students.”
“I am doing something right. That’s very cool.”
The idea of the sick table football players had also been on his list for two years. “The original idea came from the merry-go-round. I wondered what it would be like for those horses if they had to turn around all day,” he explains. But it was not what Doede hoped for.
Then he came up with the idea of the sick foosball players. “I can imagine that you are very sick if you hang on such a rotating bar all day. I’ve drawn the players who throw up after a game and walk off the pitch dizzy.”
With that drawing, Doede has been nominated for De Gouden Hoed. Together with 9 others he was chosen from 471 cartoonists and 1884 entries. The prize is part of the Belgian Cartoon Festival Knokke-Heist, which is being held for the 62nd time this year.
“I can hardly get the words out of my mouth, but I now dare to say that I belong to the better cartoonists in the world,” he says modestly. “I’ve won the award before and now I’m nominated again, so I’m doing something right. That’s very cool.”
The winner of De Gouden Hoed will be announced in July.
