The galling thing about this failure is that it didn’t even transpire very quickly. I drew it quite scrappily on one page while exiled from my desk, essentially doing a doodly draft, and then roughly got it into a shape in photoshop by simply shrinking five of the six pictures (and flipping the arm in the first picture, as I had somehow managed to put the bandage on the wrong hand).
I published it last night, but deleted it again after a few minutes because it was bumming me out.
The idea is reasonably solid. Basically, a dad is told to avoid knocking an injured finger, and manages to protect it from harm despite doing lots of manual things until he gets home, whereupon his daughter immediately smashes it with a sword.
There are at least three problems with the execution.
- The activities the dad is doing while keeping his finger safe completely fail to convey the centrally important idea that he is going to great lengths to remain uninjured. He should be balancing things on his head and closing doors with his feet, like a cartoon waiter with too many plates. Instead I’ve got him doing ordinary, perfectly convenient things, which unravels the premise.
- This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to fit six panels with dialogue on a single landscape picture with A4 dimensions, but it was on this occasion that I finally twigged: it doesn’t work, or at least not as it’s presented on wordpress. The picture comes out too small.
- The drawing is ugly. I probably would have let this slide in the past, operating as I was with the pretext that I didn’t have any spare time and so couldn’t be precious about standards (which on some level was almost certainly an excuse I was giving myself in advance for being terrible). But in the last couple of months I’ve started to feel that my drawing is improving, if nothing else, and I just wasn’t happy to publish an ugly, inept picture without also providing a craven excuse for it (i.e. everything you’ve just read) which I have unconvincingly attempted to dress up as a thoughtful dissection of my own work.
Enjoy!
Master Heywood 