Category: Comics

One of my many (many) drawing difficulties is the dead body lying on floor syndrome. This pushes one thing I think I’m good at (the human body) against another thing I really struggle with (perspective). Perspective isn’t hard, per se, and often my most successful perspective drawings are where I try not to get too rigid with it, but inevitably (especially as I’ve gone digital) I tend to fall in to the everything-is-a-box and can be drawn in perspective. And since the human body is extra hard to draw, that means extra boxes and extra hard perspective.

And that’s sort of useful, but it really steals a lot of fluidity away from the human form. Plus, and I dunno if this is a feature of my brain but it tends to lead to a lot of floating boxes. These notional boxes taking up head, torso, arms and legs, still sort of follow the placement of wherever I put them – rather than, as with the human body – sagging int other space that’s there.

When stuck on this problem I start looking at Geoff Darrow, who’s Hard Boiled is a bible for bodies lying on the ground.

I mean, look at that. Every body is painful reminder of the fact we’re only human flesh bags.

Anyway, staring at this, it seemed to me, the boxes where my problem, and if I could think of another metaphor (it’s not the right word, for what I’m trying to do – a drawing anology?) that might help it might be worth considering and staring and staring and it occurred to me if I thought of the torso as a sack of spuds, that would give me much of the flexibility of a real human body –

I feel the weight of a sack like this, much more than I do a box, and it has a bend to it that the body does that none of my box drawings ever do.

And if I extend the metaphor so instead of a box human we end with a person made of bags of spuds (or other less-norn-irish stuff) we can have a better way to think about the body in perspective, something that can keep the all of the relative lengths of the body parts the same while also making me think about weight and giving me the flexibility to move the body.

Anyway, this has JUST occured to me, so maybe it’s a bad idea, but sometimes I think you need to question your assumptions so you can rethink stuff, especially stuff you’re stuck on.

Out this Wednesday, featuring episode 4 of Chimpsky’s Law: The Incredible Mr Chimpsky.

In which the family Jepperson point the finger of blame at Chimpsky, and Chimpsky – at last – tells us who the real killer is!

I hope this strip conclusively answers the question “is this a little Hitler moustache” – the answer is no – it’s a little tall moustache that splays out at the ends, and if you read it as a Hitler ‘tache, that’s on you. (Or me for my art being not as clear as I thought it was)

I’m pretty pleased with Chimpsky’s grimacing face on that second page there, some fun things to draw.

Out last Wednesday, 2000AD Prog 2236 features Episode 3 of Chimpsky’s Law: The Talented Mr Chimpsky

Wherein out four handed friend, begins to see the Jepperson’s come to various sticky ends, finds himself fighting for his life and J’accuse Chimspky!

There’s some fun PG tips style Chimps playing card nonsense in this issue, and I think I was generally pleased with the art on it.

One of the Things with this strip is there are SO many named characters, and they all needed distinct looks, and then there were an abundance of UNNAMED characters, but again – a distinct look. Even the chimps, all fundamentally the same but you still needed – at the very least – to distinguish Chimpsky from all others. Largely with Chimpsky, I did that with body language and story telling – keeping him the focus or making sure he’s much more aware of what’s going on than the other apes (who are largely just reacting to whatever thing is happening just now – all acting is reacting!)

The Jeppersons though I designed the first bunch that I thought we’d see more of – at this point I had no idea of what fate befell each of them, so, don’t think there’s any spoilers if I show you this.

The 2000ad cover I did that ran a few progs ago was originally supposed to be for this issue, I suspect it was just abstract enough it could be run at any stage and the first episode felt like a pretty good spot for it.

The reaction to this strip seems to be largely very positive, so hopefully we’ll get to do more (I mean, assuming Chimpsky makes it out alive, right? RIGHT???)