Reversal

As I drew today's cartoon, I knew it needed a guy driving a car, a speech balloon and a comment box--the voice-over, if you will. Lately, I've been sketching out the cartoon as quickly as possible in pencil, then changing it as little as I can when tracing with pen, while still trying to keep some fluidity in the lines.

After the whole thing was sketched, I realized that I had laid it out backwards. I wanted the comment to be the last thing you read, and the speech to be the first. Wanting to keep the looseness of the original sketch, I decided to just reverse it after I scanned it into the computer.  So I inked, scanned, lettered and flipped it. After it was all cleaned up--there are generally little dots or lines where some of the light penciling gets picked up by the scanner, or little overshot lines that I decide to erase, and the process can take half an hour--I was ready to color it.

And as I began to color, I saw the problem: now the clown was driving on the left side of the car! This would be fine if part of the joke was that he was driving in the UK, but this wasn't the case. So I switched it back to the way I'd originally drawn it.

The result is a cartoon in which the punchline comes at the beginning instead of the end. I could have redrawn the whole thing, but that would take the spontaneity out of the drawing. I don't do well on second drawings. Especially if I'm really happy with the first one. The second is a burden, and it never satisfies me. Besides, I'm busy working on my house when I'm not cartooning, and a do-over just seems like time stolen from house projects. So it goes to the website as a frontwards illustration of a backwards joke.

I hope people still find it funny. Maybe I'll fix it someday. There are cartoons I've drawn over the last year and a half that I plan to revisit eventually. Maybe when they go onto a calendar, hopefully when I'm preparing them for a book. (No plans for that yet.) But for now, they stay as they were originally. Not all do-overs have to be done right away.

(By the way, after I had this whole post put together, I realized that the dashboard and the outside of the car were the same. I went back and fixed this on the original, and that's the version you'll see if you check it out at www.qlowntown.com...but I'm leaving these two versions here. This just shows you how long it can take to finish a cartoon that takes about two minutes to sketch---and still not get it right!)