Long Tall Dummy
Greetings from Hollywood Gardens, PA, where our Little Shop of Humor cranks out the cartoon product six days a week. On the sixth day, we also release a blog post reviewing the latest comical output.
Your ink-monkey plans to take a few days off in early June, so we’re working overtime at the drawing board to stay comfortably ahead of those pesky deadlines.
Looking Ahead & Looking Back
Two Frankenstein-related characters will appear in Bizarro at the end of July.
When real people appear in the comic, I try to make the drawings recognizable, but think of them as approximations rather than caricatures or portraits. I’m fairly happy with these likenesses.
This week’s archival art is a 2012 label design for my friends at the East End Brewing Company. “Blabber & Smoke” rauchbier was named after a song by Captain Beefheart, whom I mentioned in today’s blog.
I drew the line art by hand with ink and a brush, and colored and assembled the final design in Photoshop. The government warning is meant to look like a last-minute addition pasted onto the bottle. The halftone-dot background is a high-resolution scan taken from an antique linen postcard, giving the design a funky, worn look.
The label’s character is a tribute to Cal Schenkel’s cover photo for Beefheart’s notoriously polarizing Trout Mask Replica LP. Yes, I’m showing off my autographed copy.
Alternate View
As regular readers know, we reconfigure every daily comic as a strip in addition to the standard panel format.
The strip sometimes calls for a vertical orientation, which requires newsprint readers to rotate their papers by ninety degrees.
Reference Image of the Week
My work process usually includes searching for a few photos of things I’ll be drawing. This week, I needed to look at an old pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game. That cactus blossom on the left could almost be Bizarro’s Crown of Power Secret Symbol.
Thank you for indulging my (smokeless) blabbering again this week.
Remember, your comments and questions are always welcome.
Regards from your cartoonist,
Wayno
Catching on while catching up ... (We watched Pinocchio this week, again marveling at the animators' art work, thinking and appreciating ever more the work that you and our other, maybe not so geographically near, but definitely very dear cartoonist friends offer up. Thank you! -- It was Geppetto's pipe before bed that really cemented the connection ...)