Hello again, this year I've decided to try an achieve some of the things I've been saying I've been meaning to do in regards to this blog for awhile now. Which, now that I think about it, is quite a bit! But this week I'll start at one, which is to 'revisit' some of my old cartoons and give them a 'revamp'. Why I hear you ask? Well for a couple of reasons; 1) Over the years I've gotten a lot better at creating my cartoons and some of my really old ones have good ideas, but they now look like shit. So there's a bunch I've got together that I will purely just redraw and keep the idea pretty much unchanged, but others... 2) Early on in my career I worked for a motorbike magazine and they only ever bought cartoons that had characters that looked like bikers in them (another reason I want to redraw some old cartoons) and also the joke had to be really obvious and not subtle what so ever. And I talked about this before, but after all those years of doing this, I found it quite hard to not make my jokes so obvious for awhile. Which sucked, because I'm a big fan of humour that's subtle and makes you think, but I've got a hang of it now. So what I'm doing is looking at some old cartoons and reworking the idea itself but still keeping the original idea of joke intact.
This weeks cartoon is an example of #2 and next weeks cartoon is an example of #1....hmmm maybe I should have swapped those numbers? Anyway, so here is the original idea for this cartoon:
Look how old that is! I couldn't even find the coloured version and it was during my annoying, massive signature phase! And look that's a Windows 98 joke, 98! Damn that was ages ago! Anyway, so the basic joke is what do robots use for contraceptives? Back in good old '98 it was a big box that probably had a CDROM in it with some software on it. I saw this the other week and I still liked the idea, but it was rather dated and I wanted to redo it. I thought about what jokes you can get from condoms and that led to me thinking about the old embarrassing story when I condom falls out of a kids' wallet in from of a girl. First I had a robot buying something at a shop with a cute girl robot behind the counter and a DVD falls out of his wallet. At this point I came up with the idea that a robot would use anti-virus software as a contraceptive and that's what's on the DVD. I sat on that idea for a couple of weeks until the other day when I started 'stocking' my ideas and writing down the ones I wanted to do and I was going through my cartoons to 'remake' and then it hit me....not a DVD but a USB stick! And when would it be more embarrassing? Yep, a first date! So what do you think? Was it better 2nd time around? More subtle?? I hope so, I thought it was anyway. Let's just hope it doesn't look dated in 16 years like the old one!
Oh and did you like the background? I was experimenting and playing around in Illustrator the other day. I was just going to have a plain background as I sometimes do, but I thought this would be better now. I'm not a fan of backgrounds most of the time as they can sometimes be distracting, so I'm going to do some more experimenting in the future, what do you think? I even want to try doing some more detailed backgrounds as a separate image and joining them together as I need the practice on backgrounds as well.
So there you go, I hope you like it and next week I'll go through how I redraw one of my old favourites and 'de-bikey' it.
See ya!
Mike
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