Thank you, Proamericana, for the suggestion that I fill the silence of Thursdays with the now trope-y but totally workable THROWBACK THURSDAY!
This one is from 2012, back when Hubris was still gag-a-day, like so many comic strips are. There are a few comics featuring Hubris and Kara attending church or funerals. I can’t recall which early stage of development spawned this particular cartoon, but it was probably pretty late in the series of revisions for the syndicate. I was very lucky to have Amy Lago (first at United Media, then at Washington Post Writer’s Group) giving me advice about how to bring Hubris (originally called ‘Because It’s There’) up to scratch. One of the suggestions she made that I didn’t really care for, and didn’t do while I was still pestering her with new packages, ultimately resulted in both Lowell and Durnell- well after I’d turned the project into the webcomic you’re staring at now.
I wonder how Hubris would have done if I’d taken her advice, and taken the time to crank out a couple more packages, and gotten one of the syndicates to pick it up. It was late in the day as things were getting worse all the time for newspapers and syndicates, so I imagine it’d be… a lot like it is now, except I couldn’t have changed the format to the vertical form the way I did.
Cool, re-runs!
Syndicates love re-runs.
Syndicated newspapers, not so much.
Yeah, but as long as they’re oldies AND goodies…
A very good friend used to draw all sorts of stuff on his church bulletin and he saved about the thirty best ones from about five years… several of us said if he didn’t burn for some of those… the one I remember was Spock looking over a tabletop edge at the artwork drawing of the church going ‘hmm… these miniatures are amazingly detailed….’ so drawing in church has a long history.
He draws in blue pencil. Ah for the days of graphite.
It just floors me that those two are just so damn ALIKE. They are going to be waving goodbye to the grandkids when they realize they had a life together.
When this first ran, I found it so odd to see Hubris this way, not so much because of the tie as having his hair slicked back. Of course, most of the time he sports a cap, but even when he doesn’t his hair has a slightly mussed quality which I think suits him well.