Arbuckle

Maybe you've heard of the 'Garfield comic strip fad' in which Garfield's thoughts are deleted from the strip thereby creating a new comic which only contains dialogue (if any at all) from Jon Arbuckle the hapless dude who cohabits with the cat (to call him Garfield's owner seems somehow inaccurate). At any rate, doing so adds a whole new slant on the comic - in theory Jon isn't meant to be able to hear Garfield's thoughts anyway, so what's really going on in his lonely loser life?

Apparently efforts to establish archives of 'refitted' strips has met with 'cease and desist' orders (this may or may not be true), however to side-step this one enterprising guy has set up Arburckle in which an original strip is redrawn by himself or other artists... with some interesting results. Overall they're quite amusing although I found some to be sad in a very touching way... this one for example!

I'm usually one to miss fads and skip the bandwagon but I couldn't resist in this instance. Since I had a spare hour I whipped one up for submission. The request is that any submission shouldn't duplicate anything previously submitted - and I thought I had picked one previously untouched and sent it in. Here's my effort...

(I'm not sure why Blogger is reducing the size of it... should be bigger than that, hopefully I can fix it at some point). Anyway, of course I chose one that had already been done! At this stage I'm not sure if mine will make it to the site but I thought I'd share.

Nice idea. Needs work.

Some months ago I had a brief dalliance with the idea of a visual travel blog - which I called a 'Trog'; this may or may not have been a clever name, I still haven't decided. My thinking at the time was that since I spent two half hours a day crammed into a train carriage commuting to and from work it was time that could be used to sketch some of the more interesting, annoying and or obnoxious passengers onboard and then posting it online.

What I realised, once I started working on producing Trog, was that most passengers were not all that obnoxious or interesting, and if they were annoying it was usually loud iPods or half heard phone conversations that were the cause of it - pretty dull stuff. Additionally I tried drawing the subjects covertly (really hard in a crowded, swaying train BTW) and the sketch from the day's journey was what went online, no corrections, no embellishments - so the overall quality was, well, sketchy!

In the two weeks or so I tried this little experiment I only had one truly bizarre moment:
Yes, she really said that! From what I could tell (and it wasn't too hard to deduce because she talked loudly and frequently, mostly about herself) was that she was studying to become a pediatrician (parents - do you know who your children are being examined by?). Anyway, no other Trog entries were anywhere near as interesting as this and I soon lost interest myself... another project bites the dust.

It occurs to me though that Trog still has some merit. Probably the following would improve and sustain it:

• only do worthy subjects (usually those having loud un-self-censored conversations with others)
• do a sketch, take down some lines of dialogue but do a proper job of it once not on the train (or bus or whatever)
• accuracy of the subject's appearance isn't that important, go for caricature but ensure the dialogue is spot on
• don't worry about keeping any kind of update schedule, when gold is there - gold is there!

This was all precipitated after my trip home yesterday. To sum it up here would do it no justice, but maybe a Trog posting at some point in the near future might!

Little Hero and guest art galore

The concept of the 'Magellan ++' project is that I can hopefully find some other talented cartoonists who aren't too busy doing their own work to help me produce some extra Magellan stories - and there are a lot of extra stories in the Magellan universe! I do hope to pay them too - although since I'm not rolling in $$ it won't be very much. Anyway, I'll sort that out once I have something for someone to start work on - oh wait, I do! At least, half of something. Half of a Gifford Foss story in fact. Gifford is the little green goblin guy who is a cadet at the Magellan Academy - we saw him briefly as Nadine's partner in Chapter 2, but this story - Little Hero - is set in his home world.

The last day or so has been spent banging the story and script into shape and I'm very very happy with how it's turned out. I drew some character guides which I have passed on to the artist and I'm eager to post them here but I don't want to steal the artist's thunder. I imagine having a writer who is also a cartoon artist might be akin to having a patient who is also a doctor - they always want to interfere in the process, so I must resist the urge to get too ahead of myself. In fact I'm not going to say anything more on it for a while, besides I still have to write the other half of the script! Suffice to say, I'm excited and the artist is excited. To my surprise, I've actually managed to get a start on the Magellan ++ project!

The rest of my time the last day or so has been spent doing some guest art for a cartoonist in need (more on that next week), finalising the other guest art project I've been working on with writer T Campbell (more on that on Sunday), and also wrapping up the current Magellan storyline. I've been busy, but having fun fun FUN! The problem is that I have to return to my full-time day job next week so that's going to put a major spanner in the works. A shame, since I've been having a blast for the last two weeks, especially this last week with all the festivities out of the way. The good news though is that I'll be taking all of February 2006 off from work... and unlike most sensible people, won't be going on any long vacation but will probably be spending most of that time in front of my drawing board and computer. Can't wait!

Crap!

Ha! No, I don't think the drawing is crap - it's just what Jo Millen is saying about her current predicament. Anyway, an excerpt from a page I've been working on. As you can see, the art is less detailed, larger areas of black and overall a little more simplified. That said, the whole page still took me several hours to complete. It was fun doing it too, something it wasn't back when I decided to put it on hiatus...

The heat is off!

After melting thru a heatwave for the last few days (with a max of 44C/111F) the other day it's nice to have some cooler weather. It means I can actually sit at the drawing board and draw instead of sweating all over the page or use the computer without worrying that the circuits might fry. What I did find though was that I could sit in the bath, filled with cold water and still write... although I did drop my note book in the water! To give you an idea of how hot the day was, the pages of the pad dried in under 30 minutes.

Anyhoo, I've spent a much milder day working on a page of art and I'm happy with the style - it's B&W and much simpler. All that detailed art was straining my drawing hand, I think I was giving myself RSI in my thumb or something... another of the reasons why I decided to ease back on the production schedule and go on hiatus. I'll post an excerpt from the page tomorrow.

I was also working on the final details of a collaboration with my Graphic Smash editor - writer T Campbell. I can't recall if he's said anything about it in his blog, and since it's his baby I'm saying nothing more - except that I'm really excited about seeing this one online... more soon!

Thought my scanner had died today - turns out it was the transformer, so it only cost me $40 to replace instead of whatever scanners are going for these days... they're pretty cheap I know but I'd be loathe to throw out something that still works.

Finally... I neglected to mention a work related 'New Years Res' - and by work I mean my comics as much (if not more than) my day job - and that is: "To be excellent!" Should be interesting to see if I can stick to this one!