Stuffed

After weeks of comic strips and birthday cards I'm finally back to my roots with a single panel gag this week, especially as it's also a remake of a really old cartoon. I mentioned a few months back that I have a stack of old cartoons that I like the joke for but hate the art now, so I want to redo them and this is one such cartoon. Here's the original cartoon from over 10 years ago:

So you can see that the joke is exactly the same, but wow so much has changed in the last 10 years! God I hated how I did my signature back then....So instead of a generic hand puppet I replaced her with Miss Piggy and I made the finger puppets look more like basic finger puppets and not women shoved on a hand. I didn't feel the need for a bartender any more, I think about the only thing I liked in this old one was Sweep (from Sooty and Sweep a kids show I used to watch when I was a kid) downing a beer in the background, but in the new version it's Sooty this time downing a beer. I liked that idea so much I threw in 3 more famous puppets in the background with him, do you know who they all are? You know what's weird? The fact that some of the colours kind of stayed the same without meaning too! Like the finger puppets the one with her arms crossed is in green and they both have black and red hair, just swapped now. And the prominence of purple, but that's just me anyway..it's interesting as I didn't reference the old cartoon at all when I did the new one, I started from scratch and it's amazing the similarities they both have. I think it's a really good indication on how my art has progressed, involved and improved over all these years, it's cool.

I also was trying something new with this one, I've been toying around with the idea of doing monochromatically coloured backgrounds, just to make this more be more in the background and to help get more focus of the foreground. I also want to start experimenting with coloured linework on the background as well, like I used to back when I started this blog. What do you think?

Hope you like it, until next time!

Mike

Well Hidden Spot

Last week I was talking about how I plan to redo some old crappy cartoons, either just the art, the idea or both. Last weeks cartoon was an example of a cartoon completely revamped from the idea to the art. This week is pretty much just the art that's been redone, oh and the speech text as well, just to make the joke a tad 'less obvious'. 

I also mentioned last week that I worked for a motorbike magazine for quite awhile many years ago, which is ironic as I know jack shit about motorbikes and back then I didn't even have a car licence let alone a bike one. So the cartoons they always bought the most where the one's with painfully obvious jokes that pretty much got spoon fed to you, I'm not drawing any conclusions here as I'm very scared of bikies (in case you don't know what that is, here in Australia we have a lot of "Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs" as the media puts it, and they are often referred to as "bikies"). And usually all the people in the cartoon also tended to look like bikies a bit, which is why I wanted to redraw some as well. So here is the original cartoon, which judging by the style I'm putting it at about circa 2000/2001 maybe?

You know what, it's not that bad I guess, but it annoys me now, hence why I wanted to redo it. That and I still really like the joke. So what do you think, much of an improvement? God knows why I always such dull colours back then, anyway I hope you like it! Next week shall be an all new cartoon, although I still do have quite a few old one's I want to redo, but I spread them out over the year I think and probably save them for when I'm desperate for ideas!

See ya!

Mike