Something Smells Fishy: "Roe-bots," "Pink Slips," "Natal Returns," "That One Salmon" and "Eggs Is Eggs"

There was a teaser shot of this panel as it appeared in this year's annual art faculty exhibition. Not that it was very visible, so I wanted to do a dedicated post of it separate from that event, as it merits distinction as the absolute worst - and by that I mean best of the baddest of the year... perhaps even years if not top three of all-time dumbest idea yet. 

In the above-posted image taken from an off-to-the-side doodle that shows the list of topics that this spawned from, then a counter-clockwise cycle of possible compositions, starting with a Robbie reference.

And yes, I still most Sunday early mornings run down to the corner store and grab a copy of the Sunday paper, and like a little kid on Christmas, eagerly rip through the wrapping to see which Nuggets cartoon ran. Never gets old, just like a cartoonist never really grows up (hey - a healthy sense of humor supposedly keeps you younger looking and maybe just a wee bit more saner too). So anyways, back to standing at the counter on Sunday mornings: I still love the look of the Ben-Day dots, seen here on a detailed close-up.

There are times when I wish I could be more serious. But that's just not who I am. Oh and the reason you'll start to see more and more of these multi-panel postings is, yes, I'm starting to try and run out the clock on posting here at Ink & Snow, which I'll announcing at the 18th-year anniversary postings. More to follow, but that's why I'm kinda pulling a clearance sale on cartoons, and doing these data-dumps whilst flushing out the backlog before taking a bit of a hiatus.

 

Now as to the reason this specific image is posted here, is just to simply and honestly illustrate how and why we should experiment, play with new toys, see what happens. Even if it leads to an abomination, or a complete visual train-wreck. For instance striking out on a series done as demos for a summer Intermediate Drawing course, where we work our way through different mediums. In this instance I was experimenting with various markers, some of which adversely affected the India ink, but I still went with the texture effect and used it as an excuse to continue ruining it, since it had already been scanned for the digital color/print version.

 

 As to that part of the process, I've still been making steady progress in deconstructing my over-Photoshopped effect and limiting the palette.

Not that anyone could easily ascertain the origins of this doodle, but it was observing a really, really long line while down at the local bagel shop for my habitual sketchbook sessions.

Seems like as of late there's been a lot of this corporation being used as cartoon content, and by "a lot" I mean three times in as many years (here and here). I often joke about this to other shoppers while doing the same dam thing in real life. I don't recommend anyone actually trying it, as all those expressions were based on memory. Just kidding.

This was also one of those panels that halfway into it I seriously started to wonder about my commitment, as in this quickly turned into a pain in the ass to render. There was a big breakthrough when figuring out how to draw those shopping carts - which were on the same level as the bait bags covered later at the end of this post. Turned out the trick was just super-simplifying it.

I'm gonna close out this epic 5-part post with one that there is no doodle or preparatory sketch for, which is comparatively rare. On top of that, was the fact that I sat and stared at this particular panel almost every dam day for months, trying to shoehorn another, different caption into it. In other words come up with a better gag, because bait bags aren't really part of any conversation outside of the mainstream (see what I did there). Turns out after endless idle flips of the mental Jacob's Ladder, I went full circle back to the starting point and let it go, like a cartooning catch-and-release. Though I polled some folks at the newspaper office, and a couple classes, and, yep, approximately 98% of folks have never heard of the obscure idiom "eggs is eggs," and 1% have, but don't know what it means.