Just for the record: I love writing and drawing my own stuff, but I really like drawing for Ahniwa’s writing. Right now my process is: I sketch out a couple characters inside a set of three boxes and then do the dialogue according to what it appears they are describing through gesticulation and facial expression.

What this does is a) limits the scope of the comic and b) keeps me in safe territory with the art, in that I KNOW I can fucking draw it.

One of the reasons I took so long actually drawing Ahniwa’s ‘Boobie’ comic was that I couldn’t conceptualize what the damn birds would look like when I drew them nor could I quite figure out how the setting would be…set.

What I like about being the ‘artist’ (and what I hate about it) is that if I can’t conceptualize something immediately, I get a massive case of ‘artist’s block’ and my art gets moved to the back burner for 6 months while the readers become bored and move on.

The way that Ahniwa and I used to set up the strips was as follows:

1.He and I would meet in a bar.

2.We would order drinks.

3.While I would sketch on a piece of paper, he would start talking to me about a funny idea or a character he wanted to depict and I would draw it.

4.He would come up with funny dialogue to insert.

5.A comic would magically appear the next day.

I liked this process because if I couldn’t conceptualize something to the point of wanting to give up, Ahniwa would either tweak the idea or give me some kind of reference to work from. That kept me motivated to draw some of the crazy stuff that appeared in the first iteration of the comic.

I love the comic in its current form and would be happy for that to continue, but as Ahniwa pointed out this comic is supposed to be about us growing as artists and that’s where I stand on it. As long as he’s willing to write for it, I’ll continue to draw as best I can.

Ok, that being said, this entire entry was supposed to be a massive apology for the comic not having shading and looking generally like crap. But just now I realized that on the web page it doesn’t look half bad and I shouldn’t be apologizing for trying to fiddle with my technique anyway.

(edit: that last panel still bothers me.)

Finally, if you (Ahniwa) want to write comic 100, please do. All storylines I’ve been working on are over as of Wednesday and if you want to do another strip with boobies, I know how to draw them now!

-T