The Visual Telling of Stories tries to identify those images that offer a narrative solution not encountered before. As this earnest taxonomy was being assembled over fifteen years, it was implicit that each choice of image was an innovation, capable of offering a new solution to the problem presented. At this stage in its development, the website is qualified to identify in some detail the characteristics of Rubbish, Dross and the Lumpen Mass of convenient solutions that only serve to show how a professional artist could keep up with the pressures by repeating tired old formulae.

These Hoary Old Cliches of course have their charm and are useful in establishing the claims of those who challenge the system. We can't all burn high octane every working day, and some of us are happier with handcarts. Above is an ingenious parade of Cartoon Cliches assembled by Donald McKee for the New Yorker magazine in 1925. How exactly he catches the poses, the luggage labels and the tawdry tableaux, the stilted dialogue and the preposterous rebirth of the Calendar Year as a Mad Tot. Look for Chile in the bath and the drab pairing of John Bull and Uncle Sam. The choppy sea of Public Indignation is alone worth the entrance fee. Oblivion lies beyond. See elsewhere my cavalcade of Hairy Fire-Bearing Bolshies.

Don't be afraid - it isn't catching.Try some yourself. Every day presents you with more thick rich loam.

Step up to the Plate.

Let us go Forward , that is.

See also the hilarious and beautifully assembled Hall of Infamy established by Rowland Emett, The Hothouse of British Humour, with its chronicles of the Cliches, the Fakir on the Bed of Nails, the Desert island, the Psychiatrist's Couch and the Broken Window, the Angler who snags himself and endless lines of Vicars and Bishops.

I suspect I am not alone in thrilling to these distillations of the blindingly obvious.