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Dragon Comics 55

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This reminds me: maybe I should change the batteries in the smoke detector. Also, I should clean my oven.

This reminds me: maybe I should change the batteries in the smoke detector. Also, I should clean my oven.

Any excuse to draw cartoonish illustrations of things on fire is all right by me.

Of course, this comic derives from my very exciting Christmas cold, which was made more exciting by the fact that I had literally just recovered from my epic Thanksgiving cold. That seems sort of unfair. Why can my body not create sufficient antibodies to ward off all the virulent viruses in the air? Why am I exposed to so many viruses when I hardly talk to other people? Why isn’t the plural of “virus” “virii”?

Some questions will never be answered.

In panel 2, that’s a pretty original sound effect. In case you’ve ever wondered, the sound of a dragon sneezing due to a head cold is ker-CHOOFSH. Obviously, some part of the sound has to do with things catching fire whenever a dragon sneezes.

In panel 3 and 4, The Man is, of course, wearing a University of Arizona T-shirt because he is, apparently, some kind of wildcat.

Don’t worry about the table. Being magic, it cannot be harmed by dragon fire.

Dragon Comics 51

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Why I otter...

Why I otter…

Apparently people are enamored of “the machine.” Personally, I think it’s kind of a mean-spirited device. It gives you *almost* what you want, but not quite, because it delivers the thing you want in such a way that you almost don’t want it anymore. You would be better off without its generosity.

At any rate, a machine this powerful probably can’t be destroyed, although it can be stored in the guest bedroom with all the craft supplies and exercise equipment you never use, buried under antique furs and baby toys and ugly prints inherited from long-dead great-aunts. Dragon’s Cave, unlike my house, offers unlimited storage space, so there’s no question of setting the machine on fire on the front lawn.

Just so you know, the otter will share the doughnuts with the fox and the girl and the boy. He can’t eat that many doughnuts himself. Although I suspect the real otter would have no problem taking doughnuts from a kid for the sake a big laugh. But I’m sure he would give them back later.

I feel like the fox is as much a victim of this prank as the little girl, but something about the way he’s drawn suggests that he knew this would happen and he’s in on taunting the kid. But that’s not the kind of fox he is, I swear. I wanted to give him the punchline in panel 4 but nothing sprung to mind, so there it is. He’s just watching, feeling relatively certain that the otter is just messing with him and will dole out the doughnuts soon enough. Also I like the kid perspective: the girl did suffer, as only a child denied is capable of suffering.

Dragon Comics 32

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If we’re using the Andy Kaufman metric, this comic is a complete success because it amuses me.

The danger of time travel is not that you might become your own grandpa. It's that you might have to clean up your own mess.

The danger of time travel is not that you might become your own grandpa. It’s that you might have to clean up your own mess.

We’re just taking our meta experiment as far as it can go. The 4-panel layout has some particular limitations in terms of what you can do horizontally and vertically, but it also allows for this perfect setup mocking the passage of time.

Personally, I find time travel to be primarily comedic. I’ve never seen a time travel story that actually made sense, and while I was a big fan of Quantum Leap in its time, a lot of what was going on there was more fantasy than science fiction. There’s an X-Files episode that covers time travel as well, but the storyline has a guy from the future returning to the past to kill the people responsible for discovering time travel, because the knowledge of how to conquer time has made the world a horrible place. Generally speaking, though, time travel stories are ridiculous. Looper, for instance. If you can send people back in time, wouldn’t it made more sense to just send them farther back? Instead of sending back assassins and paying them in precious metal and then forcing them to assassinate themselves and run the risk of them balking at that task, why not just send your targets directly to the Jurassic era and let them be eaten by dinosaurs for free? I know people loved that movie, but I found it completely nonsensical. If I were a criminal and going to break the time travel law anyway, I can think of a million better things to do in the past than kill people.

As for the comic, originally the gag was just going to be that Dragon goes to all this trouble to see the future, only to learn that the future holds no surprises: Dragon will be drawing. But I think having the kids in there adds another dimension: Dragon realizes that jumping ahead to the future means that certain things have been left undone in the interim, and then we get a final zinger when the girl references traveling back in time.

I also like some of the poses I’ve gotten the different characters into. In reality, The Man cannot kneel like that, on account of a sudden and unplanned high-velocity meeting of his knee with a guardrail, which resulted in the metal volume of his patella being somewhat higher than that of a normal human. The rabbit really would wrap her ears around her eyes, if she could, to unsee anxiety producing activity. In panel 2, I guess the fox is jumping off the otter’s back to whack the remains of the shattered 4th wall with the broom. That is what is happening. And I also like the way the otter’s tail wraps around the panel frame for balance. And I’m glad the animals in panel 3 have taken it upon themselves to clean up the mess, so that panel 4 Dragon can draw in a clean environment.

That’s the shocking revelation of adulthood. Whatever it is that you do, you will most likely keep doing it.

Dragon Comics 26

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Sigh…optimistically, I’d like to believe that writing a sizable number of comics (let’s say 100, in which case we are 25% of the way there) should help develop my cartooning skills to a somewhat higher level. And yes, they are improving, but realistically, I think I need some more formalized instruction, if only through some kind of web module.

What I’m saying is that Dragon jumping up on down on the snake’s corpse is not quite right. There’s something missing from my depiction, both in terms of accurately portraying the act of jumping up and down in a recognizable form, as well as in terms of the comedic value that such a drawing should communicate to the reader.

Not funny enough?

Not funny enough?

However, The Man asks a perfectly cromulent question. How long has Dragon been sitting inside that magical cave, drawing? Also, the expression on The Man’s face, and the way he’s desperately trying not to look, maybe are kind of funny.

In panel 3, the way the snake is lolling on its back, it’s sort of asking for a beatdown.

Dragon Comics 24

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The Man is the one with the real vendetta against the Kindles, they're a convenient focus for Dragon's rage.

The Man is the one with the real vendetta against the Kindles; they’re a convenient focus for Dragon’s rage.

This was a fun one to draw. I’m particularly enamored of the Godzilla stuff going on in panel 3, and I was pleased to figure out how to draw the second panel without using a source image or looking at myself in the mirror. My only sorrow is the SFX words in panel 4, which are OK, but didn’t seem quite right.

In case anyone gets the wrong idea, I never take my aggression out on the children. That stuff is reserved for The Man. Don’t worry; he can take it. But the thing is, when dragons get angry, you don’t want to get in their way. Fortunately for the world, Dragons are slow to true anger.

 

Dragon Comics 20

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You've got to faith f-faith f-faith, I guess.

You’ve got to have faith f-faith f-faith, I guess.

Here I’m just saying 2 things, the first of which is that, no matter how much you’re willing to believe in an abstract concept because someone told you there was something special about believing without evidence, you can’t expect everyone in the world to throw their grounding in reality out the window because your belief is important to you. It’s nice if you have a belief that sustains you through difficult times. It is not nice to discriminate against people who are not sustained by that belief.

The second thing I’m saying here is that it is RUDE to knock on stranger’s doors when you don’t have business with them, and no, your belief that you should share your belief is not business. I don’t come to your house to discuss change in allele frequency or the melting of the polar ice caps. I personally think that overpopulation is the single biggest problem facing the human race, but I don’t bang on your door to make sure you’re using birth control, even though I feel very strongly that 90% of all people with children have no business procreating.

Otherwise, all I have to say about this comic is that, in panel 3, when Dragon is whistling, the tune is supposed to be the chorus for Mary Lambert’s “I Don’t Care if the World Knows What My Secrets Are,” but the only sheet music I could find online for that song cost $5, and I didn’t feel like taking the time and energy I would need to get up and pick the tune out on my stepdaughter’s keyboard, because I had a cold, and I’m not that much of a musician. Those two bars of music would have probably taken me 45 minutes. Just click the link and then you can whistle along with Dragon.

Dragon Comics 19

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Any day you can use the word "homunculi" is a good day.

Any day you can use the word “homunculi” is a good day. Plus, pile of flaming monsters. 

In reality, the Boy and the Girl are actually ridiculously well-behaved. Sometimes I try to encourage them to misbehave just because it seems unnatural to me that children should be so well-mannered and so little trouble. However, they are so good that they won’t be bad even when I tell them to. They cheerfully execute chores with no grumbling or backtalk and very little procrastination.

When I was little, though, this was pretty much my attitude. Why should I slave away for my parents? Taking care of us was my mom’s job, after all; I shouldn’t have to do it for her. Also, I really liked playing with fire.

So in this case, it’s my thoughts coming out of the kids’ mouths, except for the part where the Girl says, “EW!” That is something she would really say. I doubt either of them are familiar with the word, “homunculi,” or the implications of “working for The Man.”

Since we’re talking about comics, I just read the best novel anybody ever wrote about writing comics.

Dragon Comics 15

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Some comics are just darker than others.

Some comics are just darker than others.

A storyline of sorts is coming into play here; this is going somewhere, other than to a place where every punchline is either Snake insulting Dragon or Dragon killing the snake (not that that will never happen, because it’s still funny to me, but there ought to be some degree of meaning what equates to verbal slapstick.

Cat is working well; she basically looks the same cat every time. I’m starting to get a feel for her, unlike Rabbit, who still doesn’t look right in any drawing. It occurred to me last night, as I was falling asleep, that this in, in part, because I am drawing her mouth all wrong. Rabbit will be cuter the next time she appears.

Dragon Comics 14

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OK, I love this comic. I mean, I must have rewritten Rabbit’s dialog in the 2nd panel 12 times, and I’m still not completely satisfied, but this is precisely what I want to be doing: talking about serious things, and then flipping a switch and falling into a punchline.

This is another best viewed as large as your monitor can handle it, particularly the last panel.

When you don't wear clothes, body paint is pretty much the only way to add color to your wardrobe.

When you don’t wear clothes, body paint is pretty much the only way to add color to your wardrobe.

If you are not familiar with the work of Mondrian, check out this quick GIS. You’ve probably seen it, even if you don’t know his name. In fact, I’m only familiar with his name because I was on the forensics team in high school, in the “oral interpretation” division (i.e. reading out loud) and one of my pieces was Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ said the Ticktockman,” in which Mondrian is a summation of all that’s wrong with a rigid and orderly mandate in a modern, automated world. I’m not fond of the aesthetic myself.

Of course, Rabbit is adorning Dragon with the iconic image of Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” which most people are more familiar with. I have the print hanging on my bedroom door. I’ve also seen it held out as a piece beloved by people who took one art class in college and haven’t looked at a painting since then, but, obviously, I don’t have any space to be snooty about art. It’s a beautiful painting even divorced of meaning, and it had a lot of personal meaning for me. It very much is a work that, to me, expresses the kind of deep connection to the universe, intertwined with awe and wonder for the universe, that I feel when I look at a sunset or a storm cloud.

I learned a lot from studying Van Gogh’s “Blue Irises in a Yellow Vase“; from copying “The Starry Night” I basically learned how freaking amazing Van Gogh was. Do you have any idea how many colors there are in this picture? A lot. Even looking at a very good copy (I recall seeing 3D reproductions that actually used scanning technology to recreate his brushstrokes) you don’t see as deeply into the nuances as you do when you get down to the pixels. Wow. Just wow. I spent more time on “The Starry Night” than I did on anything else this week.

Dragon Comics 13

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Number 13: I’m feeling pretty lucky right now!

In reality, Fox explains that he can eat no more than 1 entire pizza pie and drink no more than 1 gallon of milk. This is purely comic exaggeration.

In reality, Fox explains that he can eat no more than 1 entire pizza pie and drink no more than 1 gallon of milk. This is purely comic exaggeration.

This week Dragon is moving into a deeper realm. There’s a couple weeks’ worth of story arc outlined as Dragon begins to ask the deep, penetrating questions. These are the thoughts that have, in the past, held me back and prevented me from devoting as much time to visual arts, or from feeling as if my ability translated into anything worthy of the hours devoted to it.

In conclusion, look at Fox’s mouth in the last panel! Look at those tiny little teeth! Tee hee. This page is best viewed at 125% or greater magnification, so zoom in if you can’t see. If you enjoy the adventures in Dragon’s cave, please like and share these links.