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Dragon Comic 36

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Obviously, there is nothing cool or fashionable about snakeskin.

Obviously, there is nothing cool or fashionable about snakeskin.

Yesterday I sat down and wrote 2 weeks of scripts all in one go, 3 pages single space. Go me. Sunday was Tucson’s All Souls Procession so I had to plan ahead since I presume I will have been downtown all day. Sitting down and writing by hand in a notebook is really pleasurable. It sort of stimulates the child mind and sends me back into the past.

The Fox was telling me about attending a writing event and being forced to participate in an activity he felt was a waste of his time. He decided to “get back his roots” by writing a short story in the margins of the handout for the session. It reminded me of the novel I started writing in pencil in a black and white composition notebook during American history junior year.

It’s a different way of writing entirely, completely selfish and self-involved. The paper draws me in, in a way that a computer doesn’t. It’s hard to ignore distractions on a computer something’s always flashing, there’s always another tab. You can flip from thought to thought without taking your eyes away from the screen. It’s harder to look away when you’re actively engaged with a piece of paper.

I actually started a short story on paper during our Grand Canyon trip, but, like the 4 other short stories I’ve started this year, it just sort of drifted away from me. They’re all ideas I was really excited about, but short fiction has never been my forte. I’m more successful seeing through to the end vast sweeping epics. And now this comic, which is like an epic series of microfictions.

Dragon Comics 35

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dragon comic 35_edited-1

 

In the high stakes arena of men’s fashion and personal grooming, there is no competition more manly than the World Beard and Mustache Championship, an event currently sponsored by the World Beard and Mustache Association (WBMA). Beginning with (probably) a German club in 1990, this event celebrates shocking, luxurious, and artistic facial hair, which has been judged and found worthy by men of discerning taste.

Here are some details:

  • The beard modeled by The Man in panel 2 was grown by a German man named Willi Chevalier, winner of the Freestyle Chin-Beard prize in 2013, described as a “world famous international bearding superstar.” The super cool T-shirt is, of course, 3 Wolf Moon.
  • In panel 3, The Man is wearing nyan cat, and sporting the even more ludicrous 2013 winner of the Freestyle Full Beard competition, grown by Aarne Bielefelte, whose Facebook fan page identifies him as an athlete and “self taught beardgrower.”
  • Panel 4’s look has been lifted wholesale from rock and roll legend, facial hair enthusiast, and all-around dangerous hombre Billy Gibbons. The guitarist and vocalist for ZZ Top is immediately identifiable by his wild red beard and favors a hat resembling a dirty mop.
  • In panel 1, the man is not picking flowers, but pulling weeds, specifically, a pernicious invasive species in the American west known as goathead. Dragon is demonstrating the yoga pose uttanasana, a standing forward bend.

 

Dragon Comics 34

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Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Possibly followed by some intense nausea.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Possibly followed by some intense nausea.

In reality, you won’t catch The Man outside without shoes, but let’s imagine that Dragon talked him into a good faith effort at practicing yoga. For the sake of the visual gag, of course.

Somersaulting down a hill backward: now, that’s real. It’s a lot easier than it looks, and it’s good fun. You’ve just got to be careful about your cervical spine, which is not a problem for Dragon in any event, because Dragon’s skeleton is a lot tougher than a human’s, and more resilient, and some of Dragon’s external parts function as an exoskeleton. Dragon is very tough.

Yes, I’ve thought this out.

This comic really came down to the wire. What with the election and the crying afterward, there wasn’t much time in the day for drawing and writing. I’d love to get a bit of a backlog again. There was a nice one before I went to the Grand Canyon. Now it seems like every night I’m racing the clock. How do people even draw dailies? I suppose the people who do that probably draw better than I do. What about those artists drawing 2 to 4 dailies? Maybe they don’t have families.

Anyway: Dragon can curl up into a perfect ball and then roll down a hill. That’s basically the essence of the joke here.

Dragon Comics 33

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I suspected this would become a problem early on, no matter how great Dragon looks in profile.

Professional comic artists, people who draw better than I do but perhaps not quite as well as they’d like, typically maintain massive clip files of art, so that they always have references for whatever pose or setting they’d like to draw. Fine artists usually spend a lot of time with live models, again providing them with extensive data on which they can depend when sketching. At the very least, many artists make use of articulated wooden models, which help them understand how the human body is put together and able to move. Barring that, today, if you’ve got a good connection and basic Google-fu, there’s a decent chance that you can find a photographic example of whatever’s inside your mind, if what you want is a fairly common thing from a fairly ordinary perspective.

Even so, you can’t find everything. Certain angles are just not represented in GIS. For example, in Dragon Comic 29, panel 3, I knew that I wanted to draw The Man squatting as he picked Dragon, and I was easily able to find many visual examples of this pose online, but most of them were intended as instruction for athletes, and for educational purposes shot either straight on from the front, or slightly angled from the side. There weren’t as many direct shots from the side, which is what I needed, so I had to extrapolate. And even so, The Man still curves his back in a non-ergonomic fashion. I image that he straightened out before he began lifting, so as not to hurt himself. He’s bigger than Dragon, but Dragon’s no featherweight, either.

Sometimes, I take pictures of myself in certain poses to help me see how to draw them. The more comics I draw, the less I have to do this.

The thing I couldn’t imagine, or Google, or photograph, of course, was my main character’s head. I could guess how it might look straight on, but I couldn’t be certain because there’s no frame of reference and my relationship with perspective is tricky. When I had the idea for comic 33, I needed a way to double check that what existed in my mind made sense in the reality of the comic, which I will discuss in tomorrow’s post. Like the smashing of the fourth wall, I think this new technique in my arsenal will help add more dimension to what the rabbit correctly asserted is a rather two-dimensional set of illustrations.

 

 

 

Dragon Comics 31

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This is something I’ve been looking forward to doing for weeks and weeks, almost since I started drawing Dragon Comics. Are you not amused?

In my defense, the rabbit is definitely getting cuter. And cut and paste is easier than trying to make the characters looks like the same characters every time.

In my defense, the rabbit is definitely getting cuter. And cut and paste is easier than trying to make the characters looks like the same characters every time.

More or less, I was basically able to recreate what appeared in my mind when the idea came to me, which is progress. Still not perfect, but the main idea is communicated by the illustration, I think. I’m fairly pleased with the shattered glass effect in panel 4. It could use some more work, but, once again, the witching hour is at hand and the terms of my agreement with myself say that the comic goes up, perfection be damned.

This kind of playing with meta perspective pleases me greatly, and it’s so well-suited to comics and cartoons. Probably the most extreme and well-known example of 4th wall breaking in animation would be the 1953 Chuck Jones Looney Tunes classic, “Duck Amuck,” in which the animator spends 7 minutes torturing Daffy Duck with inappropriate scenery changes, repeatedly erases him with a giant pencil wielded by an unseen hand, and, since this cartoon relies heavily on the viewer’s knowledge of trope, replaces an (open, functioning) parachute with an anvil. There’s always got to be an anvil. For an added bonus, the sketch ends by doubling the self-referential nature of the narrative while pushing it firmly back into place by revealing that the sadistic cartoonist is actually Bugs Bunny, screwing with his old nemesis Daffy. After establishing a refreshing commentary that reflects the separate world (reality) influencing the cartoon, the end sequence encloses the entire story back in the cartoon world.

I could never be so cruel to my characters who, as you may realize, represent my actual loved ones, none of whom have even tried to convince a hunter that it was Dragon season. I just like to play. In fact, as I get older, that kind of classic cartoon violence-for-the-sake-of-violence makes me more and more uncomfortable. Apparently, some of us become gentler with age. That kid of cartoon violence is funny. It’s just not fair. I would rather wait 3 seasons to watch Aang spend 8 minutes fighting Firelord  Ozai before defeating him with compassionate nonviolence than see any number of falling anvils. Don’t get me wrong; falling anvils are still hilarious. Epic storytelling is just more fun.

Please note that even after the fourth wall has been completely shattered, The Man goes right on breaking it. He’s funny like that.

 

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Not that I precisely understand Facebook’s algorithms, but it seems pretty likely to me that Facebook doesn’t like it when you link to the same blog every single day. When I first started blogging, it seems like I actually got a lot more traffic, and a lot more Facebook likes. Now it’s leveled off, so my assumption is that Facebook isn’t showing my updates to as many people, which means fewer people are liking them, which means fewer people are seeing them. A vicious circle.

Lacking a publicity budget and not being overly active on any other forums, it’s hard to see how to increase my reach. Unless my work is so great that everyone who reads it just naturally and organically shares it. OK: generate better work so that people just naturally like and share it.

I *can* get better with practice. But do I?

I *can* get better with practice. But do I?

For most of my life, I was the type of person who either took immediately to a new skill, or gave up immediately on a new skill. It’s fortunate (or, possibly, the cause of this behavior) that I found myself naturally good at enough things that it was not immediately apparent that I was a quitter, or that I wasn’t learning certain important skills. (Seriously, I don’t think I knew my 12 times tables until college.) Not until my 30s did it ever seem imperative to me that subpar skills should be honed, that time should be spent doing things I wasn’t good at. So the Dragon “I can get better with practice” comic still amuses me, and guides me. It can guide you too, if you carry it around with you at all times and refer to it for guidance in times of need.

I stand by this princess.

I stand by this princess.

Getting better still isn’t a guarantee of success, which is another life lesson for me. Take Princess Sealestia of Aquastria. Although she’s a simple drawing, she took me about a month to complete, primarily because I had no idea what I was doing and had to learn the skills as I went. She still cracks me up. She still seems like a great idea to me. She gets more page views than any other design in my RedBubble shop. She gets compliments, too. But no one seems to want to take her home. Why not? She’s adorable. She’s available as a sticker for $2.32. That makes her versatile. She could be a smartphone case, or a notebook cover, or a window decal.

That cat is never going to get tired of that fish.

That cat is never going to get tired of that fish.

And finally, being worse isn’t an indicator of failure. It is certain that my writing is objectively better than that of Stephanie Meyers, but it isn’t more successful. I don’t think “Kitty Sees 3 Fishes” is a masterpiece; it’s the oldest drawing in the shop, and it’s actually something I dashed out in a few minutes. In fact, I think I spent more time converting it to a digital format than I did painting it. But it’s one of my most successful designs. How? Why? Should I be doing more in this vein? The idea of the picture still amuses me. But as an older, more accomplished artist, I look at this image and think, “Where are kitty’s feet?”

Anyway, this is a blog post, and these are 3 items in my shop. Do with them as you will. (I hope what you will do is like and share them with your social networks and expose more people to the magic of QWERTYvsDvorak.)

Dragon Comics 30

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It's true. He does smell delightful.

It’s true. He does smell delightful.

When I showed him the illustrations, before I added the text, he said, “I’m so glad you got outside.” Figuring out how to draw the Milky Way was the fun part of this drawing. Getting the silhouettes right was also something of a challenge, but not as much as it would have been 29 comics ago.

In case you’re wondering where Dragon’s tail is, it is flat and limp without the cave’s magic, and therefore spilling down the hill with no curl whatsoever.

In reality, I spend far too much time outside the cave. Why, just yesterday I went to 2 parties and 3 stores, and later found out that I missed an old friend passing through town due to my own busy-ness. And today I attended a Girl Scouts Brownies meeting for the first time since 1981. Fascinating. Getting the comic written is getting harder as the frantic part of the year encroaches, but I’m committed to at least 100 of them before I reevaluate.

Like what you see? Why not support the artist by clicking on the blogroll links to your right?

 

 

Dragon Comics 29

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Of all the work for hire I’ve done in my life, I’m perhaps most proud of the 30 entries I wrote for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature in the mid 2000s, including the entry on cartooning legend Tex Avery, whose 1949 cartoon short “Bad Luck Blackie” basically ushered the concept of cartoon violence into modernity. In retaliation for his torture of a kitten, a sadistic bulldog is cursed with bad luck, in the form of a variety of hilarious and increasingly unlikely objects that fall on his head whenever a black cat crosses his path.

The first 2 items to fall on the dog’s head are flowerpots; these are city creatures, and flowerpots falling from windowsills are explainable, even if 2 in 1 minute strain plausibility. Then comes the steamer trunk, followed, of course, by a piano. There is some explanation for the falling bricks at a construction site, but little logic behind the live bomb and the now expected, if not completely unlikely, anvil.

In the cartoon’s final moments, as the dog’s bad luck is sealed in seeming perpetuity, three final object fall from the sky onto his head as he runs off into a distance: a plane (OK), a bus (what? Did it fall off a bridge?), and then, for the punchline, a ship. A large ocean liner falls out of the sky, onto the dog. His luck is indeed bad.

In 7 minutes, Avery’s cartoon communicates an absurd logic, one without which we cannot truly enjoy cartoons. It’s the same logic explained in the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Roger, the animated rabbit, and Eddie, the live action human, have been handcuffed together. As Eddie furiously saws at the handcuffs he snaps at Roger to stand still. In a good faith effort to help, Roger slips out of his bonds and leaves Eddie to his task. Eddie notices that Roger is no longer chained to him, and snarls, “Do you mean to tell me you could have taken your hand out of that cuff at any time?”

“No, not at any time,” Roger explains. “Only when it was funny.”

That is the essence of cartoon logic. Anything can happen. But only when it’s funny.

This is a lot of what I love about cartoons.

The Animaniacs summarized the boundaries and possibilities of cartoon logic in the 1993 short, “I Am the Very Model of a Cartoon Individual,” jamming a maximum number of tropes into 75 seconds of music. An illustration of an anvil falls from the pages of a book, manifesting with a heavy clang onto the head of a pirate. Yakko Warner sings, “From this bag here why I can pull most anything imaginable, like office desks and lava lights and Burt who is a cannibal.”

Anything imaginable, as long as it’s funny.

Peter does it in Family Guy and Pinky Pie does it in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

And this is what Dragon is doing today. I love cartoons. I love drawing cartoons. It’s unlikely that I’ll get any worse at it. This strip gives me hope that I might be getting better.

But I wanted to examine the Horsehead Nebula! And shoot the fun size trebuchet. And maybe eat a banana, or some other piece of fruit off the Carmen Miranda hat.

But I wanted to examine the Horsehead Nebula! And shoot the fun size trebuchet. And maybe eat a banana, or some other piece of fruit off the Carmen Miranda hat.

Dragon Comics 22

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Remember when you were a kid and your could ignore anything?

Remember when you were a kid and your could ignore anything?

Vampire Bat fits into the scope of this comic, I think, and creates a nice contrast to some of the other characters. I could probably draw a better bat, but I’ve been sick and frankly I don’t even really remember drawing most of this comic, which I apparently did in the middle of the night with a mild fever while watching 3 episodes of The X-Files on Netflix, which I also don’t remember. Thank you subconscious mind. Way to be way more functional than my conscious mind, even if you do keep it all to yourself.

In panel 4, the girl is, of course, rocking out to Taylor Swift. They really do like those big headphones, which are a lot more comfortable than earbuds. As adults, it’s sometimes hard to know how to handle kids and technology. We don’t want them on their devices all the time, but we also don’t want them constantly complaining that they’re bored. We don’t like hearing the random sounds their devices make, but we also don’t like them being completely checked out and unable to hear anything you say to them because they’ve got the headphones on.

 

 

 

 

Dragon Comics 21

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What can I say? The Man is very fond of his vacuum cleaners.

What can I say? The Man is very fond of his vacuum cleaners.

Like most normal human beings, I really do not appreciate strangers attempting to corral me into a discussion of their philosophical beliefs. I assure you, it’s 2014 and if I have any questions about a particular book or its interpretation, I will most certainly Google it to learn more. I am not waiting around for random people to offer their opinions. Whether or not I’m in my house, I don’t want to be approached by strangers trying to sell me things, even intangible things.

I did have a friend who welcomed a certain type of witness into his home. A certain denomination sent a few young and attractive girls out to knock on doors and ask random people if they wanted to talk about their very particular spiritual beliefs. My friend was sufficiently interested in religion to keep the conversation going, but I gather he was far more interested in the fact of these girls being young and attractive. They asked if they could return to continue the discussion, to which he gladly agreed. They showed up a few more times before their supervisors correctly gleaned that my friend had no interest in converting, at which point, they assigned him some male visitors, after which he was no longer interested in discussing their religion.

Anyway, in reality The Man does seem to have a powerful attachment to that Dyson. Those things are powerful. I have no doubt a Dyson could contain an incorporeal spirit, although I find the idea of a haunted vacuum cleaner pretty frightening. Can you imagine if it just turned itself on and started roaring around your house at night? That’s a heart attack right there.

Have a great weekend!