Cartoon Questions Answered

Several commentators on this blog have asked me to go into more detail about how I create my comics, color them, convert from panel to strip, make them squeak when you step on them, etc.

So here goes:

This is the cartoon I published last Xmas, and a gag I like pretty well. The original ink drawing looked like the black and white image here, is about 6"x7", india ink on bristol board. (Have these riveting details put you to sleep yet?)


This is the cartoon after it is colored, which I do in Photoshop, CMYK mode. I won't explain exactly how I do it because I spent a lot of years experimenting with various techniques to arrive here and I don't want just anyone to be able to perfectly knock it off (assuming there is anyone out there who might want to). But I will say that I color in transparent layers, a technique I learned from oil painting.

You can see that the color scheme in this one is a bit unorthodox, using a slightly different monochromatic
palette for each character. I don't do it often, but in a composition like this one with lots going on, it can be a nice way to simplify the image a bit, instead of it looking like a jigsaw puzzle with a thousand different colors.

Here is the strip version, concocted on the computer in Photoshop by cutting, pasting and moving things around. I have a cool computer screen which you can draw directly on with a stylus, called a Cintiq, made by a company called Wacom. In this way, I can draw extra stuff into the blank spots created by the new format.In this case, I had to add a whole new character to deliver the punch line, the original speaker having been decapitated. I also reversed the image, which I do frequently. There is a principle in comedy that you want the punch line to be as close to the end as possible. In a cartoon, sometimes the image is the punch line for relatively straightforward dialogue, sometimes the dialogue is the punch line for a relatively normal picture, as in this case. In the panel version, I don't have a lot of choice of whether the reader sees the pic or the caption first, but in the strip version I have more control. So the punchline always goes to the right, whether it's the pic or the words.

I hope this was less dull to read than it was to type. Enjoy the rest of your day and feel free to ask specific questions about the process in the comments.