Since Day #1 of this blog there has been a link to Jimmy Johnson’s ‘Arlo & Janis’. Jimmy has been struggling with WordPress to revamp his Web site. From past experience I can relate, which was why for the sake of platform stability I gave up trying to customize the presentation of WordPress, and decided to instead stick to one of its default themes.
I’m telling you about this because something else I can relate to is an essay on cartooning that Jimmy wrote a few days ago. The catch is that you can’t read the essay by going to the Arlo & Janis site, because of that WordPress trouble Jimmy is having, but the text is available on the RSS feed. Likewise, I can’t include his cartoon because of those technical difficulties.
I’ve gotten a lot better at drawing over the years, especially anatomy. After all this time, one would hope so, right? The fourth panel above brings this to mind, because I think it’s a tidy little drawing, exaggerated and loose enough to be a good cartoon yet just realistic enough to, let us say, hold the eye. That’s more of a trick than it sounds. Never a particularly gifted graphic artist, I sometimes have struggled to draw anything. It simply did not come naturally, as for some.
Drawing a lawn mower, drawing a chair, drawing a person were, for a long time, a challenge. Surprisingly, however, the greater challenge for me was not depicting subject matter accurately but depicting it funny. There is some truth in what those books about “How to be a cartoonist” tell you; to draw cartoons, it helps to first know how to draw. So once I became proficient at basic drawing, I had to learn to make a funny drawing. To this day, I work on this.
At least I have good company. When Charles M. Schulz began toying with birds in Peanuts, they didn’t look right to him. They weren’t funny. They were too real. It wasn’t until he consciously forced himself to loosen up that he produced “Woodstock.” Mort Walker experienced something of the same thing in the early Beetle Bailey strips. The military settings and the equipment didn’t look right. Again, they were too real. The problem was solved when he realized he had to stop drawing a Sherman tank and start drawing a Camp Swampy tank.
Nothing in life is easy, however. Now that the drawing is easier, the ideas are harder!
This is exactly what I want to say as an introduction to my ‘Jeanie Beanie’ comic strip samples and the craft of or, if you prefer, the art of drawing. It’s better to take the word of a professional, right?
Given the demands at home and work at the time, the comic strips I’ll be posting here were drawn in fits and starts over a period of about a year. What will be very obvious is that I was constantly experimenting with character design and techniques in drawing and inking.
So these two characters looked like this…
… and this…
… and you get the idea.
Before getting rolling I’ll get something out of the way. Yes, I submitted the strip to a syndicate. Lee Salem at Universal Press saw it, and as expected I received a form rejection letter. A couple of years later Universal began distributing “Get Fuzzy” by Darby Conley, which has essentially the same premise. Just sayin’ 😉