Hello again! So sorry about last week, Once again I had a sick child and my Aunty from New Zealand was visiting for the week so I couldn't get much work done at night either. Oh well, you have a brand new cartoon this week, so don't complain.
The other day I thought about how cathartic it is for me to do cartoons addressing things that annoy the shit out of me. One thing that did really annoy the shit out of me a couple of weeks ago was this crazy BitStrips bullshit that was flooding my Facebook feed. Now as much as I freakin' hate Facebook, I'm at home with 2 kids most of the time, so I use Facebook an awful lot to 'keep in touch' with everybody and it is a really good tool to promote this blog. If not for it my pageviews would be horrible. Anyway, so heaps of people were using this stupid BitStrips thing, although it pretty much annoyed almost everyone, I was also annoyed on a professional level. Have you ever heard professional photographers complaining about how amateurs go out and buy an expensive camera and all of a sudden they think they're a photographer? Well it's the same thing! It's an artform damn it! I've spent years working on my technique of drawing and idea generation and people download some freakin' app and they think they're a cartoonist! I think it would have bugged me more if I actually saw some pretty funny ones, but I didn't really, so that makes me feel slightly better.....slightly.
So last Friday, I decided I wanted to do a comic about BitStips, no idea why I didn't a couple of weeks ago. When I went to work on the idea for the cartoon, I realised something....I hadn't seen a BitStips comic in my Facebook feed in awhile, oh no, I'd missed my window by about 2 weeks! What will I do now? Yep, sometimes when faced with a problem the cream needs to just rise to the top. I thought "Screw it, I should just do a comic about how I was too late and make fun of the ridiculously small window of stuff being cool on social media!" and also make fun of how old and out of touch I am. I think in the end this idea proved to be better than any of the actual ideas I had for a normal BitStips joke anyway! I think I was going along the lines of how a cartoonist dies every time you use BitStrips, I don't know I never finished the whole idea process on that one anyway.
I tried to make this cartoon kind of look like a dodgy BitStips comic, but not too much because really, if I was going to make it exactly like one, I may as well have just used the freakin app to do the cartoon and that would kind of make me a hypocrite....never done that before have I? #cough#cough#ownes and iPod#cough#cough#bitches about Apple#cough#cough# But the funny thing is, because of this style, I drew and finished it really fast....probably quicker than if I downloaded the BitStrips App, figured out how to use it and create the cartoon with it. Go figure, that's how a real cartoonist rolls bitches! So that's why there's no detail, shading and a crap gradient background....it's deliberate! Oh and also why the guy in red's limbs are at stupid angles.
Wow, this post is getting long, better wrap it up, see you next time!
Mike
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