Friday, July 06, 2012

A Funny Thing Happened ...

(Click on the cartoon to see the full image.)
(C)Copyright 2012, C. Burke. All rights reserved. A funny thing happened on the way to my class blog ... The students weren't using it, so I made some bonus comics. I doodled and diddled, and threw in some old jokes. Next thing I know I have recurring characters, both human and numerical, all developing personalities, in my own geeky version of "Sesame Street" where such could exist side-by-side. (Except that they're never actually existed side-by-side, I think.) This was definitely the most ambition thing I've done to date -- and those last two words scare the hell out of me. There were other things that I left out of this. Not just illustrations to go with the text, but other text that didn't fit. And I wanted as many characters as I could squeeze in, but some were just faces and the stick figures wouldn't blend in well. That's enough for today. I need a break. It's hot. -- Chris Burke

2 comments:

GregT said...

Wow, that's... really impressive. I probably only caught half the references too, since I haven't gotten around to going back through the whole archive. (Incidentally, was it intentional to have the same title reference as the last?)

So out of curiosity, did you decide on the song first, or did you just have a lot of elements and then needed to pick a song to frame them? And while you say your students didn't read the blog then, have any started since? What about coworkers?

(x, why?) said...

No. I fixed the title text. The title text should always (with few, if any, exceptions) match some part of the text below. Sometimes the old one slips through because it's mostly a cut and paste job, and that's the last thing I do.

Song came first. I decided I wanted to do something with most of my characters, like a big production number, sort of like the Star Teachers comic from September 2010.

I did the show in community theater so it came to mind when I thought about the rest of company. There's a line in opening of the stage show where Pseudolus shouts, and Now the Rest of the Company, and they emerge and sing the last part.

And then I forget about it and couldn't remember what song I'd picked. And then I remembered it again. And then I had to come up with all the rhymes that fit into the correct scheme. Which I messed up at first, and had to re-do.

Some bits were left on the cutting-room floor, as it were. And some things just didn't work -- like "luftballoon" for "pantaloons", without a decent pairing word in place of "eunichs".