#619 – camping

I switched (permanently) to a larger 11x17 page format for this story, so that's why the lines all got smoother. I think here it looks almost too clean to me. I really had to figure out how to fill the space from here. The first thing I did was switch back to hand lettering and go really bold. This pretty close to where I landed on lettering. It got comfortable and less labored-over the more I did it. I always encourage my students to hand-letter, especially when their balloons and panel borders are hand-drawn. It looks more organic, it's a good tool to have in a cartooning toolbox, and it makes for a good original page. It also helps (me, at least) in committing to the final dialogue. Nothing digital feels permanent to me, always a chance for desperate revision. It's good to commit. It's a skill separate from drawing itself that should be cultivated alongside. You can get thousands of pages drawn that way.

7 thoughts on “#619 – camping

  1. This page has always felt so surreal and at first I thought it was, another dream scene, and it took the next few pages to convince me it was literal. Marek is a force of nature, but then, so are Eve, Hanna, Jane, Olly…

  2. eve going in for more in panel 2 is really sweet and that guy's a fuckup for not going for bailing

  3. This guy did repulse me but not because he's found a nice little douche-aesthetic niche for himself, nor because he treats casual sex as transactional, but because he's a dick about the transaction. If I'm buying groceries and the clerk asks me "How was your day?" I'm going to tell them about my day, not make a pretentious remark about how the transaction is the only point of contact that we have, that they don't really care about my day, and that we don't need to pretend like our lives will change if the other lives or dies. They already know all that and the other person in a hook-up knows all that. Sometimes we don't need to comment on the relative futility of our social rituals. Sometimes we can just ask a stranger's name and say something nice to them and not act like we're above all that yucky human interaction.

    Also, was the 2008 blackout a NY thing? I remember these types of shirts becoming more and more popular with the ascendance of Facebook.

  4. This has always been one of my favorite pages.

  5. I had to zoom in on the t-shirt. At first, I thought it said: "I survived the boob bandit".

  6. Late Comment Ahoy!

    I've never been in the dating scene nor have I had any chance encounters with strangers, so perhaps I'm a bit jaded on how such things tend to go- but if I had to guess about someone deciding to be THAT dodgy about giving out their name, I'd suggest he was probably cheating on someone and wanted as little of a trail as possible.

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