March 2009

Way Beyond What I Know

Friday, March 27, 2009

There's an inherent danger with creating a really involved storyline around something like a heart transplant. It's the fact that I have no idea what I'm writing about. So when it comes time to write and draw particular elements of the story, such as the equipment being used or something as simple as the number of the people in the room, I don't know what needs to be there.

My hope is that, for the most part, nobody thinks about the particulars and the inaccuracies - they just enjoy the story. But I'm pretty sure that if one of my readers was a heart surgeon, he might find it hard to follow the story without poking lots of holes in it.

In some cases there are liberties which I'll take, even though I know I'm deviating from reality. For example: the hair. In a real operation, ever person in the room would have their head covered. But the characters' differing hairstyles is one of the easiest ways to distinguish them and I didn't want any of my readers to be confused. So the head covers have been sacrificed.

But generally, if something's inaccurate, it's simply because I'm ignorant. Hope you enjoy it anyway.

~Jeff

The Real Longest Word Ever

Monday, March 16, 2009

So it turns out that "anesthesiologist" is actually a pretty short word compared to some of the other words out there...

A commandos fan sent me an e-mail with three much longer words:

Floccinaucinihilipilification:
to make something valueless or to devalue something

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis:
a term for Black Lung disease

Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia:
ironically, the fear of long words

Elite Team member Dan Bates also submitted the second word to me, which apparently wins the award for longest word in the English language. And here I thought "antidisestablishmentarianism" was long. What was I thinking?

~Jeff

The Longest Word Ever

Friday, March 13, 2009

In my quest to make unique and funny comic strips storylines, I came across the idea to incorporate an anesthesiologist. I didn't realize how ridiculously long the word "anesthesiologist" is until I tried fitting it into a dialogue balloon. And I'm still not sure I spelled it correctly. It's unlikely I'll ever use a longer word in a Smiley Face Commandos comic strip. I know that, technically, there are longer words out there, but off of the top of your head - try naming a few. I can't think of more than one.

Now that the idea is in my head, I think I'm going to try to find a longer word and incorporate it in the comic in the future. Just for the challenge. We need to keep challenging ourselves anyway, right?

~Jeff

Dealing with Multiple Characters

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

If someone had asked me six months ago if it was harder to draw 5 or 6 six characters interacting in a single strip than just two or three, I would have said yes. But my guess would have come mainly from a theoretical standpoint. "Naturally," I would have thought to myself, "It takes longer and is harder to draw more characters."

But, at this point, I've actually been going strong, drawing three comic strips per week, for nearly the last six months. And I've found that the multiple character scenes are definitely more challenging to tackle than the two character scenes. For one thing, just making them all fit within the panel is a challenge. Then it becomes difficult to make them interact without making them look like just four or five talking heads. Drawing action which occurs between them can be tricky. I've found that one of the best ways to get past the difficulty is to zoom in on two of the characters after the relationship of the group has been established in the first panel. This keeps the subsequent panels from becoming too crowded.

There is an inverse challenge to the two-character episodes - how to make them visually interesting. It may be easier and quicker to draw two characters versus four, but it can actually be harder to make the comic aesthetically appealing, because there are less bodies to fill up the image and make it seem like a full and complete drawing. So I tend to use a wider variety of camera angles and camera distances to make up for the lack of subjects.

Fascinating, no?

~Jeff

Abbreviating Dialogue

Monday, March 9, 2009

One of the great challenges of writing comic strips is getting your joke across effectively within a very short amount of time. I've only got three or four panels (or five if I'm really creative) to work within, and only so many words can fit within those panels. The goal, of course, is to reach a punchline by the end of the last panel - which can often be difficult to do. Building up to a punchline (or at least a major dramatic moment) is tough when the characters can only talk back and forth a maximum of of five times.

Normally I try to keep my dialogue very brief and to the point, but with today's strip, I really wanted the doctor character to say all of those things and more ( I still had to shorten it). So I cheated by shrinking my text. Yes, it's smaller than my standard dialogue size. Fortunately it still seems to be readable. I just better be careful if I shrink this particular strip. It can't go much smaller.

~Jeff

Drawing the Line

Friday, March 6, 2009

I tend to use a lot of cruel humor in the Commandos strips - I find that jokes about injury and death are generally very easy to write. Eventually I'll probably run out of these kinds of jokes and have to broaden my aesthetic sensibilities (by embracing more crude humor, right?). But as a result of my violent humor trend, I sometimes lose touch with what would be acceptable to my current and future readership. I don't want to go too far. Chances are, I would never illustrate Koff Eepot dismembering someone, but here he is admitting that he does that kind of thing.

I'm going to be honest about what the strip was originally going to say to illustrate my point: In an earlier written draft of this particular strip, Eepot was referring specifically to women, saying, "I impale them, I dismember them, I blow them up... but no slapping." And while that's funny to me, I really think it goes too far. By referring specifically to women, it crosses the line of acceptability.

In the final version, Nancy Matters is instead the one who refers to dismemberment, and she does so in a very generic way by speaking of "people." It's non-specific and much less threatening to my female readers (I hope). Thanks to my wife for making it clear to me when I've gone too far.

~Jeff

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