Paper Shuffling
Scheduling cartoons, plus thoughtful words from Dan Piraro
The latest blog entry has been posted. Our musical bonus track is a brand new song by my pal Steve Young, the man behind Bathtubs Over Broadway.
The Bizarro gags I drew this week were populated by archaeologists, princes, Bigfoot, dogs, and an orchestral conductor.
Looking Ahead & Looking Back
A few months ago, I did a gag about world-weary princesses and decided to give the princes equal time.
My longtime friend Mary Fleener shared this self-portrait from a letter I sent her in 1987. I’ve been “that guy in the hat” for a long time.
She also still has this check from 1990. And I thought I saved everything!
Panel Planning Process
In addition to writing and drawing six cartoons a week, part of the job is deciding how to sequence them. I prefer to have more than six on hand, so I can use the best ones, and allow time to do additional work on gags that aren’t as strong.
Occasionally, I’ll have written enough for two weeks of Bizarro, which helps to lower my anxiety levels.
I draw rough sketches of each gag and digitally place them in blank panels. Here’s a two-week batch I wrote in March.
I’ll then spread printouts on a tabletop or the floor, moving them around to determine the Monday-through-Saturday sequence.
I pick my favorite for Friday, with the next-best gags on Monday and Wednesday. The one I like the least gets slotted for Saturday and the last two fill in Tuesday and Thursday. This is entirely subjective and unscientific, and quite often a gag I thought wasn’t the best will be a hit with readers, proving that I’m not always the best judge of my work.
I slightly changed the sequence shown above, swapping the Saturday gags. I thought the second week had too many panels with dialog plus a caption. That may have been overthinking on my part since nobody else would see an entire week of gags arranged in this way.
Recommended Reading
Among his many projects, Dan Piraro, my comical partner and original creator of Bizarro, publishes a weekly newsletter called The Naked Cartoonist. He described it better than I ever could in his first post:
The articles I’ll include in this project will average five or six minutes of reading time with a few longer ones. They’ll mostly be surreal humor with a little philosophy thrown in, or philosophical ramblings with a little humor. Doubtless, I’ll occasionally do a completely serious one—we’ll see.
His latest post is a mostly serious one about one of his children and their openness with him about their gender identity. He discusses the long educational process necessary for people our age (we’re close contemporaries) to overcome the attitudes and assumptions we learned as youngsters. Many particulars of our experience are different, but the arcs are similar. We’re both fortunate to have had lifelong connections to arts communities, where differences are more celebrated than denigrated.
The Naked Cartoonist is a newsletter for paid subscribers, but Dan kindly agreed to let us read this one for free.
Check out the article. I got a lot from it and maybe you will, too.
Thank you for subscribing to the newsletter and reading the comics
Your questions, comments, and pipe pics are always welcome and may end up in the blog or the newsletter.
Best wishes from your cartoonist,
Wayno
