Making of "Black & White" (Patreon)

One crappy thing about getting older is seeing all the celebrities that have always been there, suddenly not being there. I'm not a huge celebrity follower, but there's certain folks who have unknowingly played roles in shaping me and it's sad to see them go. David Attenborough is the one that keeps getting me recently -I swear that man has more than 1 birthday a year! I felt like he was old when I was little, when I'd watch nature documentaries over at my Granny's house. He's still going though! At 100 apparently!

With that in mind; I really hate it when social media accounts use a B&W photo to mark a celebrities birthday, making me think they've died! I'm starting to suspect accounts do this on purpose for all the engagement from poor jump scared scrollers!

After the longer, meandering beach comic last week, I wanted a short, more universal relatable one for this week and this fitted the role perfectly!

Having Fran & Joel sitting next to each other in tall panels is difficult. I can just about do it, but to squeeze their big ol' heads in, the "camera" has to be pretty far away. As this one was primarily about the expressions, I wanted to have their faces as big as possible, so I put Fran in the foreground with Joel further up the couch in the distance. I thought I'd been pretty clever because I could largely avoid having to draw Fran's body and the composition was much more interesting than f they'd been side by side. Roughs went great, but the problems came when I had to fit their real proportions!

I needed Joel fully visible behind Fran, who's moving quite a bit, AND to accommodate the speech bubbles. I'd shift them about a bit to make it work, only to realize they were weirdly scooting around on the couch! 😅 Fixing it would often mean moving them more, revealing more of Joel and having to draw him back in, which would result in more tangent issues and oh my goodness it ended up being quite a lot of work! Even now they still scoot about a bit, you can probably see if now I've mentioned it! 😜 Still, it was within acceptable parameters, so I was happy!

For the bonus I brainstormed ideas until I came up with the winner. These bonuses have become pretty good practice for inventive writing! I have a general theme and 1 or maybe 2 panels for a joke. I'll just keep writing down ideas until something clicks, or I get some sort of idea combo. Feel like it's making me a better comedy writer! 😊