Archive for December, 2008
5 items.
Gasoline is a great solvent, but I would REALLY not recommend cleaning with it. Unstable vapors, and all.
Merry Christmas! Here`s the Christmas Card for this year. It was received really well. Get it? I mailed them, so they were “received”. It`s another pun!
You know what? Just go spend more time with your family.
I really need to get into some other characters, bring back the lobster, go back to drawing backgrounds…lots of stuff. I feel like I wrote myself into a corner with this vacation stuff, though. I couldn`t come up with anything. I was about to sit down with my one-off ideas to stall for time, then I came up with this. The guy`s got nothing to say, but he talks anyway so people will hear him. This strip was, in a way, my way of filling dead air. Why not just say nothing? Well, for one I`ve skipped a lot of strips lately.
But primarily, if I don`t speak, how will everyone hear me?
The great thing about strips like these is I get to draw a bunch of poses and see where I`m improving and where I really need to work harder. Clearly the head-on shot (#4) needs a lot more work, as do my hands. The third shot I`m actually really happy with, as I thought it would turn out much worse. I had to push myself to draw these, which is always good, so I skimped a bit on the coloring.
Writing on this one was tough, too: I wanted to keep it moving, but I really wanted to rant as well. In the end, I cut the dialog down a lot. What the characters say is really important, but comics are a graphic medium, and if I want to read a novel I go pick up a novel. No sense in bogging down the reader once you convey your point.
I had this joke written a lot of different ways, and originally it was going to be a flyer. When I started blocking it all out, I had to have an excuse to swap places to really streamline the writing. I used the computer so the guy could lean over the girl, allowing me to trim the word count. I feel this gave the punchline more “punch”.