Keith Richards Brain
The mother crunker FELL OUT OF A COCONUT TREE! Instant comedy gold. Imagine if he did become super intelligent or understandable? Wild.
Hey I saw the video Kris Straub put up about how he makes his comic– LINK — in which, it’s revealed he uses a library of pre-drawn templates and figures to put a strip together. Now, I’m not dissing that, I think it’s friggin brilliant and he pulls it off amazingly, because you can imagine him having the original art on hand, his stuff looks like a solid consistent comic. He really does pull off this effect really well. Is it cheating? Some would say so– but technically, no. The strips look fresh, clean and consistent.
Then my mind shifts to.. THAT MAGNIFICENT BASTARD! Because I’m envious of the time I imagined he must save pulling off this method. On average I think I put 3 hours or so into each daily. I have tried similar things years ago, but it never felt right to me, I always felt like I was cheating if I didn’t draw on actual bristol board. Sure, I use the occasional cut and paste to cut corners sometimes, which is pretty much the same thing, but having a giant library of forms and figures is pretty in genius. I’ve also been envious of other cartoonists who are completely “paperless”- Chris Browne son of Dik Browne, who draws Hagar the Horrible I think now, totally digital.
Try as I may have in the past, I just can’t peel myself away from drawing in the standard way I’ve always done strips. Plus, it would make it much harder to be more topical and do things like today’s Keith Richards strip on the fly. Overall, I guess I sometimes do think I’m a sucker for putting so much time into one strip, a strip that someone will spend seconds glancing over and maybe never see again, but I really can’t do it any other way here. This almost makes me afraid, if sometime in the future, will programs just make the comics for us and we fill in the dialogue? Will comics lack the soul of the creator?
Ive had people ask in the past if I would chronicle how I put a strip together, and Kris’s video reminded me of this— I don’t have the fancy video podcasting capabilities to show you, but I did chronicle the steps and my work areas HERE ON THE FORUM Enjoy!
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And thanks for preordering ISSUE FOUR of Yirmumah monthly! All the books are still available on the store page– Although, I’m thinking if my life might be a little easier if I took the first three issues and put them together in a quarterly pack and sold them together? It’d make reorders on printing much simpler, like buying them in sets all together. So if you want to buy them seperate, do that soon.
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May 11th, 2006 at 7:27 am
DJ, the fact that you draw the strip every day shows in your improvement. I have been blown away at how good this strip has become visually. You are definately hitting your stride. Templates are fine but they limit artistic growth.
May 11th, 2006 at 9:50 am
Steve is right. If you’re constantly working in real media, you’re constantly improving. Collage work doesn’t provide much opportunity for advancement. Someone may spend seconds looking at your work, and never see it again *physically*, but they will always go back to it in their memory because it will make a better impression for being unique and clever, than the same images rearranged.
May 11th, 2006 at 10:08 am
For example, I’m always impressed by the expressions you give your characters, especially the llama. I’m always going to remember the panel in the last “Llama Facts” where the llama’s looking into his bag like it’s a Christmas present. You can’t ever use that image again without looking like a hack, because I’ll remember it, but I’ll *remember* it. I’ll always marvel how you got that expression onto a llama. Rubber stamp it, and it’ll lose its magic.