Shooting the Breeze

Introduction

The cartoon was inspired by an upload from a fellow cartoonist who had in turn been inspired by a scene she'd witnessed in a store (or shop if you're english). The cartoon is called 'Spoiled Princess' (http://second-puberty.webcomic.ws/comics/573/)

It's a simple idea, a child wants something that she's seen and like many modern parents her Dad caves in. It got me thinking about what might happen if the child wanted something inappropriate.

The Drawing

I decided to illustrate this using the idea of two parallel father and son scenes with the initial idea of a young alien wanting a Death Star from Star Wars. I thought that if I demonstrated what damage a human boy could do with something relatively harmless (like a BB Gun), then I could leave the reader to imagine for themselves what the alien boy could do with a planet killer.

I wanted to find a way of doing this that didnt use words, so I imagined what a back garden would look like a few days after the boy had taken a BB Gun home. What sort of damage would you see? Initially I brainstormed some ideas and then pulled together a rough sketch of the garden with imported images from the web.  Once planned, I redrew the elements I needed.

Area 5.1 Cartoon - Shooting the Breeze

I was careful to make the two father and son frames to look as similar as I could, while still having them different. I came up with a new design of alien using the same eyes, mouth and ears and coloured them purple so they wouldn't be confused with the original alien design.

See the web comic here: http://area5-1.webcomic.ws/comics/59/

How's your Handwriting?

The Idea

A recent social network posting showed a list of top 50 bad habits, and while I didn't bother reading it, I did consider that even aliens might go for this sort of trash too. So I set out to come up with a list related to aliens, and it turned out to be more difficult than I thought.

Here's my list:-

1. Not washing the probe between jobs.
2. Preoccupied with cows?
3. Always holidays in Roswell?
4. Abduction / Body Snatching.
5. Obsessed with crop circles.
6. Buzzing air force pilots.
7. Ruling primitive planets.
8. Always whistling the same 5 note tune.
9. Leaving large drawings and lines in the deserts.
10. Always needing more space?
11. Taking Zambo's (God's) name in vain.
12. Trigger happy?
13. Prefer to work nights.
14. No atmosphere at their parties.
15. Watching too much TV.

OK some of those are just jokes rather than bad habits, but like I said, I (or rather we) struggled a little just to get this many. (Thanks to Julie and Shiela for your help, it would have been a small list without your input.)

Evolving The Idea

It occurred to me these sorts of things are commonly seen in trashy magazines, so I thought it'd be fun to create a parody. This got me thinking about additional articles so googled a bit and came up with the following:-

• Fake advert for slimming supplement.
• Gossip section.
• What your raygun says about you.

But once I'd started drawing it up I thought it would be nice to draw a cartoon from the aliens perspective. I came up with Humanz, a simple stickman based strip, and dropped the raygun idea.

The Artwork

Here's the completed work..

Area 5.1 Bad Habits List Cartoon

There's not actually that much drawing on it, but because of the curve of the pages all the text had to be drawn by hand. It proved difficult and time consuming to get the style and size consistent across each article. It's the sort of thing that would have been simple with decent distortion tools.

When I came to writing in the bad habits I wanted them to be easy to read. (After all this was the primary joke!) So I chose quite a large uppercase style which limited the width of the text. This meant I had to play around with the words a little and even swapped out the atmosphere joke for an Erich Von Daniken gag. Some might not get it, but if it makes them google his name then I figure I've enriched their lives a little.

Enjoy.