Go With What you Know.
I hate chores. I hate the tediousness. I don’t mind a tedious and repetitive task though, what I mind is a tedious, repetitive task that will never, ever, EVER stay done. Stupid sisyphean chores. I did a really good job mopping the floor last week, why won’t it stay clean!?!
I blame entropy.
In this strip Adam’s Grandpa is faced with household chores, and in contemplating aforementioned chores, he is forced to deal with his own irrelevance on the world stage. It sounds deep, I know… but it really isn’t.
I’ve got a couple of technical issues with this strip. The second panel didn’t come out quite like I envisioned it. Certainly I think it does the job of communicating what it is meant to, but I wanted more shadow of the giant spaceship. I’ll have to work on it. I also tried to make grandpa’s word bubbles ‘electronic’… I really want to make a font for grandpa, and I think I will when I have time, but until then, I’d better work out my electronic speech bubbles.
-oh, and on a side note… today is the day! Today I get the package in the mail! I’m really excited. It could revolutionize, or at least speed up my production! (Right now I work digitally with a standard wacom tablet.)
July 18th, 2007 at 3:05 am
In the last panel of today’s strip you have “get get to be henchmen”. I presume it’s the old problem of having them on separate lines that makes them hard to catch
Otherwise, a great strip!
July 18th, 2007 at 5:15 am
Whoa! A Cintiq, I’m jealous.
I haven’t made the move to drawing digitally yet. I still ink by hand but cleanup and color with my Wacom tablet. What software do you use for drawing?
July 18th, 2007 at 6:38 am
I laughed at this one, it reminded me of my friends rich dad growing up who used to pay us $50 in like 1984 to vaccum a room…that’s just as sick as Grandpa.
I’m loving panel 4…they are all good for that matter. I still am looking for a little more subtle future, I mean, the flashbacks which are in the past have more future than your present.
July 18th, 2007 at 7:05 am
@Ewan: Thanks for the heads up! How embarrassing!
@Worth: I’m a Painter 10 kind of guy. The natural media brushes are what it’s all about. I spend quite a bit of time tweaking settings of those things so that I can get just the effect that I want. I’ve got settings for one brush for the majority of my inking, another for landscapes, and a few more for special effects so far. I’m still working out the process, but I love being able to basically change tools on the fly with zero clean-up.
@Jarrett: Yeah, It’s a future heavy flashback for sure. After I did it, I got annoyed with myself actually, because I hadn’t worked out how much space travel was actually going on. It’s one of those things I might have to change actually. But redrawing and lettering one panel isn’t that big a deal.
July 18th, 2007 at 7:05 am
Well Done! I’m going to make one tiny little suggestion to your work as a whole. Your images are displayed in a large format which looks great. If you’re shooting for any sort of print format, I would shrink your work down to about 650px width and print it to double-check the font size. It looks good here but I wonder if you’re going to run into a problem should someone want to print your work. It could be a decent size but it’s something I’d check before you get too many originals finished.
July 18th, 2007 at 7:33 am
yeah, the font is too small for it, I know. If I were going to be shrinking this down to standard strip size, I’d have to raise the point size by two. It would be a problem in certain formats for print, most notably if it were appearing in newspapers. I guess at some point I will have to re-evaluate what my goals are and make a decision on that, but since I already told jarrett off when he suggested I enlarge the font so I could put my comic on Sherpa, I’m loath to change it now.
July 18th, 2007 at 8:31 am
It’s like talking to a rock pile…
July 18th, 2007 at 8:50 am
hahaha, this sort of portrays all parents as the aged evil genius….”Hmmm, i don’t want to do the work, who’ll do it for me? Ah yes, the kids, i’ll just make it sound cool”
July 18th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Nice! My favorite part of this strip is panel two. Great job at conveying total pandemonium. As for electronic speech bubbles, they are a pain to draw.
July 18th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Hey thanks guys.
@Scott: Yeah, I think I should just make a template for it for adam’s grandpa, but first I have to figure out exactly what the best way is to communicate “electronic”
July 18th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
One possibility would be to keep the electronic bubbles the way you have them drawn here but use an electronic-looking font, instead of handwritten. MAybe a font like this: http://www.brainybetty.com/PPT9/fonts.3.gif
Might be a bit much but it definitely communicates electronic.
July 18th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Yeah, I do have a similar font. I use it in metafour for the nerd voice :
http://jetpacksandtimemachines.com/2007/06/13/communication-trouble/
I thought about using it for grandpa too but then I started thinking about altering it, to make a darker and top-heavy version. I thought villainous fonts maybe should be more top-heavy
July 18th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
RE: “future heavy flashback”
Piffle. It’s common knowledge that tech-based supervillains are well ahead of the curve. A-OKosher.
July 18th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
Yeah, I suppose that’s true. I’ll probably still change the word ‘planets’ to ‘cities’ though.
July 21st, 2007 at 6:47 am
Perhaps it is not a spaceship, but a giant blimp. That’s also pretty super-villianish, if you ask me. Am loving this strip (linked throught the Girl Genius site, if I remember correctly, which is actually unlikely). I noted all the comparisons to Bill Watterson and Berke Breathed in previous posts, and am forced to agree. Forced, I tell you! They held an anchovy to my head! (Damn penguins!) There is much to admire in your artwork, your characters and your left-of-centre humour. Great stuff. Thanks for helping keep this Interweb thingy interesting.