Tag Archives: webcomics

Dragon Comics 35

7 Replies

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 33

2 Replies

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 32

3 Replies

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

Leave a reply

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

2 Replies
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

3 Replies
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 17

1 Reply
dragon comics 17_edited-2

Some monsters have a lot of chutzpah.

Maybe it’s a bit of an exaggeration, but in general, I don’t think I’m the only artist who deals with bizarre distractions coupled with an attrition of art supplies. If I had a dollar for every time I had to stop what I was doing to figure out what happened to the stylus for the Wacom tablet, I could buy a new stylus every single day, and while I own literally hundreds of pens and pencils, laying my hands on one when it’s needed can become a bit of an ordeal. Poor Dragon has so much more to contend with.

Dragon Comics 16

Leave a reply
Just what you want to hear first thing on a Monday morning.

Just what you want to hear first thing on a Monday morning.

A more comical weapon than a scimitar did not come immediately to mind. It’s sort of funny looking and the name sounds slightly amusing. Can anyone think of funnier weapons? Actual weapons that look or sound funny, not ridiculous things being used as weapons. The first person I asked suggested a typewriter on a chain. That’s funny. But it’s not a real weapon. You might use it in a pinch, but you would never take it into battle.

You don’t take a typewriter on a chain to a scimitar fight.

See? It doesn’t work.

Dragon Comics 15

3 Replies
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 11

Leave a reply
White dudes: so oppressed, so voiceless.

White dudes: so oppressed, so voiceless.

Every night is basically a Man talking party in certain company. 

All I really have to say about this comic is that I had a lot of fun drawing hands this week. Friday’s comic has some even more amusingly drawn hands. The Man looked it over and informed me that Dragon is using the wrong finger in panel 3, but I guess that says more about his worldview than my ability to draw hands. It’s funny, because in a lot of circles the ability to draw hands is sort of considered the benchmark. I think hands are only medium-hard; it’s faces that cause me the most grief. 

What I’m not entirely satisfied with is the placement of the word balloons in this comic. That’s another important skill in creating a visual narrative, and it’s not always obvious how to line them up so they’re read in order. I’ve actually read quite a bit on this, and I get that it’s part skill and part art. And if you think it doesn’t matter, you should read this hilarious takedown of inexplicable newspaper comic Mark Trail in Cracked. Actually, the whole article is hilarious. But actually, people have written much more serious pieces about word balloon placement. And it’s even more important in a bigger format, because then you also have to think about panel placement. Simply placing 9 or 12 equal-sized boxes in a grid over and over gets boring. The best artists can create a magical flow of images that sweeps the reader along from action to action in a visual way that somehow reflects the action, but done incorrectly, this method can just confuse the reader.

I’m fair from having to worry about that. But it is interesting to consider how the chosen format affects the storytelling. I’ve already got a little story planned out that examines this, but first, Dragon has a few things to say about art, friendship, truth, and beauty. Stick around!