November 2008

Linus

Friday, November 28, 2008

On Wednesday we found out that our next child is going to be a boy! That's right: little boy #2 is on the way. He'll probably be born in May. My wife, Kristin, was reading through the Bible and happened upon the name Linus. We both think it's a great name for our next kid.

Of course, the immediate association most people have with the name Linus is the comic strip Charlie Brown. Linus is best known for his blanket, which he carries everywhere, sucking his thumb, and dispensing wise advice to his best friend, Charlie Brown. In the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, he was the one who told everyone the true meaning of Christmas. He's a pretty smart kid.

But the responses we've gotten to the name Linus for our next child have been polarized. About 2/3 of our family doesn't like it (or hates it) and the other third thinks it's great. My dad said, "Neat!" when we told him the name. Linus is Greek for "flax-colored hair," which doesn't exactly inspire greatness or give the kid much of a legacy to live up to. I don't even know what flax is.

What do you think?

~Jeff

A History of Violence

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

I'm pretty sure I won't be getting the commandos into a newspaper any time soon. And even though there are many roadblocks to that happening, such as not knowing any influential people and the near-impossibility of achieving syndication with a comic strip, I mainly don't expect it because my comic strip includes lots of guns (and therefore, implied violence).

Think about it - do you EVER see guns in the funnies section? These days it's just not politically correct to allow such a thing. What's odd about this phenomenon is that, many decades ago, the comic strip Dick Tracy had some pretty horrific on-screen violence: a man being fed to the sharks, someone getting chopped in the head with an axe, and plenty of shootings. Even though that was way back in the 1940's, it was far more violent than what we typically see now.

I suppose our contemporary equivalent would be comic books. For some reason it's okay to have violence in those. But someone important decided years ago that the average citizen just doesn't want to see cartoon-murder in his newspaper when he sitting down for a cup of coffee in the morning.

~Jeff

The Blog Archive

Monday, November 24, 2008

Most of you have probably noticed that I recently started writing blogs for each day I post a new comic strip. While I won't make any guarantees on the frequency of my blog postings (unlike my comics), I do plan to TRY to write a blog about as often as I post a new comic. So I decided to add a blog archive to the website, in case there's anyone with enough free time on their hands to want to read some of my old postings.

I consider it my job to help you find more fun ways to waste your time. Enjoy!

~Jeff

Cruel Humor

Friday, November 21, 2008

It recently struck me that I might be delving into cruel humor a little more than I realized: jokes about death, assassination, and killing seem to be taking over The Smiley Face Commandos. Especially since the character Koff Eepot was introduced, the cruelty in my comic is almost providing more laughs than anything else. Should I be disturbed by this? I don't know. I just know I can't take it too far (jokes about cancer and rape never go over very well).

I suppose the humor is easy to swallow because the storyline and the characters are so absurd. If it were drawn in a more realistic fashion and the characters were killed with knives instead of ducks and lamps, it would probably become unsettling very quickly.

~Jeff

Webcomics Which Inspire Me

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Several webcomics come to mind when I think of what inspires me to keep the Smiley Face Commandos in action. But two come to the forefront: Sheldon and Megatokyo. Both of these webcomics are really well done and both of these guys, Dave Kellett and Fred Gallagher, have been successful enough at what they do to make a living from their comics.

Sheldon inspires me because it's just plain funny. Dave Kellett makes me laugh just about every day. That ten-year-old boy and his wacky duck provide more humor than I ever could have imagined in such simple-looking characters. The drawings are stylized and to the point, but the characters are adorable and delightfully silly.

Fred Gallagher's Megatokyo is completely different, with Manga-style format and drawings that are intricate and beautiful, amazing in their level of detail, fluid and full of energy. While Megatokyo doesn't have the constant wit we find in Sheldon, it does have a continual, unending story and complex characters that I find very appealing.

My goal is to somehow combine the elements of these two comics to make one hilarious, beautiful and engaging webcomic of my own. Not sure where I stand right now, but I'm pretty sure I'm not there yet.

Special thanks to my friend, Stephen Shaw, and my sister-in-law, Heather Horton, for introducing me to these great webcomics.

~Jeff

Drawing New Characters

Monday, November 17, 2008

There is a challenge that comes with adding new characters to your comic strip: drawing them consistently. I've found that, even with numerous practice sketches before I commit ink to the page, I still can't make new characters consistently look the same. Ronald Clementine and Koff Eepot are the two most recent examples of characters I've struggled with. After finally settling on what they SHOULD look like, it's hard to draw them exactly the same. It's challenging because sometimes they appear at different angles to the reader's point-of-view or at different sizes in the strip. I just haven't drawn them enough times to feel comfortable doing it consistently. Take a look at Koff Eepot in today's strip - he looks like he's missing his neck.

Honestly, I feel like I still struggle with getting the commandos themselves just right. Sometimes the drawings work for me and other times they don't. When I look at a comic strip like Calvin and Hobbes, I can see a little bit of difference in Bill Watterson's early character drawings and his later ones, but the characters still always look good. I personally don't feel like my characters always look good. Sometimes the proportions are way off of what I was originally going for. Other times I just draw a line completely in the wrong place, making Will's head warped or Joe's eyeballs distorted.

I try not to fret over these mistakes and I hope and expect that my drawings will just get better with time. I guess we'll know about a year from now...

~Jeff

Colorful Vocabulary

Friday, November 14, 2008

I don't know what it is about me and my brother, but for some reason we've always tried a little too hard to make our dialogue more clever. I'm not talking about dialogue in comic strips - I mean dialogue in real life. I guess I've always felt that my conversations would be too boring without using interesting, out-of-the-ordinary words. But sometimes I definitely try too hard to be funny or clever or off-the-wall... and it's not always received that well. People look at me as if to say, "Why didn't you just say that like a normal person?" And they're right. I need to work on that.

How does this carry over into comic strips? Well, I always want my characters to be funny or interesting. So I'm always thinking about ways for them to communicate the story without just delivering exposition. Funny ways to say normal things. Hopefully the commandos will become unique enough and well-received enough that they can establish some popular phrases of their own, phrases that become injected into pop-culture. We'll see...

As far as making their vocabulary colorful, I often run across words that are so unique, quirky and underused that I feel a responsibility to somehow incorporate them into my strip. Like "hooligan." This evening I was watching "The Parent Trap," that classic Disney film starring Hailey Mills. The character of Mrs. Inch, who runs the summer camp, used the word, "hooliganism." Now isn't that a great word that deserves more frequent usage in everyday conversation? I'm determined to fit it into the story sooner or later.

~Jeff