Original Art Sundays No. 162: Surrealist Cowgirls, p. 18

Only six pages left to this story!
Here's the latest installment:

So the Zen Master is the villian? Okay...
In my Comic Writing course, which ends tomorrow night,  we've been talking about the challenges of doing written humor, either in comics or in prose. Humor is dependent on timing, and when someone else is reading your work, you surrender control of timing. This is usually remedied in comics by visual exaggeration- think Howard Cruse, Robert Crumb or Peter Bagge- but that's not my style, so I find other approaches. My most common tools are puns and surrealist visuals.
These tools can be tricky. it's hard to be over the top and subtle at the same time. On this page, I aspire to a sense of menace, and hope to achieve it without losing (or forcing) the silliness. The surrealism scenes usually begin with a random image, and are honed by making the design work in a plausible way. I don't want it to seem cluttered, while I want to retain a sense of a full-tilt surrealist desert and world.
Overall this is going the way I want it to (except for Taz the kitty's continual insistence on jumping into my work space). I'm continually inspired by Bob Clampett, Carl Barks, Jim Woodring and Mary Fleener in doing this work.
More and more, I see this as either a Golden Age 64 page book or as an 80-page Giant comic, old school DC style. With the completion of this story, I'll have about 47 pages of Cowgirls material total.
Page 19 is almost done, so let's look forward to next week!

Original Art Sundays #53: A Dialogue with Harvey Pekar

Well, I shot myself in the foot by not properly saving the scan of the work I was planning on posting today.
However, as I was contemplating Hara Kari, I realized that from these setbacks we glean giant strides forward (to quote the great 80s film Real Genius).
A few week ago, Harvey Pekar died. I was lucky enough to chat with him once, and while I'm sure he would never recall me, my memories of him are vivid and positive.
This happened the same day my most recent relationship ended quite abruptly and unexpectedly. She spontaneously decided (in the middle of a month) that she had to live in another state, a thousand miles away, in three days. To say I was hurt and angry is like calling the Chicago Fire a weenie roast.
It didn't end well. Does it ever, really?
Her reasons are her own. Suffice to say I didn't agree and I've had more harmonious partings, though I hope that time heals that as well.
Shaken by Harvey's death and the unexpected turn in my personal life, I spent part of the following day re-reading my (ahem) complete collection of American Splendor.
I found this story. Not my favorite Harvey story (that's An Everyday Horror Story, from issue #5), but quite on point.
I chose to make a short video of it. For a soundtrack, I used R. Crumb's Cheap Suit Serenaders, as he and Harvey were friends and worked together often.
Timing and pacing this was an interesting experience. I wanted the text to be on-screen long enough to be legible, but not so long as to be tedious. Also, a series of static images can be less than exciting, so I used bits of motion and some image repetitions to shake it up just a bit.
I'm content with the result.
Full screen viewing recommended for reading ease!