Rope swing

I drew a cartoon earlier this week and was very pleased with myself when it was done. I liked the colors, the composition, the way I drew the characters. I liked that I'd changed my original concept of having the chicken say, "Of course I'm chicken" to a caption explaining the picture. I think that's a drier, more amusing way to do it. That way, the "narrator" is stating this as a logical reason, which I think is funnier than just having the character make a silly pun. (I was going to say "bad" pun, but puns aren't really bad--they're clever wordplay. Shakespeare and I don't have a lot in common, but we both have beards and love a good pun.)

I even traced a Shaker-style wooden box to get the even curve of the rope...I use a compass sometimes, but it's quicker and easier to trace an object when I want a smooth ink line. And I decided that Perry seemed like a good, unlikely name for a chicken. Finally, I liked that I put the chicken in a bathing suit and set things up as if he was just another one of the boys.


Sooo--it's all done, it gets uploaded, it's there in the queue--and then it arrives in my email several days later as the Daily Cartoon. And I see that the rope on the swing is so long, one would smash into the ground before reaching the water.


My first thought was to fix that--redraw that part of the cartoon so the rope is tauter. That would mean replacing some black lines and a few areas of color, all of which I'd do in the computer. But I liked every other element so much, I decided not to tamper with (near) perfection. Maybe I'll do a followup, where the taunting kid who's holding the tire tries to swing and hits the ground. He deserves it.