The Most Difficult Starbucks Order

I don’t know where I’m running now, I’m just running on, Running on-running on empty, Running on-running blind, Running on-running into the sun, But I’m running behind, Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive, Trying not to confuse it with what you do to survive – The US Economy

This was a fun one, and I was able to get a lot of my drawing mojo back. Not totally, and I still went through the redrawing a bunch of the lines things. But not as bad. Those rounded word bubbles didn’t take me as long either, and I think they look pretty good! In case you’ve never done a rounded word bubble working in Photoshop and were wondering what the big deal is, well for me it’s just that the oval shape lends itself to taking up too much space, especially vertically. This problem grows exponentially when you increase the width, due to the nature of the shape. My simple, elegant solution? I chopped off the top and bottom of these shapes with a straight rectangle on the larger ovals.

The font has really grown on me, and I think it looks even better here now that I increased the size and adjusted the vertical spacing. In case you’re wondering where I got this and other fonts, I got them free at http://www.blambot.com/ for free!

I did my coloring the same way as I described on the last Black Power post. It took awhile. I think next time I’ll try the technique Rawr suggested, using the polygonal lasso to color in those stupid fill bucket gaps.

I’d like to share something with you that happened while drawing this comic, that I hopes demonstrates my passion and love for drawing these comics. First off, this comic, like many others, was started at about 5AM, because that’s my main free time. I work full time, like to spend time with my wife, and have a fairly demanding almost 3 year old son. So waking up early is the best chance I get to draw. Yesterday I got the nice option to leave work a little early, my wife and son weren’t home yet, and I wanted to bust this out. It had been a demanding day and I had to continue dealing with work emails as I drew, but I got home and got straight to drawing. I drew until I literally fell asleep because I was so tired.

That is something that I don’t remember ever happening before, or maybe once before. I’m a lot of things, but no one’s ever accused me of being lazy. I’m a pretty driven, determined and organized guy. So it’s not like I just lazily settled down for my daily nap or something. I very rarely nap. I literally drew until I couldn’t hold my eyes open, and later woke up still sitting on my couch with my laptop and tablet in front of me, and my stylus in my hand. Oh, and when I woke up I finished drawing.

So if anyone ever says I don’t care or try hard enough, well they’re dead wrong. Drawing funny little pictures ain’t as easy as you might think.

One last thing I’d like to address, since I just can’t seem to let it go, is a few more thoughts I had on that Digital Strips poodcast review. Firstly, if drawing really polished detailed realistic art is the main criteria for being a great webcomic as they’ve suggested (and nothing to do with the tone, theme, humor, writing, or having a different art style) then how do they explain the success of the most famous webcomic of all, XKCD? Also, why did they earlier in the show praise Peanuts Minus Snoopy, a self admittedly blatant Garfield Minus Garfield ripoff by the way. It doesn’t contain any original art, and is only based entirely on the humor of distorting those original comics. And if were talking classic comic strips, where was this great, realistic art in some of the greatest strips of all time, like my inspirations The Far Side or Calvin and Hobbes. Hell, where is it in most strips? Garfield, Hagar the Horrible, Peanuts (which they specifically said was one of the best in the podcast), Pickles, Monty, Blondie, Get Fuzzy, or any other number of famous successful strips had cartoonish looking characters with little backgrounds and no accurate perspective. It’s a ridiculous criteria they’ve applied to me. This was said in the show, but even more directly during our email exchanges.

Which brings me to my final point. They seem to make a big deal about the fact that I use a full page comic strip format, so that makes I’m Famous! somehow a comic book and it should be judged under those standards (they alluded to it in the show and said it directly to me in email). Huh? It’s a full page comic strip. They aren’t that uncommon online. Each page is meant to be able to be read as a self contained joke. Yeah, they’re funnier and make more sense if you read them all in order, but so do all sequitur comic strips. It would be ridiculous for me to try to use the same storytelling elements (like the much harped on camera angles) to a format that only allows for a “story” to be told on a single page.

Yeah, again like most sequential comics there are over arching story elements, but it still a single page format. Where were all these much lauded story telling elements, panel variations and camera angles in those famous strips I mentioned above? Were they all bad comics because they almost always had the characters facing the camera (an actual criticism described to me in the email when I asked how exactly my shots were all the same)?

Let me make this as clear as possible to the boys at Digital Strips and anyone else confused: I’M FAMOUS! IS A COMIC STRIP, NOT A COMIC BOOK! Notice how the title and date appear at the bottom of every page? That’s a clue. It was never meant to be a comic book.

If you want to see me do a comic book with an emphasis on storytelling elements go read Black Snow. That IS a comic book. Soon that will be a graphic novel, where you’ll get even more story telling.

Now why would I have to explain this to Digital Strips? It’s the second word in your 2 word name! You should know what a comic strip is to be able to critique one!

Ugh.

Now listen to a classic that describes my level for dealing with this nonsense.