See? That’s why we need to get the real world back to a place where we have crowds and festivals.
When you go participate in crowds and festivals and conventions and stuff- people see and hear you.
You get fans. Paste gets fans. Mal gets fans. Look there! Lowell appears to be surrounded by fan-like people.
Cool, right?
COVID-19, however, has no damned fans.
Crowding the tape. We do it. The cops put up caution tape, the parade functionaries put up sawhorses, the museum directors put up velvet ropes, and we belly up to them as though they’re going to stop the stray bullets, out-of-control floats, and idealism-maddened zealots. And we get sprayed with whatever detritus there is flinging itself past the mostly-imaginary boundaries set up by our social gatekeepers if not by actual physical limitations. Pow.
Witness the ‘innocent by-standers’ on the outermostside of a curve in a Dakar race. Pow.
Those in the first row of a Gallagher concert. Pow.
Those who crowd the line at the bank teller’s window when the sketchy guy who seems to make the teller nervous keeps waving the ragged slip of paper and gesturing to the back of the room with a pistol.
So, don’t ‘crowd the tape’ when watching races that end in man-made swamplands. You’re just gonna get your underpants covered in mud. Even when they’re neatly covered by every other piece of outerwear you’re also wearing.
You have to take the personalities of your characters into consideration when writing these comics. I’ve said that before.
They each have their own voice and behaviors that matter.
Paste, on the one hand, would definitely ride out a crazy stunt.
Lowell, on the other hand, would bail out, after it was kinda too late to bail out.
And you people would stand at the edge of a mudpit and cheer the little rat as he flew to certain doom. Admit it. I got ya figured out.
Kara will see now, that because of her delegating the responsibility of the Caber Toss to Donny, she wins.
It’s not necessarily true, but she will see it now.
Microphones, left on, and left on stage.
These things happen.
I don’t know what you guys think, but I think that ‘down range’ can change pretty darn quick during the Unicycle Archery competition.
One stiff breeze and a sneeze, and somebody could have an arrow inconveniently installed.
Crowd behavior. There’s probably a university degree you can get in that.
Exhausted disinterest. That’s what you get when you take a university degree in Crowd Behavior.
So, if you see a face in the crowd that you think doesn’t look like you, but looks like it should look like you… just assume it’s you. I’m not taking an hour per face to make sure everyone looks like their photo. The photos might not look like the way you think you look, either, so relax and just show everyone “Hey, This is me in this cartoon!” They won’t believe you, but you know better.
From the beginning, I wanted Hubriscomics to be kid-friendly… y’know, no nudity (I’d probably have more readership if I was one of those webcomics that put the girlies in bikinis every so often, but I just ain’t feelin’ it.) and no swearing, no drug humor… not as strictly as a newspaper would enforce things- I just had something different in mind. And then there’s the temptation to make a point with swearing, and I’ve avoided that, too. Too easy, really. But it does lead to some fairly juvenile vocabulary now and again. Today’s strip is a good example- “Midnight Urines” is funny to me. Partly because I grew up in a place where stilted euphemisms were occasionally pretty artful, and so I find them entertaining, and partly because I have fun picking through words I can use to see what sounds funny. Paste using the term ‘Wee’ for dog puddles (or unicorn puddles, if you’ve been reading for THAT long) tickles me. In my head, Durnell’s rural speaking voice is really funny when he’s trying to be a Southern Gentleman and avoid the use of the word ‘piss’. He doesn’t want to be that vulgar, so what he comes up with, while not exactly vulgar, is stilted enough to have it’s own goofy charm. I hope you agree… and that you hear something like Jeff Foxworthy’s accent while reading Durnell’s speech balloons.
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