Getting To The Point

Introduction

When you start cartooning you soon realise ideas come in all sorts of ways, but this is the first one to come to me in a dream,... I could see one of my son's friends skateboarding past the house holding onto a rocket by way of propulsion. (It's perhaps best not to analyse this dream for any meaning!)

.. anyway, he got a little way past the house and then let go of the thing. It then arced across the sky towards a housing estate. I have no idea what happened after that, but the uncertainty and the jeapardy appeal to me. I really don't need to know!

My main challenge to take this idea and turn it into a comic using the minimum number of frames.

Keeping Frame Count Low

In the past I've wanted to get complex ideas across, or have a wordy dialogue. This has often pushed me to draw way more frames than I'd wanted, or needed to. I just need to get to the point.

So taking a leaf from writers, I've decided to cut the wind-up and get straight to the point. This means distilling the idea and my original humour angle into just what's important.

Consider my first notes:-

Frame 1: Scene starts with alien #1 riding skateboard, holding rocket.
Alien #2: "Hey where did you get that?"
Alien #1: "It's one of the rockets from the ship."
Alien #2: "Let me try."
Frame 2: Alien #2 starts riding skateboard
Alien #1: "Okay, just don't let go of the rocket."
Frame 3: Skateboard hits a stone.
Frame 4: Alien #2 takes a tumble and lets go of the rocket.
Frame 5: Alien #2 gets up thinking everything is OK, while rocket heads towards their ship.

My fix:-

• Drop frame 1,.. we don't need to know both aliens have tried skating, just that one of them triggers the event.
• Keep frame 3, we need to show what causes the problem.
• Then we can jump straight to frame 5, because we don't need to see the tumble.

The Results

The dialogue needed to be changed, and I limited it to just what was important to the idea.

The Completed Comic

The final frame became very important. I added some dialogue to show the panic as alien #1 runs to save the UFO, and to help portray Alien #2's dazed state. I also drew the sci-fi version of birds flying above his head to help reinforce this idea.