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.