corks are special contractible 4-manifolds that play a key role in the study of exotic smooth 4-manifolds. in this talk, i will describe applications of corks to the study of surfaces in 4-manifolds. i'll begin with some badly behaved 2-spheres in 4-space, based on joint work with piccirillo. then i'll use a twist on these ideas to construct smoothly (indeed, holomorphically) embedded disks in the 4-ball that are isotopic through ambient homeomorphisms but not through diffeomorphisms. there will be lots of cartoons.