Um… Wow!
This isn’t WYH-related. Or even comic-related. This is… this… wow…
Possibly one of the greatest human feats I’ve ever seen. I’m still trying to come to terms with what I saw yesterday. Sheesh!
But, special mention to this guy:
Richard Thompson hung in for the silver medal. He’s from where I’m from. And a single medal at the Olympics means a whole lot to a country of just 1 million people and to people like me who still carry home in their hearts after they left.
You’re No Lady, Ma’am
Interesting complaint I’ve been encountering for a while. Here’s a comment from the Comics Curmudgeon blog earlier this week:
Fairly sure it’s a girl. In this strip, I have no idea who or what the characters are. There is one who seems to have the physical attributes of Pat from SNL (except for color and that isn’t always obvious).
And here’s a snippet from an e-mail I received last month:
In WYH, I don’t even know how many regulars there are. I read it daily and I see clear personality differences but they haven’t translated to faces. And yes, there’s boy-with-glasses, boy-with-beard, but sometimes without a close look I can’t tell one of the male students from one of the female students.
In fact, here’s a little bit of an e-mail I got over a year ago:
I’ve noticed a few things that are getting in the way of becoming completely absorbed in (the strip).
- Hard to differentiate between male and female characters. A lot of your female characters have short hair, thin lips and dress in baggy clothing—at a glance (and especially if you don’t use their names regularly or if they have androgynous names like “Robin”) it can be hard to tell who’s who and who’s loving on who
- Hard to tell one character from another. You have a fairly large, mostly male cast. Here, I think using their names more often would help a lot. Just have them call each other by name routinely.
And those guys aren’t alone. It seems there’s a segment of WYH readers out there who have struggles recognizing the characters. Not only do they have trouble telling the guys apart. Some of them have trouble telling the guys are guys.
I’m not trying to make more of this than there is. It’d be easy to rail against people-who-think-all-black-folks-look-the-same. (And maybe that’s exactly what it is in some cases.) But I’m not ready to dismiss the criticisms so quickly. There’s every possibility that it might be something I’m doing wrong. I’m trying to get to the bottom of it.
One thing I do cop to (and one of the e-mail guys touched on this) is that I don’t use the characters names enough. I do have a large-ish cast and I can’t assume everyone reading knows who’s who. I suck at this. It usually never occurs to me, when writing dialog, to slip in an “Omar” instead of a “dude”, for the benefit of new readers. So that’s a complaint I totally get.
The one I’m trying to wrap my mind around is that the characters look alike. One contributing factor could be plain old apathy. Some people read the strip because it’s there but don’t really care enough to invest in it. An artist’s worst nightmare, but I know I do that too with a lot of the strips I read. I consider myself a fan of the strip Big Nate. Besides Nate… I have no idea who anyone else is. Same with the webcomic Shortpacked! I’m pretty sure there’s a Mike in there… And those are strips I like!
Apathy still doesn’t explain the lookalike thing, though.
Maybe it’s a drawback of my “realistic” art style. Here’s another Curmudgeon commenter (and apparently a former fan) weighing in:
Part of the problem is that … there is not enough exaggerated physical difference. In most strips, there is one VERY fat one, one VERY tall one, one VERY old one, etc. These characters are all about the same height and weight (except for Quincy, which makes him the most recognizable). They also change clothes in a realistic way. When is the last time you saw Jeremy “Zits” Duncan in anything other than that anachronistic flannel shirt?
That’s an idea worth considering. I’ve often toyed with the idea of tweaking their physical characteristics. Making their heights drastically different, broadening a nose or two. I’ve already applied the Extreme Makeover to Dana. Remember her?:
Turns out homely, flat-chested girls with afros are hard to distinguish from dudes. Which can lead to unnecessary headaches for me when they start kissing on boys. So, first I tried softening her up and making her cuter:
No dice. Still a challenge for some to figure out. So, with the help of Happy Roots Miracle Hair Growf (and a who-gives-a-shit-how-long-dreads-take attitude), I’ve (hopefully) settled the burning question of Dana’s genitalia.
Now if only Quincy could find answers to his unsettled burning genitalia…
I have more thoughts on this so I’ll come back to it one day. I do think there’s also a cultural disconnect involved. For now, I’ll just file this issue under Unresolved. But don’t be surprised to see some drastic visual changes over the coming weeks.
He Hate Me
Aah… hate mail. I guess I’m not doing my job if I’m not annoying the small-minded. Found this gem signed to my website’s guestbook today:
I love your grammar.. you be teaching good english to kids who will be looking for jobs someday. But when they axe for a job..they won’t get one. Know what um saying??? The strip is about as funny as a crutch!!..basically..it stinks. No wut um sayin??
Most likely this was inspired by last week’s series of strips featuring Jason, WYH’s favorite half-way crook. Here’s my response:
1.) This isn’t Slylock Fox. I’m not trying to teach kids anything.
2.) This is a fictional depiction of real life, where some people speak colloquially. If that bothers you, I hope you’ve sent similarly angry correspondence to the dude who writes Snuffy Smith.
3.) Way to ignore the other characters in the strip, the majority of whom are intelligent and educated.
Either you don’t read the strip much or you read the strip with blinders. Whichever way you do it, thanks for reading.
When I first started, I thought this was the worst thing in the world. But I’ve come to learn that hate for the strip is more desirable than ambivalence. You don’t want readers shrugging off your work or not knowing who you are. I get enough of that at home.
The Awkward Phase
This is where the strip went through its ugly growth spurts and started growing hair in weird places.
While at Howard, I had a friend, Ashelyn, who worked in the Administration Building. She was appointed by my cousin to keep an eye on me so I didn’t overdose on cough syrup or punch a policeman or something. Coincidentally, Ashelyn’s husband, Kris(with a K ’cause it’s kick-ass)was also into comics and creating characters of his own. So - I guess - she would take the school paper home and he would silently judge me.
At this point, I was mostly drawing for fun. I was paid by the paper, but I probably would have done it for free if I wasn’t a starving grad student. A grown man’s diet, after all, should consist of more than raspberry Twizzlers and V8. Otherwise, the idea of charging for my art would never cross my mind. Ashelyn and Kris had other ideas. They decided that stuff like this was good enough to be in major newspapers:
Kris, though, figured I needed something to differentiate me from all the other horse penis jokesters out there. Watch Your Head needed color. Sounded like a pain in the ass to me, but then he took one of my strips and showed me the potential results. I was sold.
I learned his method pretty quickly and applied to, first, just one panel:
I hated it. I was used to over 20 years of seeing my drawings in pencil. Ink was hard enough for me to stomach, but now color…? It just didn’t look right. Like one of those colorized Turner Classics that drained the charm out of the originals. I kept at it, though. Kept practicing. Then… finally something that made me happy. I turned out my very first complete version of Watch Your Head (Now In Technicolor):
I guess I liked it because the word balloons and robot font made it feel more like a real comic.
Around this time, I also started to reevaluate my drawing style. There was no reason for 19-year-old college students to look like a bunch of burnt-up Big Nates. Plus it wasn’t my natural style. It was just a style I contrived to fit a misguided idea of what ‘comic strip art’ should look like.
At this point, I was already out of the Hilltop and, encouraged by Krishelyn, I was starting to develop the strip in a more conventional daily format. I did a bunch of research, studied a bunch of different strips and pored through Lee Nordling’s ‘Your Career in Comics.’ Some of the info in that book is probably outdated by now, but up to 4 years ago it was essential reading and really helped to direct my path.
Here are a few of my very first attempts at a revamped WYH:
And here’s the barf bag you’ll need after enduring any of that. Lo siento.
I gradually improved on that. Too bad I didn’t save much of it. I’m sure this next one looks familiar, though:
After about 6 months of steady work and practice, Kris and I put together a booklet with my best strips and I shipped copies out to the major syndicates.
I’m not sure what Amy Lago of the WPWG saw in the strip, but the rest is, as they say, hithtory. (’They’ being paleonthologists with lisps.) Under close attention from Amy and after a year of further development, the strip improved to the horror show that most readers are now familiar with.
So that’s it. The end of the horrible home movie. I hope some of you were entertained while I reminisced on the strip’s childhood. Sorry it wasn’t wearing pants.
It’s not PBS, but…
… I’ll be part of a discussion panel this Saturday examining the response to the New Yorker cover and the use of satire in general. It’s in Arlington/Shirlington, Virginia, if anyone’s inclined to visit. Here’s the flyer:
And bringing up the rear…!
I hope it’ll be productive and enlightening. I’d hate to be holding forth in the middle of a swirling storm of angry.
History 101
Some of you might be curious about the origins of the strip. Here’s the skinny :
Back in 2004, I was the editorial cartoonist for the Hilltop (the student-run newspaper of Howard University). The cartoons I drew weren’t so much editorials as they were gag panels related to the topic of the day. But the editor-in-chief was happy enough with them and asked me to come up with a comic strip. Nice.
I was ready to call it ‘Ahead of the Curve’, in keeping with its nerdy outcast theme. But I heard someone warn ‘watch your head!’ on TV, and decided that tag was catchier. Plus it kind of applied to the strip on a couple levels, mostly as a warning to the reader.
And so the strip was born, starting with this one. Your typical black and white, poorly-drawn, ball point pen-inked college strip. Back then, I was under the assumption that comic strip characters had to be 4′2″ with encephalitic heads.
A lot has obviously changed since then. Not just the artwork, but the cast.
That’s right. Robin was originally Tara (my freshman crush), Omar was originally bearded and friendly and Quincy was some light-skinned fat guy named Ty. (I was already seeing the characters in color at this point. I just didn’t know how to make it happen. More on that later.)
Oh yeah…
…and Jason was called Randy. I named him after this dude I was cool with but who was my diametric opposite. Not sure how Randy felt about that if he ever read the paper. Or read.
WYH didn’t have a very long run in the Hilltop. A couple of months at most. At that point, space became a problem for the paper and, just like the corporate-run newspapers throughout the country, the comic page was the first to get the chop.
I like to imagine there was a rally in my support. A massive show of student defiance with protesters, picket signs and Al Sharpton. But, nah… those big-headed, borderline stick figures went out with a wimpy whimper.
That was the end of phase one in the evolution of the strip. But I didn’t stop drawing. Phase two is a post away…
Chapter 1 Verse 1
The first Watch Your Head strip ever published. I’ll post up some more this weekend.
Context is the Devil’s Tool of Deception!
I could have been on TV this week. No, not being pummeled by police or inarticulately detailing a neighborhood fire. I was invited on Monday to participate in a discussion on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer. I guess, as a cartoonist and a black guy, they felt I had twice the experience necessary to comment on the flare-up over the New Yorker’s Obama cover. The producers of the show had my information on file after contacting me about the February 10th cartoonist-and-black-guy sit in.
Only problem is that, when the call came in, I had no idea what was going on. I had spent all morning at Alexandria’s waterfront, brainstorming, writing and watching people talk to dogs. I checked my e-mail by phone and read a forwarded message about some controversy or other. But I paid it little mind, promising myself to check it out when I had time.
As I came into my apartment on Monday afternoon, the phone was ringing and the TV request was made. I was in the dark about the situation and let the producer know it. I wanted to see the thing first before committing to the show. So I saw it, saw the response to it and called the producer back. And called….. And called…
No doubt she was preoccupied with putting a show together and my window of opportunity to contribute was closed. Pissed! Not only do I love a debate, but I, of course, love publicity for the strip. Which is why I’m looking into acquiring the Fan Man equipment and circling the inauguration on the calendar.
So what’s my take on the recent controversy? Three words: I hate people.
Not all people, of course. My wife is nice. As are the fine folks at Subway who know I like ketchup on everything. In fact, I’m not sure who the people are that I hate, but they’re out there. And they’re always outraged. They’re the people from outside a culture who make superficial assessments without the benefit of context. They’re people, unfamiliar with the nature of satire, who accuse its proponents of negative intent. They’re the people, unfamiliar with the depth and nuances of hip hop, who depict some of its best poets as ‘gangsta rappers.’ The people, unfamiliar with the culture of comedy, who demand a ‘racist’ turn off his mic. They’re incapable of getting past the surface of things. All confused by Tupperware and shit.
Through their eyes, the New Yorker cover is nothing but a blatant attack just the same as if the image was on a Republican magazine. Context be damned. Never mind the liberal political slant of the magazine. Never mind the magazine’s intended audience being perfectly capable of decoding it’s message. The Coalition of the Angry are too literal-minded to consider it and too blow-hardy to accept they might be wrong
And they’re usually letter-writers too. This is where I add color to the rant with personal experience. As an example of satire grossly misunderstood, here’s a strip I did that ran on (or close to) Martin Luther King day last year:
Pretty simple, I thought. I assumed the intent was clear… Here’s an e-mail I got in response:
Washington Post January 14, 2006 Section SC3 display an article about Happy Roots. We find this article offensive to our culture. You are insulting a revolutionary black person who has freed our people from bondage. The message indicate getting rid of our King’s dream that has become a powerful message even today. It appears that you are black, from another country and attempting to gain on Dr. Martin Luther Kings’ name. So you have not really lived in this country long enough to really know the pain we suffer throughout the years. What do you really know about our suffering? We don’t “had the dream”, we still have a dream. Dr. Martin Luther King is to be remembered as a positive, strong leader who gave us hope and died so we can be freed.
!!!
Now, this would be a less disturbing letter if it came from a regular Joe. Joe, the CVS cashier or something. But, no. This rambling, wrongly dated missive came from a local councilwoman. Someone with a fair-ish amount of power, who I would’ve expected to employ careful reason (and English Grammar).
So, naively attempting to state my case, and maybe combat ignorance, this was my response:
You misunderstood the message. It did not suggest getting rid of the dream. It was showing how sad it is that many people today don’t know what the dream was about. Like this article shows: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/14/AR2007011401026.html?sub=AR
I hoped that she would lookat it again with fresh eyes and a new understanding, bolstered by the analysis of the article. No dice:
I’ve read the article. It does not relate to your script. Besides, many people remembers Dr. Kings message and his dream. My four year old granddaughter learns about Dr. King in day-care. The point I’m making about the article you send is, people do remember about Dr. King, maybe not everything but something, just like every christian remembers about Jesus Christ dying for our sins, they may not remember everything he did but the remember his death. Furthermore, I can not find any store that sells Happy Roots wave activator, is there such a product? I had six calls between yesterday and today about your article. So I’m not the only person who took offense to your article.
OK, first of all, stop calling it an article!
Secondly this- I can not find any store that sells Happy Roots wave activator- is exactly what I’m talking about. A literal-minded, superficial appraisal leads to outrage leads to (no doubt) a call for the boycott of Happy Roots Activator. Then what would Quincy brush his hair with?
Maybe it was best that I didn’t show up on TV after all. My Lewis Black impression could have ended in an on-camera stroke.
The Old Switcheroo
There’s a newsgroup that I visit regularly. It’s devoted entirely to discussing comic strips, and it’s one of the few places I can use to gauge reader reactions. Granted the contributors to the group don’t necessarily reflect the views of Joe Public. Not too many Garfield mug owners I’d imagine.
Anyway, this week, one of the posters raised the issue of alternate Watch Your Head strips. That’s where, on occasion, I’m asked by the syndicate to come up with an edgeless version of some strip likely to send comic editors into panic mode. The process seems pretty arbitrary to be honest. One week I’m freely submitting strips rife with sexual innuendo. The next week I’m being politely asked to remove a drawing of a girly clenched fist.
I generally oblige, because, despite my comedic preferences, I realize comic editors seem determined to keep their pages as safe as possible. Because, you know… every time I’m on the train I see 10-year-olds poring through the Washington Post. Trading the sections among themselves like Pokemon cards. Unfazed by the chronicles of Jihad and sexual assault, their collective innocence shredded by the idea that cartoons have body parts.
Here’s the strip in question this week:
SHREIK! That ladydrawing has boobies! And apparently, so does the mansketch!
Here’s the alternate version that I guess a lot of papers (and comics.com) ran with:
And so, stripper imagery still intact, we successfully fend off the outrage of dozens.
As much as these episodes frustrate me, I deal with them in stride. I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for it. I usually fume for 10 minutes or so and then I get over it. Usually. Some of them I’ve never gotten over. I can understand the concerns over sexual content or violence. I can understand the aversion to toilet humor or defamatory attacks. But when honest attempts at racial discussion get shut down… it bothers me. Some of those strips were never even allowed to see print:
The claim was that they were potentially offensive to black readers. But I don’t know a single, reasonably intelligent black person that would be offended by any of it. Black people aren’t even the villains of the pieces. Hmm.
Other strips were allowed to run, but with their messages muted. I’ve combined the originals with their alternates for comparison:
Again with the claim that black readers might be offended by the imagery. Some might. But, I’d like to think that the rational majority would recognize these as condemnations of the ugliness.
I don’t even know if anyone following the story understood what happened to Omar in this recent one:
It seems half a syllable of the dreaded N-word is enough to warrant a safe, but ultimately confusing diversion. I thought the idea was to not make the readers think too hard.
There’s more of these, but it’d be quite the task sorting through all my old work to unearth them. I’m positive there’ll be more to come. And since I now seem to be Bloggy B. McBloggerton from Blogsville, I’ll be sure to use this site to let my original ideas be seen.
Only When the Clock Stops Does Time Come to Life
I added a blog link to the front page of the site, so I’m forced now to update this regularly. Still no evidence that anybody reads these, but I’ll try to keep talking just in case I manage to entertain passers-by. Kind of like the guy that mutters to himself on the subway about angels or the number 87 being a lie.
In keeping with the theme of the last post, I’ve been slowly updating the art of my oldest strips.
I’ve promised myself that I’ll have my first two weeks of strips re-done some time before the Oregon-sized asteroid renders the second Ice Age. In other words, I’m approaching it really slowly.
It’s hard finding time to do much of anything besides the strip. But when I step back at the end of the week and look at how I spent my days, I have trouble figuring out why. Usually, the bulk of my work is done over the span of two or three days. The rest of the week I spend either recovering from lack of sleep or panicking over what I need to draw next. Both of those activities involve doing a whole lot of nothing. But I’m usually too burntout to do otherwise.
At the moment, I’m trapped in a frustrating cycle of fatigue-procrastination-last minute sleepless deadline pushing-fatigue. And my work is suffering for it. Lifeless scripts. Weak punchlines. Rushed shortcuts in my drawing.
Basically, my approach to time management could do with some reassessment.
The first thing I need to come to terms with is my PC addiction. Which, unlike my PCP addiction, doesn’t incite me to hurtle through traffic. But it does account for a great deal of wasted time. Time that could be spent in a quiet place writing, brainstorming or dozing off with my mouth open. Time I could be using to write better jokes. Or develop an actual plot.
I’ve always held the belief that creativity can’t be regulated. But, maybe if I develop a strict regimen for my work, I’ll be more productive and more satisfied. Certainly worth a shot.
