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Comics
79 comics.
It’s been quite a spell, what with finishing up the MFA, doing Dancing Bear Variety Hour and six months of public radio internships, but I’ve been drawing a handful of comics lately. Don’t know if this is going to be regular thing, but it’s been a nice way to record recent experiences. I don’t have a scanner in New York right now, so the quality is kinda garbage. I’ll try and remember to rectify this while I’m home for the holidays.
I doodled this in the coffee shop on Saturday. I wasn’t really planning to draw a comic, but felt like playing with this wandering knight character and this came out. The dialogue is sort of improvisational – once I was on panel three I realized that I was in fact drawing a comic and just kind of let my mind roam. This is what it came up with. Sorry.
Hi, folks! Back again so soon? I realized I never posted the third installation of my Birds Painted on National Geographic series, so here it is. I particularly like the way the birds suggest that they’re going to bounce once they hit the ground, and the frustration evident in the woman’s face at the fact that birds have – once again – gotten into her grain. Sigh. Damn birds.
Oh my! A new comic!! This is pretty exciting, hey? I feel like I should have some momentous words on the occasion of an update after a fairly generous “sabbatical”. But I’m pretty hungry and don’t feel like being on campus right now. Also I just remembered that my bike got a flat, which means I have to walk it down the hill, so I’m not too stoked about that adding to how long I have to wait before enjoying delicious food. Also I my fatigued/hungered state seems to be affecting my writing abilities, as the first draft of that previous sentence was anticipating “enjoying delicious foot.” Pretty sure that’s not a thing.
Anyway, here’s what I did this weekend. I’m pretty happy with it. I haven’t painted in a very long time. I really would like to cartoon more, but I still haven’t figured out a way to do it time efficiently – especially with projects like this. The last several weeks/couple months have been mostly devoted to writing projects. Maybe I ought to combine the two – anybody up for Duckbox: The Animated Series? I’d also be up for a live action version, maybe an HBO series: The BOX. Shift it to the post-midnight scheduling block and we could have DuckBoxxx. I’ll write ’em all, no adaptation too ridiculous!
I’m gonna go make a sandwich.
Hey! Drew a comic. I’m on the road, so I just took a picture with my tablet and did my best job at touching it up. Which isn’t really a good job, but this is all you get until I get back home to my scanner.
Lately I’ve been doing a lot more writing than drawing. It kind of comes in shifts – sometimes I spend hours drawing cartoon vegetables taking part in a Viking raid, other times I spend hours writing dialogue for cartoon vegetables taking part in a Viking raid. But the writing doesn’t really get shared, and the site sits for weeks with no updates. I’ve thought about setting up a “writing” page, but I want to make sure I have worthwhile, quality stuff to share first (so expect that around 2018 sometime). Maybe I could start exploiting the “blog” feature to say interesting things when I don’t have interesting things to show you!
What about that?
I sketched out the idea for this comic years ago, possibly during lecture in undergrad. It floated around in a notebook somewhere until I rediscovered it a while ago, and decided to do something with it. I usually use technical pens for comics, but I was interested in a rougher look for this, so I went old school and used two G2s (05 and 038), and some brick red craft paint I had lying around. Messing with the paint made me realize I really just need to get some ink and brushes and start experimenting with washes. You don’t really get the same depth and subtle cross-hatching with a gel pen.
Ah, also, it’s Highlander gag. Do you like it?
Hey look! It’s Duckbox, but in a longer, nine-panel format that allows for a deeper, more expansive storytelling experience. With these new long-form Duckbox strips, the comic promises to offer levels of substance and emotional nuance never before witnessed in this medium. I’m a visionary! (Stay tuned for more Duckbox!)
What’s that? A new comic? Yes indeedy! The above strip was meant to be a pretty quick exercise, just scribbling out a fairly simple idea one after noon and posting it. Instead, at some point, it became something that would require several hours of work stretched out over two weeks. Because I have no capacity for enforcing efficiency or regularity in my work, which is fine because I don’t think those are important traits for cartoonists.
Remember when I used to just do blog posts? I think I might start doing that again, since I often have important, valuable things to say, even when I don’t have new drawings to post.
Opa!