Changes

One advantage of doing a strictly web-based comic strip is that I can change it after it runs online. In a newspaper, the strip runs once and that's the only version ever printed (unless it later shows up in a book or on a calendar). But with an online strip, I can make changes, corrections, improvements or upgrades as I see fit. This happened earlier this week.

The strip was about a T shirt on which the color ran after washing it. The first version, which appeared Tuesday,  had one clown talking and that was it. This is a technique used more often in anthology strips like the Far Side or Close to Home, where the characters are different every day, and therefore the traits of each aren't established enough to necessarily make their response funny. In a recurring-character strip, however, the personality of an established character can add to the humor. For example, Garfield may make a snide comment after Jon says something that is itself funny. Our familiarity with Garfield's sarcasm makes the cat's comment the punchline.

When I re-read the T shirt cartoon Tuesday night, however, I decided it might be funnier if the second clown points out that, even though the first guy now has a shirt that ridicules the wearer instead of whomever he's with, he is still wearing it...proving him to be stupid. So I redrew the necessary parts, uploaded it to the site in place of the former version, and told my email subscribers what I'd done, asking for their reactions. Several people responded, all preferring the new version. I do too. Of course, those of you who don't subscribe may have never gotten to see the original version---except that I ran it here. Another reason to sign up! This could happen to a strip again, but I probably won't tell you about it here next time.

I'm curious to see if there'll be any sales of the QlownTown logo shirt in the next few days, since it appears in this same cartoon...I figure product placement is okay in my own strip. I actually decided to offer this comic strip (the second version) printed on merchandise in the online store. (I no longer put every new strip on merchandise, unless I receive a request.) Now you can buy a copy of the strip on T shirts, mugs, etc., and even order a copy of the "runny" shirt itself so you can make a fool of yourself. Hey, people have actually ordered the "You wanna go where everybody knows you're inane" shirt--a sign that some people have no shame.

I live for these people.

Lost

Well, I guess I'll weigh in on the Lost finale, along with every other blogger on the internet. I had to watch it in low def, which looked really bad on a 50" screen, but we're having issues with our Tivo, cable, and/or set--we haven't pinned down which yet. (SPOILER ALERT: READ NO FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE LAST EPISODE!!!) With my luck, they're probably all dying--which ties in nicely with today's blog.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the last episode. The fact that you could interpret it as a Christian metaphor (right down to the wound in Jack's side and the ending in a church); or as it all having been a dream in Jack's mind as he died--or maybe just the sideways reality of season six was a dream, or maybe his being on the island was a dream; or as an unknowable version of what Life and Death are really resonated with me. After six seasons in which mystery was piled upon mystery, and countless fans and reviewers pondered online What It All Means, an ending which was open to interpretation was the best conclusion. That we can feel relieved that most questions were answered--through one explanation or another--is a testament to the writers' skill. Maybe the sideways reality was Purgatory--a popular theory for a long time--but by not spelling out that it was, we can still look for other answers...or tell ourselves that that's indeed what it was. I was able to go to bed thoroughly satisfied--and yet I was anxious to see what others said this morning. Closure, yet still open to discussion.

I'm pleased that I can still ponder what happened in those six seasons, yet not be frustrated that there are big, unresolved questions left hanging that will never be answered. I would have thought that this series, with all its twists and turns, would have been a closed book when it ended. But I would now like to watch the whole thing again (at some point, and not all in one sitting!), knowing the ending, and see what answers I come up with as I follow the stories again. It's impressive when a linear drama is able to compel one to watch it again, even after one "knows" how it all turns out.

By the way, I'll give away the eventual ending of the QlownTown comic strip now: they all turn out to really be clowns. Big surprise.

Hidden stuff

I like to stick little details in the strips that people may or may not notice. In video-game speak, they're Easter eggs.

Today's strip features a clown using an iPad. It's right out there in the open, but only one person wrote to tell me she'd noticed it. I thought it was pretty cool to put it in there; I haven't seen any iPads in cartoons yet, although I'm sure I'm not the first cartoonist to draw one.

'Way back in March '09, I did a strip which included a duck whistling. That one wasn't hidden, but it was a little detail that a lot of people noticed. As a matter of fact, I may be the only one who thought that cartoon was funny, but I redeemed myself with a lot of people who liked the whistler.
 

In the octopus cartoon, the applicant's name was Callie Mari. It was probably illegible on small computer screens, but you'll be able to read when the book comes out someday. (Don't hold your breath.)

The little dinosaur whose dad was reading him a bedtime story had a Jurassic Park poster on his wall.


And it was a lot of fun to draw different kinds of brooms outside Voldemart.

When I began, I had planned to do lots of "half tone" colors using words, but that sort of fell by the wayside. I'll try to start doing it again, though. Again, it doesn't translate well to the low resolution of some computer screens. When the strips start appearing larger--a change we're planning for the site at some point--it'll be easier to spot. (If you can't read it, the grass at the bottom says GRASSGRASSGRASSGRASS.)

Entertainment for the simple mind, I guess.

Writing gags

I have to say, I love creating ideas for QlownTown. Someone dropped me an email this week to say how much she and her husband enjoyed the Russian Ukulele strip, and asked me how I come up with them. I've expounded on this in the past, so I won't repeat myself here. But this one had an interesting progression. It began as a scribble of a guy who walks into the strip with a guitar, or what appears to be a guitar, then opens it, revealing it to be a case with a guitar inside. When I sat down to do the finished version, that seemed a little incomplete. So I thought, how about if he has a big guitar case, inside of which is a smaller one, inside of which is a still smaller one. Then, I figured, why not make it an upright bass case, inside of which is a guitar case, then a mandolin, then a ukulele? I liked the even sillier logic of bothering to haul around an upright bass case just to to protect a ukulele.

I had wanted to show the original sketch, but can't seem to find it. This prompted an office cleaning this morning, during which I organized the strips I've drawn so far into semi-logical piles. I began drawing the daily strips about 11" x 3", and the earliest strips were drawn so they could also be a square panel. The idea was to offer a square or strip formats to newspapers, but I found it to be too time-consuming. (One artist I know of does it that way: Wiley Miller, whose Non Sequitur appears as both a strip and a panel, depending on the paper or site.) After a few months I switched to a larger format, 12-1/8" x 4-1/4", and I've occasionally done square panels along the way--after all, it only appears on the website (for now), so QlownTown can be any shape I want. So there are the early dual format drawings, the smaller strip size, the larger strip size, and originals that are the square-panel-only format, as well as the Sunday strips--which also vary in size if the artwork outgrows the intended size: I'm a big believer in trying to retain the freedom of the original pencil drawings, and if I think I got it right on the first sketch but some element goes "outside the lines," I'll just change the size of the drawing, resizing it in the computer as necessary.

Anyway, I did find this early sketch of another strip which evolved into the final product later. I was working as a kitchen designer at the time, but I wanted to remember the color concept more clearly, so you'll notice it's colored with highlighter pens--the only color source I had in the office.


 

When the strip appeared in its final form, it looked like this:












In this case, the original drawing and concept were pretty close to the final outcome. But the process from that first sketch was the less-fun part of the job. Coming up with the idea was the exciting thing. There's an artist, Keith Knight, who draws his strip, The Knight Life, in a cafe. That's not the setting: that's his "studio". They're kind of scribbly, but I like them, and he gets to basically sketch his initial idea and that becomes the finished cartoon! Lucky guy.

In the future, I'll try to post more before and after strips.

Wine

A few weeks ago, we visited our friends Kris and Lynda in Washington, DC. Among the many fun things we did over a long weekend was to have dinner at the home of a couple of our hosts' friends one night. As a thank you, we brought a couple of bottles of wine. Because the hosts already had the evening's wines planned out, the bottles we'd brought weren't opened that evening. (For those you wondering, it is not required that the hosts open a gift bottle--they may open them later if they choose; it is, after all, a gift.) We had brunch with the same people the next day, and I explained to them that the Pinot Noir we brought was a special wine to us.

I'd had it in a restaurant one night a couple of years earlier, and liked it so much that I decided later to purchase a couple of bottles at a wine store. It was more expensive than what I usually spend on a bottle, but I felt it was worth it for special occasions. It so happened that a few weeks later, we were going to Game Night at the home of our son's girlfriend, and decided to bring a bottle of wine. Her parents aren't big fans of wine, especially reds, but the only unopened bottle we had on hand was a bottle of the Pinot, so I reluctantly brought it. As it turned out, that was the night that our son and now-daughter-in-law announced their engagement, so it was nice to have a special, splurged-on bottle to toast the news.

When I told this story, the husband, Jeff,  reminded me that they were waiting for their daughter's boyfriend (whom we'd met the night before) to propose to her, and that maybe this wine would work some more magic. I wished him good luck, and said I wasn't sure if they should open it first to make it happen, or save it for when (or if ever) the announcement came. It would age well, so if they had to wait a long time, the wine would still be good anyway.

A couple of weeks later, I was ushering at a concert and Lynda came in. She told me, "They opened the wine". I immediately caught on and said, "You mean...?" and she said, "Yes, he proposed to her last night." The kids had called to tell Jeff and Ellen, and as soon as he got off the phone, Jeff had uncorked the bottle to toast the news.

Well, that made my day. To meet someone once and now have a unique bond through engagements and wine is pretty special. And now I---and the people with whom I've shared the story---have a new catchphrase: when a couple gets engaged, they "opened the wine". Kind of a nice metaphor for starting a life together, too.

Green

Ever since the first Earth Day forty years ago, I've tried to be ecologically responsible. In 1970, I tried driving 50 on the highway in my old Plymouth Duster and got about 35 MPG, whereas before it'd been closer to 27 or so. Then I bought a little Honda Civic back in 1976. I added foam board insulation to the walls of an already-insulated house that I restored in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, back in the late 70s. (My wife said it wouldn't gain us anything in resale value, but two years later when the house was done and the economy was in the crapper, people were excited about the extra insulation.) I won a cash award for building a superinsulated house in Maine back in the eighties.

None of which is is blow my own horn. I'm just saying, I'm glad the world is catching up. It's been frustrating for years. While Hummers gained popularity and SUVs ruled the roads, I wondered where the conscientious people were. Now smaller cars are becoming popular again and, more importantly, people are seeing conservation as a priority.

What really drove it home for me was seeing a popular comic strip recently in which a character rants about people changing oil every 3,000 miles instead of 6,000. When pop culture uses "green" topics as a teaching/humor tool, that's good. Consumer Reports actually discovered years ago, in controlled tests, that there was no significant advantage to changing the oil in one's car every 3,000 miles---that 6,000-mile changes were just as effective.They also pointed out that if everyone who changes every 3,000 would do it half as often, hundreds of thousands of gallons of tainted oil would be eliminated from the waste stream every year. But still people think 3,000-mile oil changes make sense.

About fifteen years ago, I began washing every foam meat or vegetable tray we got from the store and began storing them in my attic, on the theory that someday they would be recyclable and I would have kept all those trays out of the landfill. After a year or so, I gave up. Now I have some extra insulation up there, but I don't think those trays will ever be reused in any other way. Oh well. Sometimes you're ahead of your time--and sometimes you're just overly compulsive. Can't win 'em all. But I'm feeling like I--we--are winning on some important stuff.

Sweepstakes

I was just entering some sweepstakes. It's easy online. Some even take you to a list of other contests you can enter after you've entered the first one. You can submit as often as once a day on a lot of them. Of course, as I do this, I'm well aware that I'm just wasting my time--but it is, as a friend once said to my wife and me as he was buying a Megabucks ticket, "buying a ticket to a dream". The difference with a free online entry is: there's no monetary expense. I can spend a few minutes dreaming about what I'd do with the money, or the car, or the trip to Hawaii, and all I've invested is time.

I don't go so far as to subscribe to sites that keep you updated on new contests. That is reaching the point of obsession, I think...although if it entertains you, who am I to criticize? It's free entertainment.

A few years ago, when the local PowerBall was at an all-time high, we bought two tickets. We knew we were probably throwing away two bucks, but it gave us the chance to dream. If you've actually paid something for an entry, I think it's easier to imagine what winning might really be like.We decided that the mistake some winners make is just going crazy, spending money on everything they've ever wanted, and more. Then the novelty wears off, everyone's asking them for a donation, their life has no purpose and they get depressed. I think the answer is to become a philanthropist.

Say you win twenty million bucks. After taxes, you net around nine million. You splurge on $100,000 worth of stuff. You decide you want to quit your job and travel, so you set aside, say, $300,000 to spend per year, invested in pretty safe funds. If you figure you have twenty years to live, that's six million. Interest should more than cover the cost of inflation. Now you still have three million. This could be given away to charities, or it could be invested. What if you make it your job to invest that money so it generates more money, which can be doled out to charities and worthy causes for the rest of your life? If you make yourself a financial expert through studying, courses, whatever, you could probably give away more over time than if you gave it all away at once. This would give your life purpose, rather than just sitting around as a member of the nouveau idle rich. The lack of purpose is the downfall of big winners.

See? I was able to develop this whole theory and feel good about it, all because I spent a few minutes entering contests. It doesn't actually do anyone any good, because I don't have these millions to develop and donate, but it's free. And it does make the point that I should be the one to win, because I'm prepared. Hear that, oh gods of sweepstakes? I'm the guy.