No Why In Color

I've been experimenting with watercolors a lot lately, and loving it. Watercolors are super hard to control, but when they're successful, they look amazing. So far I've had mixed results, but ones that please me nonetheless.

This is a page I made from the last two Apartness strips, No Why and Sunset. I printed these strips with a laser printer on heavy stock paper and then watercolored the image. I tried printing on bristol and rougher multi-media paper, but in both cases something prevented the ink from fusing with the paper and it rubbed off in an inky, flaky mess.

In any case, I think the end result is decent. But I'm learning something new about watercolors on an almost daily basis.

Notes on Comic Humor 4: What Makes This Funny?

Today I realized something about a comic I made that people thought was funny and about how that works.

This:

Is what makes this work:

Everything else — all the bigger drawings that lead up to that one tiny little drawing — they're just setup, they're there to build tension and intrigue. There's a bunch of them, they're vague in that we don't know what's going on, and they're dramatic, and there's a bunch of words. All that builds tension and intrigue.

The last little drawing answers all the questions, releasing the tension, ending the intrigue, and we get a wide shot that explains in a surprising, revealing manner, what's been going on all this time.

But if that last, tiny little drawing were wrong, the whole thing would fall apart. Especially the facial expression. It's that wide-eyed look of horror that makes it work. That's what actually makes it funny. 

Really it just comes down to two tiny squares and two tiny dots.

Humor!