FF – Fotographical Friday: Escape from the Planet of the Comics!

  
This is me, six years ago, at R. (I call him Bob) Sikoryak’s Carousel. In its simplest terms, cartoonists project their work on a screen, and then “act it out.” (Way back when, Bob used slides, so “Carousel” actual referred to slide carousels. Ask your parents.)

I had been working on a pantomime comic called Infant Fred which, having no words, made it tricky to act out. So, obviously, I tried to escape from a straight jacket before 25 drawings had been projected. (You can see if I succeed at the link below.)

Looking back. Looking forward. Part 2

Here are a few more baby-centric sketches that I forgot were on our fridge and thus forgot to include in Looking back. Looking forward. Part 1.

The above one I probably did on one of our trips to the doctor during my wife’s pregnancy. The word balloon’s contents relate to something I would repeatedly say to my wife’s belly: “This is your father, who you must obey” *

The sketch below is one of the first I did when I started thinking about Dadding Badly. It had a looseness that I wish I could capture in the actual strips. You can also see that I was literally stripping down my style so much that my wife and I ended up without clothes. We just have bodies – and yet the boy is wearing a diaper. Go figure.

* Yeah, I know. The grammar is wrong.

Looking back. Looking forward.

So I’m digging in many piles of papers to get my taxes in order and I flip through last year’s date book and find this. It’s a sketch done on the due date of our son’s birth. But he is my son afterall, so he was late.

You may recognize this as my standard baby drawing. It started developing in a piece of promo art I did years ago.

Then in my comic strip Bo Nanas this look became more stylized and became Baby Karl. Bo would babysit him occasionally.

Early on I did the Sunday strip below with a version that would become Karl. (This was on the back cover of the Monkey Meets World book.)

I ripped off the look for Infant Fred, my new comic strip app for hand-held devices. (It was supposed to come out last Fall but there were some difficulties. It should be out by the end of the year. Fingers cross. Feel free to sign up for updates.)

For my Dadding Badly strip, I wanted a looser style and the drawing of my kid just ended up looking less generic and more like him, which is as it should be.

From the mailbag

Remember last week when I posted this page of Infant Fred sketches that I couldn’t figure out?

 

Well, I posted it on Facebook and asked my friends for help. Here’s what they suggested:

From Julie-
“The angel and the owl went to trapeze class, the net was faulty and almost caused them great harm. Being alright in the end, they decided to go and eat Chinese food, where they saw the story of their harrowing fall on the news. Meanwhile, the DOG GOD watches over all.”

From Shari-
“hmmm…baby looks at mirror…baby tries to jump through mirror to see other self…baby bounces off mirror and falls…then sees bruised self in mirror”

If you have your own suggestions, please send them along.

Infant Fred update

So you may be thinking to yourself, didn’t John have a big announcement waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back when about a new comic strip that’d be on iPhones and such? Was it about a baby or some large-headed being called Infant Fred? Wasn’t it supposed to start last Fall?

Yep, on all counts.

Well, there have been some “technical difficulties” but it’s moving ahead. I’ll tell you when we have a launch date.

So here I am, working on new Fred strips, looking a the sketch below that I did a few months ago. I did this so I would not forget these gags – so it would be crystal clear.

I have little idea what this means. It would take an entire new “National Treasure” movie to decode it.

Riding the Carousel…again

Explaining that my wife bought me the straightjacket for Christmas a few years ago (assisted by my lovely assistant Kriota Wilberg)

Here’s some more media stuff from the Carousel performance in September. I had put up a video of my straightjacket escape a few weeks ago. Here’s a longer video that is edited down but shows most of the cartoonists/performances from that night. (NOTE: Some of the content is Not Safe For Work)

Me reading some of my really, really funny cartoons (really)

 

Straightjacket!!!!!!!!!!

Remember back a few weeks ago that I was going to NYC to be part of the cartoonist performance thingy called Carousel? Well, here’s a video of me getting out of a straightjacket. (Many thanks to John Beaman.)

You may ask what does a straightjacket have to do with cartooning. (A damn fine question, I might add.) Well, my new comic strip Infant Fred is wordless and it seemed more than a bit silly to read a silent comic to the audience. So I decided to try to escape from a straightjacket in the amount of time it would take the viewers to “read” 25 panels – about 2:05 minutes (based on 5 seconds per panel).

Did I escape? You’ll have to watch to find out.

(If you can’t see the video above, you can see it here.)

Start spreading the news…

Yep, I’ll be in NYC on Wednesday to be part of R. Sikoryak’s “Carousel.” It’s sort of a melding of comics and performance. I’ll be “performing” some stuff from MAD, Bo Nanas and my new strip Infant Fred. And, in what may be a first, I’ll be incorporating comics and a straight jacket escape. (You heard me.)