Here's the latest installment:
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!
