I’ve got this framed thing on the wall which looks like a shrine to my own ego. (Not true, of course. This website is the shrine to my own ego.)
Anyhow, this framed thing is, in fact, a teaching aid that grew into the idea for a cartoon art show.
The thing started life as the pile of stuff I showed at the beginning of cartooning classes. It’s the process by which comic strips can be efficiently produced. If you have to produce one for each day of the year, efficiency plays a part in whether you can entertain people properly. If you make your 365 cartoons inefficiently, it’s possible that you’ll start missing more deadlines than I do, and the final product won’t be as funny as comic strips have a reputation for.
It’s pure coincidence that I produce Hubris in the same way I do The Buckets.
The top panel (and I apologize for the color and photo quality. The thing’s behind glass, on the wall, and a lot of it’s in pencil. Plus I was using a crap camera.) is torn out of a sketchbook. It’s got the germ of three or four things that finally made it into strips, and a lot of lines and words that have had no value since. There are also some studies of hands, and a scribble that had been a phone number. Cool, right?
The next panel is a neat sheet that I print out. It’s got the outside dimensions of a Sunday comic printed on it. There are lettering guides printed on the sheet, so I can letter away to my heart’s content. Then erase it all when I realize that I hadn’t spent enough time on the script before I started lettering. It also has marks for quartered panels and for thirds, just in case I need those. They’re printed in blue and red, respectively. On this particular sheet, you can (nearly) see where I worked out the characters, the size of the panels, and all the usual junk.
The following panel is, of course, the final inks, which are done on a nice heavy sheet of paper cut to size and placed on a light table over the penciled page.
The last panel is the way the whole thing printed in the Sunday papers. Fun, huh?
Overlaying the whole photo is a reflection of me holding a camera. Unlike the funny stories that crop up on the internet, I am clothed while I took the photo. In men’s clothing. A whole set of them. Thank you.
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