These are studies I made for that comic about The Decemberists two fridays ago. The duck appears in Pat Oliphant’s cartoons, he’s one of my favorite political cartoonists and I felt the duck (who I found out is actually a penguin while doing research for that strip) was very iconic.

I wanted to do the topbar of that strip in a political cartoon style, which I think I pulled of fairl well. However, I knew I needed to do it more caricatured than usual to really pull of the newspaper editorial comic style, so these are some of the studies I made trying to caricature myself. I’m actually really happy with the middle one, the others are kind of meh, but the version that actually made it into the strip is probably my least favorite. Oh well!

I’ve always wanted to work more caricaturization in the strip, so A) people in the strip look like actual people, not just graphic symbols representing people, and B) because I think that in order to get the most out of the medium of comics, not only should the dialogue try to be funny and have punchlines and all, but the drawings should actually be funny in and of themselves, like you should be able to look at the comics and actually be amused even if all the dialogue was whited out. For the most part I think I fail at that, but there are some exceptions.

It’s sort of hard to do because A) I feel bad pointing out or exaggerating most people’s features because I don’t want to hurt their feelings, which is why I’m most comfortable doing it with drawings of myself, and B) it’s artistically difficult to make drawing that are funny, coherent, and look like they’re of real human beings, and I’m not a particularly exceptional artist. I do try though, and I’ve gotten a hojillion times better since I started this stuff. I recently reposted all of the old Ass Happens archives over here on The Semi Real, and the difference between the comics now and the comics back in January ‘06 is pretty dramatic, I think.

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