Web Comics with Stories

Intro

I'm now four episodes into X-Fails and things are going well. Viewing figures are acceptable and I'm finding it's actually easier to generate ideas using the story arc method. I first tried this out with my Star Wars episodes (links here)

• Trooper Trouble
• Use The Force
• Search The Droids 
• Rescue The Droids

It was fun to put my own spin on the Star Wars universe and it had the advantage that one idea easily led into the next.

So with X-Fails, the drawing is more interesting. It takes more effort, but I think it's easier for people to relate to. The little green men may still make the odd appearance, but for now I'm convinced that X-Fails is the right direction.

Changing Style

The original idea for Area 5.1 was quick and simple drawing so that weekly submissions would be possible. But I soon found that generating usable ideas could be a problem. Also, as my drawing skills improved there was little scope for improving those aliens, unless I re-designed them.

So X-Fails evolved, giving me more scope to include new characters and taking the story idea and running with it. I still try and make each page funny, but they're no longer as "stand-alone".

Area 5.1 (X-Fails) - Say No More

Link to the cartoon: http://area5-1.webcomic.ws/comics/73/

Here we see a new character, who could be a local busy-body, or maybe somebody important, but the boys accept his help without realising they could be getting themselves into trouble. Judging by the few comments I have received, people just wanted them to start digging, so I was happy to oblige.

You'll find out soon whether they find anything interesting, or just get into trouble. Hopefully people will get hooked into the story and they'll keep coming back.

But, if it's stand-alone comics you want, there's always FunStreak, or any of the others listed down the right of this page.

Cartoon Challenge - Taking the Opposite

The Challenge

It was quite a simple exercise, but it turned out to be quite an undertaking.

These challenges normally come from discussions about cartoons that Shiela or I find and share with each other. The example that inspired this one comes from The Argyle Sweater with this great snake based idea.

In brief..
"Take a well known saying and make the opposite work for someone different."

I really struggled with this one, I could come up with ideas based on well-known sayings, but they didn't match the challenge criteria. In the end I had help from my girlfriend, who came up with the idea about using the phrase "You'll have someones eye out", with someone different being a Pirate.

I liked it, but wasn't sure how to make it work!

Developing the Idea

I spent some time considering an alternative based on rubber sucker tipped arrows, but the idea I came up with didn't meet the requirements. The best bet seemed to be find a way to make pirates work.

Thinking about other sharp pointy things, this would generally be a sword or cutlass. It got me thinking about kids being chastised for fighting with sticks and pieces of wood. Their parents saying "be careful, you'll have someones eye out with that stick"

What if that parent was a pirate with an eye patch, and what might he have said instead?

My Cartoon Challenge Submission

Link to original comic : http://funstreak.webcomic.ws/comics/16

Insert your own blowing double-entendre here.

Another in our series of exercises to draw cartoons based on common sayings (which is proving a very successful strategy).

My drawing still has a long way to go and it's never easy to think up a good joke, but this suggestion of doing some quickies based on sayings or phrases (which seem perfectly normal when taken by themselves) is working really well.

Cartooning - Don't Ignore the Obvious

Introduction

Recently I had an a comic idea where the joke used a play on the word "wicked". Here it is...

It bombed,.. the big mistake I made here is ignoring the obvious!

Edit 10/08/2017: See fixed version of cartoon.

What Do I Mean?

Possibly like many others, you see this picture and think,..

"Shouldn't the candle be lit at both ends, I mean he's busy ain't he?"

But, burning the candle at both ends wasn't the joke I was going for, it's more subtle than that. The candle has a wick running through it which I'd showed as not lit, to try and veer the reader away from the accepted wisdom. I'd ignored the obvious and tried to be clever.

Learning From Mistakes

Contrary to popular beliefs, it's acceptable to make mistakes, but you should at least try to find out what you did wrong so you could avoid it next time.

I nearly fell into the same trap with this one..

This is one of those jokes that works better spoken than when written down. At first I wrote the line "Hysteria = Length x Wit", but it troubled me. The correct spelling doesn't feature the word "area", so the joke is lost.

I'd already shown various formulae for calculating areas on the blackboard, but I still felt compelled to spell it incorrectly and hyphenated to make my point.

I like it as a concept, but it still doesn't feel quite right when written down.

Cartoon Challenge - Here's another

I found a load more well known sayings today, so I picked one out and drew it.

It's a bit of a play on words... (hopefully you can tell it's a candle)

I deliberately didn't show a lit candle because it might have confused with the saying about burning it at both ends. Other than that, pretty simple.

Cartoon Challenge - Single Frames

This is my version of the single frame cartoon with caption which is taken out of context to form the joke. For it to work it has to be a well know saying or item, and so I chose this euphemism on a whim.

Finding the saying as your starting point isn't so easy, I think I must have scanned through hundreds before I stumbled across this one. At first I was going to hint at it, but after drawing the cartoon I decided the line must appear otherwise people won't get it.

Sleeve tattoo

Rick and I were discussing the fact that some single-frame cartoons have a caption which could be perfectly innocent if taken out of context. But the image gives the line a completely new and funny meaning.

We wondered whether this might be a good way to come up with new ideas - listen out for a perfectly innocent line but hear it in a different way.

We decided to use this as a challenge.

Here's my first. I think I heard the line "can you do me a sleeve?" in a list of 'things to say to piss off your tattooist'. I believe a sleeve should develop over time. Asking for a complete one is a sad symptom of our instant-gratification world.

The picture obviously plays on the meaning of 'sleeve'. I could have stuck to the rules of the challenge and drawn something for the caption 'can you do me a sleeve' but I like this slightly developed version better.

The idea seems pretty obvious to me now. I'm sure it must have been done before but I didn't bother Googling to find out, I don't care.