Here's The Pitch: Behind The Scenes (Patreon)

Hello, my lovely patrons!

Well that was certainly a month. For those who may be reading this at a later date, Here's The Pitch just wrapped up. It was a daily series that I started producing on 5/31 and stopped on 7/2.

Overall, I'm very pleased with this comic. I had a lot of fun working on it and it helped me develop my skills. And what's better is that you, my lovely patrons, voted on it! That means I had to deliver something special.

So let's dig into what it took to make this comic. Here's the wind up and...

THE PITCHOkay so first of all I should say up front that I wanted Here's The Pitch (or HTP) to win the poll. That was the one I was the most excited by and the one I had the most material for. The original poll entrants:

This is not knocking those other ideas, because honestly I might do another poll and resurrect some of them. But Here's The Pitch was the most special one to me. I love building out my historical setting and HTP offered a good excuse to take that setting forward into modern times. It was also a concept I'd been kicking around since 2023.

As per the rules of the poll, HTP was originally supposed to be an 8-10 page comic. I wrote the script for that version and it was pretty awful. There was no humor, no sex, no joy in the transformation or the fashion. It was stripped down to base essentials and suffered for it. So I rewrote it.

The new script numbered 35 pages in total. But those pages were different from my standard 11x17 comic page. I needed a different format, something closer to a newspaper strip. Something easy to make but not something where I could just be lazy. After reading Grumpy-TG's new comic The Problem With Shapeboy, I decided to eliminate the bottom third of the page. So each page in HTP is 11x11. The square format freed me up to tell better jokes and be more concise in my cartooning. So those 35 pages are really more like 25 full-size page in terms of picture plane. At least I think that's how the math works out. Don't quote me on that.

Another concession was not doing shading in my colors (excluding one or two pages). All of Here's The Pitch is flatted, but not shaded.

All of this was done in service of making the daily strip plan possible.

DAILY

So I made a comic back in 2022 during my tumultuous cross-country move called The Ballad of Scaredy-Cat Red. I had been away from drawing for a month and I was very stressed out. I finally found a few quiet moments to jot some ideas down on my ipad and I just started working. Scaredy-Cat Red ended up being my first successful comic, I'd say. Successful in that it had a solid execution on an idea and people liked it. The feeling of coming downstairs every morning, sitting at my roommate's sister's kitchen table, and drawing cowboy smut was honestly delightful. It's a high I've been chasing ever since, both consciously and subconsciously. I think that's why I made The Many Lives of Pretty John Bishop. It didn't do it for me in the same way though. I was too prepared. Anticipated it too much. Here's The Pitch gave me another hit.

I took maybe two days off that whole month of June. Every day was just about making comics. Nearly every page was a pleasure to make. There are a couple I'm less fond of, but that has more to do with my mental state while I was making them than the pages themselves. I have a mental condition that leaves me depressed on rare occasions (thank you psych meds) and it hit during the month of June. But besides that, I had so much fun writing and drawing about Babs and Jenny.

STORY

I tend to make stories about icons and established concepts more than originals. Here's The Pitch is a story that can be easily boiled down to Abbott and Costello in Some Like It Hot meets A League of Their Own plus Sex. Obviously there's more going on than just that concept, but that's the elevator pitch.

I wanted to tell a romantic story that wasn't about a wedding. A romance between friends and partners. Babs and Jenny are a broad comedy duo archetype, but I wanted them to feel like like real people. I think flipping the roles and making Babs a short serious girl and Jenny a tall silly girl put them in a different dynamic where they could play off each other more genuinely. Jenny's tall stacked blonde whose presence lights up a room. There's nothing subtle about her. Babs on the other hand is her short brunette friend who is a little pudgy and a little grumpy. She doesn't want to be noticed as much. She's not into the skirts lifestyle yet. The potential for humor and feelings was there. WORLD

So HTP is set in the same universe as Scaredy-Cat Red and Pretty John Bishop (along with some commissions I've taken). There's two pieces of connective tissue there. Professor Jonix, the mysterious medicine-making miracle-worker of the old west, eventually founded a company and started selling their patent medicine that turns you into a girl as cosmetics. The feminizing aspect was downplayed and the 'beauty amplification' effects were championed. Fast forward ~70-80 years and those cosmetics are now readily available and those who know their secret properties and use them to change others for the better.

The other piece of connective tissue is Ruby. She bears a passing resemblance to Red himself, especially near the end of that comic. And that's because she's her great grand-daughter.

So Ruby references her 'Grandma Scarlet' in passing. That is a hint to a family lineage. 'But Jo,' I hear you ask, 'how could her grandma be Scarlet if Scarlet is from the 1860s or whatever?' And the answer to that is twofold.

Her family tree is strange because Scarlet and Big Joe got married and Scarlet does not have a womb. 'How did she have kids?' And the answer to that is that Professor Jonix is a miracle-worker (and that's all I'll say about that for the moment). The other reason is Ruby's family carries on a legacy of feminizing people. Each generation is told about Scarlet's story and how her life was changed for the better. And how she gave that gift to others through her brothel/saloon. Well Ruby (Daughter of Rusty, Son of Rosa, Daughter of Scarlet Jr. if you must know) didn't believe it. She'd been around and never run into a case that her family legacy was applicable to. Until she met those two clowns.

Candidly, I wish I had more material for Ruby in this comic. She was fun to write and I feel like she could have used another scene to send her off.There's another comic set in this universe. It's probably pretty obvious, if you think about it for two seconds, but here's a hint:

REFSI love my historical comics. I get to do all the fashion research I want on these things. I had a hoot looking up bullet bra pictures and old hairstyles. What can I say? I'm a hair pervert and I'm proud of that.

Finding old photos of buildings and clothes was fun too!

I wished I could have used some of these shots, but I wanted to downplay the baseball aspect.

BASEBALL AND COMICS

The premise required baseball. I don't give a SHIT about baseball. It's boring to me and the times I've been the most bored in my life have involved baseball. However, baseball is also the reason I love comics.

When I was a kid, probably 5 or 6, I was taken to a local baseball game in Toledo, Ohio. The Mud Hens were the local team and I couldn't care less. Bored to my limit, I was out wandering the grounds behind the stands with my cousin when we came across a table that had this weird looking book on it. It featured a team of angry, muscular, cyborg mutant warthogs looking menacing. I picked it up and didn't even know how to read it. All I knew was that it was like the comics from the paper, but way different. It blew my mind. I didn't know there was stuff like that out there. From that moment, I knew I wanted to make this. Whatever it was.

So that's why I didn't put much baseball in the story. That and I wanted to sidestep the trans athlete discussion because yikes.

SKETCHES

I have a special bonus surprise for you, my lovely patrons! Attached to this post is all 35 pages in sketch form. You can see how tight I was getting with my pencils on a lot of those pages. I really wanted to evoke a certain look in an untested format, so I really wanted to plan my drawings well.FUTUREI loved writing Babs and Jenny. I don't want to let them go. I think I have an idea of a follow-up but it's only a notion at this point. No idea when that comic would get made. But it might be fun to catch up with them in the 1960s...

Thank you for reading my thoughts on Here's The Pitch.