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Scribbles and Scribes...

This is more to do with my creative writing course than drawing, but I wanted to put these up here to show how doodling and drawings can be handy when writing a story. I often like to draw scenes/characters etc. to help me focus my writing and give me a better idea of what it is I'm writing about. I also like to create 'extra-textual' add-ons for stories: pamphlets, postcards, and in the above case, character's business cards, to give a bit of uneccessary but fun depth to a story.

The spooky pic above is something I made back in December for my short story 'The Dead Drop', just to help me visualise the world and characters I was writing about. It's the business card belonging to The Great Doctor Theophrastus, who's a Victorian magician of great talent and repute. I like that it's morbid but amusing (which is what I was going for in the story in general), and having it to hold and put up on my noticeboard really did help.

As I'm working on a 'Dead Drop' spin-off and still in the development stages to see if it'll work as a novel, I'll be producing more of this kind of stuff, some of which'll make it here, some of which'll make it to the bin...

Monstro (tbp)

Of all the cartoons I've drawn, Monstro has changed the most. The actual drawing has always been the same, but the words and tag-line have changed at least a dozen times, and I think they'll probably change again as I'm still not happy with them. It started out as a Christmas cartoon, with Monstro going Christmas shopping for his family ('ROAR'! Juicer for sister! 'GRRR'! Socks for dad!), but when the festive season passed I changed it to him going shopping for a birthday. Then I changed it to him simply going for a stroll...and so on and so on. In this incarnation he's just going shopping.
To be honest, it's not all that funny, but I guess I keep working on it in the hope that one day it will be...

Backseat (tbp)

Backseat drivers are annoying, no question, and so I began thinking about what it would be like if there were backseat drivers in other professions. Backseat surgeons for instance, or backseat gravediggers; weird occupations in which it would be less than helpful to have someone standing over you telling you where you went wrong. And bomb disposal has to be the ultimate job where the last thing you need is a guy teling you to cut the red wire not the blue one while the timer ticks down...

Monkey Business... (tbp)

FACT: There is no animal in the whole world that is funnier than the monkey*.

This is why I always try and use them in a cartoon when I can. This is one of the first cartoons I ever drew when I was developing Too Close For Comfort and it still stands strong. It's also my favourite of the monkey cartoons I've drawn because it combines a well known phrase and a little sideways thought and then twists them into a joke. The tag-line is still a little long, but it's been refined and sanded down as much as possible without losing anything. I also like the idea of a perfume being called 'Eau de Banane'. Frankly I'm surprised it hasn't already been invented...

*(Well, maybe a dog in a trilby hat is funnier...I'm still not sure)

Hangman (tbp)

I do love a good game of 'Hangman', though I'd like it a lot less if a noose was involved.
As for the cartoon, I like this one a lot. It's fairly well-drawn (I'm very proud of the hangman in particular), nicely inked, and, most important of all, it's pretty funny. As you'd expect, the idea came during a game of Hangman and I just refined the punch-line from there. The tag-line has changed with every incarnation of the cartoon, ranging from the simple 'Hangman: 1602' (if you like your Marvel or Neil Gaiman you'll know where I got the date from) to the downright obscure 'You snooze, you noose', to 'Medieval gameshows' (which very nearly took the place of the current tag-line).
Look out for this one in The Courier in the next few weeks...

Badger, Badger, Badger... (to be published)

Depending on who you are, you either love badgers for being all cute and furry, or you hate them for spreading TB to cattle. Whatever you think, badgers are great in jokes...

Rocket (tbp)

Another one that'll probably end up in The Courier unless I think of a better replacement (and I probably will); it's also the first cartoon I've done for the newspaper that doesn't have a tag line, and that's because I couldn't think of a one. Plus, I don't think it actually needs anything else doing to it. I just stretched the image to cover the area the tag line usually occupies and - hey presto - the first widescreen cartoon I've done. It's not laugh out loud funny, but if I'm really lucky it might put a smirk on people's faces.

Sharks (tbp)

This works better in a larger format because I can fit the words in that I wanted to put in ('Edwina, aren't you showing rather a lot of fin in that dress my dear...?')

I like the idea that fins are the shark equivalent of cleavage, and that's really the basis of the joke. The 'Sharks getting ready to go out for dinner' tag doesn't really add much to it all, but I couldn't think of a better line so it stuck.

This is one that's eventually going to end up in The Courier unless I think of a better cartoon to replace it.

And I think that shark looks rather handsome in his tuxedo.

Dear Oh Deer... (tbp)

I do like this one, and I ain't ashamed to say it.
As with 90% of the cartoons I create, this one is based on a phrase, in this case a line from the song 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'. The question is, why couldn't ol' Rudolph join in those reindeer games? I like to think that he failed the drugs test for them, though I don't know how you'd fit that into the song...

Stick-Mean (no, that's not a typo)

Here's something I just doodled while on the train the other day.