This is the first post in quite a while. They say lead off with your strongest material. Hope you guys like vile bodily functions!
Posts Tagged ‘Mr. Fuzzybuns’
14 results.
Thanks for indulging my string of comics without dialog. All will become clear in the next installment, of course. It’s been a fun bunch of strips, trying to communicate everything in picture only and still deliver on the occasional gag. Normally I’d wrap something like this up in a panel or two of talk. It gets the point across quickly, which keeps the comic moving, but so much of this rich detail gets lost when I do that.
And thanks to those who turn out for comic broadcasting. It’s quite entertaining for me as well.
Unfortunately, everything through the window is out of proportion: It should be pretty far away if that is actual size. Also, Mr. Fuzzybuns is out of proportion to the items on the desk (considering he’s a kitten). Oops. It conveyed what I wanted to convey in the space I had, so I did it. In retrospect, I probably should have designed around it in a different way, but it’s done now.
Making mistakes is how you learn. At the rate I make mistakes, I’m going to be the next oracle.
There should only be one more strip without words, unless I decide to go back to my earlier pacing and put two more in. I think I have it cut down to one strip, though, without losing important parts of the story. It’s always a balancing act: tell more story at the risk of boring people to death at the pace.
This comic was done completely on my new Macbook Pro. It took me a few days to get everything set up the way it was on my desktop, and it is still different because of the widescreen format (which works much better). I’m still not totally comfortable with the process, but I must say that the Apple track pad coupled with the Wacom tablet makes it really easy to zip around the file.
The next few comics will be wordless, so I hope I can convey what I’m trying to with pictures instead of text. That is, really, the idea of comics. If you’re telling the story entirely with words, you might as well write a short story. This is something I know I need to work on, so you get to suffer along with me.
I spent a lot of time agonizing over the color choices in this one. The choices in colors for the lobster’s outfit are of greater importance to convey what’s going on because the animal characters don’t speak. I also spent a good bit of time picking the background shade. I wanted to pick a color that would make the lobster stand out but be a bit more subdued against the infiltration outfit and Mr. Fuzzybuns. I didn’t want to entirely lose the contrast with the dark shades of gray, though, and it took me a while (and a lot of re-colorings) to be happy with it. In the end, I’m not sure all that time amounted to much in this comic but I got a good bit from the exercise.
It’s back! The comic is back! It turns out that having a dozen people in your house for most of a week then going out of town for another week is terrible for keeping schedules. Too much to do! But I am back and hopefully will be regularly updating for at least January. Let’s find out together, shall we?
I’m not really happy with how the last panel came out, and I wish I had done something to indicate the dramatic shift in time (and place) between panels 2 and 3 better, but live and learn.
I’m curious as to Mr. Fuzzybuns’ history: This is clearly not his first victory over humanity, even for his young age. I don’t imagine his previous victories relied on allergies, either, at least not all of them. I doubt we’ll ever visit his history because his future has much more potential.
I have at times portrayed the two animals in this strip (the lobster and Mr. Fuzzybuns, the kitten) as spiteful, malicious beings. I find it humorous when someone says that humans are the only animals who are malicious, or kill for fun. One merely needs to watch a housecat stalk its prey, or jilt a devoted dog and come home late to find a remote corner of the house sprayed to see otherwise. Perhaps it’s less prevalent in non-humans, but if that’s true I believe that’s more due to the fact that so much energy has to be put into surviving that so little is left over to hold grudges.
I once watched a hummingbird feed from a feeder outside a store. There were easily a dozen feeders, all of different shapes and sizes, all full of food. When another hummingbird came along, the first hummingbird left his perch and chased off the newcomer. This dance went on for a good five minutes before the second hummingbird gave up and left for good. I also remember, growing up, when some fledglings fell from a blue jay’s nest outside our house. My cat, being cuirous as her kind are, went to inspect the ground dwellers. I have no doubt in my mind that she was going to determine their tastiness in as thorough a fashion as possible, and the mother blue jay apparently had no doubt as well. She not only chased my cat away, she dive-bombed anyone who came out of that house for two months. My cat was a hunter who ate what she came across, and the blue jay was of course defending her children as any mother would do. Classifying her two-month reign of terror over the whole household, however, can only be seen as spiteful. I can’t say I blame her for being spitfeul, of course; rather, I see it as only natural that animals are just as capable of being jerks as humans are in their own ways.
I also wish to point out that the animals represented in this strip also have their redeeming traits and moments. They’re not always jerks.
I wanted to put the Lobster in a comic, because he’s been distressingly absent. I thought this was a great visual, so I was excited about it. I’m a bit disappointed in how I rendered Mary, though. I wanted to give the impression she was looking down at the plant, but I’m not so sure I did her justice. Oh, well.
I tried something new with the background. A long time ago I had scanned in part of a sheet of sketchbook paper at 600 dpi to digitize some stuff I had scribbled. I noticed the paper tooth was quite evident in grayscale mode. Since then, I have wanted to use it as a multiply layer to add texture to things. I happened to have a small patch of “unsketched” notebook paper from a scan, and I borrowed it for the background. Instead of multiply, I used the “Soft Light” layer mode. I felt it did a better job of softening the background color intensity so it would detract less from the foreground. Please let me know what you think of it. I’ll probably play with it a little more before I make any decisions, but input is always appreciated.
Extra-Holy water is Holy water blessed directly by a Pope. It gets more sanctified as more Popes succeed him. Mary had water blessed under Pope Paul III, who opened the Council of Trent. How she got her hands on Holy water from a 16th-Century Pope is another question; Yet another question is, how will she get MORE Extra-Holy water?
I hope you enjoyed my detour. It’s a nice way to break out of my routines and let my creativity loose. A downside is that it really limits how much exposition I can give. I have a limited number of panels as it is, and every time I fork the story I reduce the amount of attention I can give to any one piece. It’s frustrating, but that just means I have something to come back to some day.
Paranormal detectives will be on the shelf for quite a while, but I do hope to come back and explore this more.