Hey, we’re back! Did you miss me? I know I missed you.

 

Not a whole heckuva lot is going on in the political sphere right now so today’s cartoon is rather topic-less, unless you consider John McCain’s neck newsworthy. Luckily my cartoon doubles as social satire (that’s how I sold it anyway), so I can make fun of other stuff too!

 

I’d been kicking around the idea of doing a storyline for awhile now, but the problem of only running two days a week makes storytelling much more difficult. Plus, it’s hard to stay topical if you’re only concentrating on one story. Luckily, “Jim and Jillian become political cartoonists” is both really simple and able to stay relevant politically.

 

The idea of Jim and Jillian becoming political cartoonists has also been around for awhile, but I’ve delayed it for fear that it would be too self-referential and too “only appealing to me.” Then one day I realized that’s all the strip is, so the idea fit right in.

 

The first panel is full of weird symbols and drawings that only make sense to me, and are probably illegible if you’re reading it in “The Daily” or on the blog. Looking at it now, I can see Xavier from “Xavier: Renegade Angel,” Opus from “Bloom County,” and a recreation of a “Calvin and Hobbes” strip.

 

The first panel is also a lesson in detail. Originally I added some cracks on the wall to imply Jim lived in a bad dorm room, but it was too much visual information. The cracks distracted you from Jim and Jillian, and thus broke the simple staging. As I’ve said before, in a cartoon everything has to “read,” and if it takes to long to read, it doesn’t work.

 

This cartoon was also a study in drawing the characters in perspective as we see them from behind, from the front facing up, and in ¾ profile. Both characters were designed before I became aware of the idea of designing characters in three dimensions, so it’s something of a struggle to get them to work. Jim in particular doesn’t look right when viewed head on.

 

 Fun Fact #35: The “Sally Forth” joke is another one of those jokes where I wonder if anyone else gets it. For the punch line I needed a comic strip by two authors, and “Sally Forth” fit the bill as a bland, not awful but not great comic strip that’s still running in your local paper for some reason. Plus the title “Sally Forth” is fairly amusing. If you’d never heard of it you’d be confused as it to what it means.

 

“Sally Forth” is drawn by Craig Macintosh and written by Francesco Marciuliano, who’s actually incredibly funny. Marciuliano had a webcomic called “Medium Large” that was full of great, mean, weird humor, and his blog, Francesco Explains it All, is amazing. Check it out and tell ‘em Ryan sent ya’.

 

I’m not sure what any of that had to do with politics, but that's never stopped me before.

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