It’s all fun and games til somebody gets hurt. So it’s best to bring along someone clumsier than yourself.
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We gettin’ Hubris all up in this place. Click on some things. ‘Vote Hubris’ comes to mind. Tell a friend. We gotta come up with a party game that involves Hubris somehow.
I think we leave off skiing and snowboarding for a bit, here. Hope you enjoyed it. The big news on this end is that the National Cartoonist Society (I’m a member, isn’t THAT weird) has added a division category to their annual awards. It’s ‘webcomic’, though someday, I reckon it’ll have some other nomenclature, as everything in the world goes to the web. There might be better webcomics than Hubris, but I don’t care. I’m submitting. Cross your fingers for Hubris! Also, click on ‘VoteHubris’ and StumbleUpon and Google+ and Tweet some Hubris and all that other stuff. ‘Like’ the Facebook page and everything. Every word out there in the cloud is another reader someday, and when there’s enough readers, I’m updating every day and having more fun with you guys. ‘Cause I like you and all.
Well, there you go. The alternate version of Monday’s cartoon, long and tall. Whattaya think? Better? Annoying? Different Good or Different Bad?
We could even take it one step farther and stack this same cartoon onto the end of itself. Hubris could drop over endless cliffs in a cartoon loop. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll post that tomorrow.
Okay, little feedback needed here. Today’s cartoon is newspaper format. That means it’d fit neatly into the spaces that newspapers and syndicates decided they need cartoons to be.
Now, since Hubris is a webcomic, I could have (still can, I guess) redesign the whole thing to take advantage of the fact that it’s on a webpage. Instead of a series of panels running horizontally at the same height, would YOU rather see a clever use of a tall panel where Hubris can fall and fall? Remember that you’d have to scroll down to see the whole thing. Would the novelty of a more dramatic panel arrangement help or hinder your enjoyment of a webcomic?
Click on the comments section below and say a word or two about that, if you have a minute. Thanks!!
Greg
Sorry this is late today! Holidays… y’know.
Okay- last of the golden oldies. This is the first Sunday cartoon I did for the original package. Hubris was still more like me- in fact, this happened to me the first time I tried to rappel- and so a lot of the Sunday cartoons were designed to be educational in a sick sort of way. “Watch out or THIS might happen to you!” educational. Fun, yeah? Later on, I decided to do the Crowd-Gag style Sundays, which I have put on the site before, and I think are wonderful because they slow a reader down, give the reader something to concentrate on, and make for an entertaining visual experience in a way that the average 3-second Sunday cartoon don’t offer. The syndicates said I should try to stick with the general concept of Sunday cartoons (like today’s cartoon does). The only upside that I see to the ‘tell a joke in a longer format’ Sunday is that it doesn’t take as long to draw. I like the look, feel, and theory behind the busy stuff.
This cartoon has a weird history. I did a version that went to the syndicates, and then cleaned it up a little and it ran, as has been mentioned before, on Tribune Media’s Comicsedge website for up-and-coming talent. A month and a half later, the words appeared nearly verbatim in a ‘Shoe’ cartoon.
Now, I’m not saying that some unscrupulous freelance comics writer was trolling ComicsEdge, writing down gags and then selling them as his own work to big strips. I’m not saying that at all. If you wanted to go say that, well, that’s up to you. If you’re wondering why I’m not accusing the guys who do ‘Shoe’ directly, it’s because I really respect them. I don’t expect them to grill freelance writers to make sure the gags they’re buying are original.
There’s another point, too, that this is a pretty broad gag. It could have been used in the Burns & Allen comedy show on radio or television for all I know. It’s got the look and the feel of something that anyone could have come up with.
ON THE OTHER HAND… another one of my ‘Because It’s There’ cartoons started off “You rode your mountain board off the roof? What were you thinking?”… And a short time after the club soda gag ran on ‘Shoe’ they ran a gag that started “You rode your skateboard off the roof? What were you thinking?” The proximity and wording makes me suspicious, even though the punchlines didn’t match.
Not that there’s anything to be done, of course. The newspapers and interwebs are FULL of cartoons, and have been for years and years. Multiply any cartoon by the number of times it runs in a year (365 for syndicated strips like The Buckets), then multiply that by the number of cartoons you read, and then multiply again for all the hundreds of cartoons you’ve never seen and never even heard of and you get a number of jokes written and drawn over the past ten decades that is truly (not euphemistically) awesome and staggering to the mind. And more being done every day. Like this one, that rehashes a gag I did on ComicsEdge and then ran in ‘Shoe’ and has been resurrected here on Hubriscomics.
So, if you once saw this gag on M*A*S*H or Leave It To Beaver or The Banana Splits, well… welcome it back to life for a moment. Mark it down. It’ll probably turn up somewhere else in a month or so. Just hope it’s not in ‘Shoe’.
This is one of the early Because It’s There cartoons that I haven’t updated and colored. That’s because the dynamic of the relationship between Hubris and Kara changed as I was writing. Hubris is no longer the sort of character who’d balk at the idea of actually, physically climbing the highest mountain for Kara. More likely, he’d insist on it while she said they didn’t have time to do it, so pick something else to do this weekend, like a movie or… another trail run, I think.
What do you think? Should Hubris be less reckless and more romantic-minded? Feel free to share. There’s a comment section, and there’s always the ‘contact’ and ’email’ buttons.
And as always, thanks for reading. The nostalgia trip will be over soon enough and we’ll be looking at fatter lines and colors.
So here we are with the original Basic Premise for Hubris. The name of the comic strip and the TV show Hubris hosted was to be ‘Because It’s There’. “Because It’s There” was the famous answer George Lee Mallory gave when asked why the heck he wanted to climb Mount Everest. I thought it was a pretty good excuse to do most anything outdoors. A nice syndicate editor told me to quit fooling around and use the name ‘Hubris’ instead. And who am I to ignore a good editor?
All through the original strips, Hubris’ name was painfully obvious. He was big and blustery and Doug The Dog (or Earl, in a lot of the first strips. Patrick McDowell’s ‘Mutts’ put a stop to me calling the dog ‘Earl’, because who wants to be accused of not being bright enough to avoid naming one of your characters the same as those in hotshot award-winning strips) had to pull his fat out of the fire on lots of occasions. As I wrote more and more strips and added more characters, Hubris’ character smoothed out to something more relatable. Still big and blustery, but not quite so blithely oblivious to his own shortcomings.
