Return of the Comic Strip Games: A Halloween Bonus

After yesterday's mind-melt on this site, I need a day off to reboot. But I didn't want my regular guests to be left empty-handed for the Countdown to Halloween celebration, especially since I delivered a different sort of goods yesterday far removed from October concerns.

This is a comic strip that my brothers, Mark and Chris, and I concocted a few years ago as we were traveling around Idaho in a motorhome with our dad for his 70th birthday. It was a variation on the surrealist games we like to play when we are together. I would start with a couple of lines of text written in a frame, one of my brothers would draw the artwork in the frame, and then do the art for the next box, where I then had to continue the story text-wise, the artwork would then go to my other brother, and so on. We did eleven of these on our trip that week, having a grand old time playing art games again, and mainly enjoying being all together for the first time in a good while.

As for the comic, we were creating these in early August, so it shows that our minds are never that far from Halloween at any time of year. We were also bumping down the rode most of the time in the RV, and doing multiple pages at once, so some of the pencil lines and text are more than a little erratic. But the best of them have a nice underground comic feel to them, thanks mainly to the artwork of both Mark and Chris.

If you are interested in reading more of these comics or would like to learn more about the game we used to create them, click the link to begin reading Comics on the Road to Nowhere? Pt. 1 of 11: Tod's Balls. I hope you enjoy them.  

Son o' the Return o' the Comic o' the Jack-O'-Lantern Undead...

My beloved and I attended the Disney Halloween Party (with awesome fireworks) last night, but a massive headache and a serious lack of sleep the last couple of days have eaten away at my time to put up a decent post about it this evening.

In lieu of such a post, I am cheating a bit for the second night in a row in this Countdown to Halloween (last night was a mere picture of a slice of my dining table full of monster toy sets, with only text in the title, so it was a real cheat). This is a comic page that was drawn on a camping trip last August by my brothers Mark and Chris, for which I provided the dialogue.

The twist here is that the comic page is absolutely improvisational, a massive derivation of the surrealist drawing game called Exquisite Corpse, where artists draw unconnected and unseen images on their own half (or quarters if there are more than two artists participating) of a folded piece of paper, and when it is revealed, the two separate images forge what is hoped to be a rather remarkable single image. We adapted it to where either I would write the dialogue (being currently uncomfortable with my art skills, unlike the olden days) in the first panel, and then one of the brothers would draw the first and then the next panel, and then I would fill in the dialogue for the art in the second panel and then start the third, and so on... or it could start with art in the first panel, dialogue in the first and second, and so it goes forward until completion. Get it? Got it. Good.

The reason I am rerunning this particular comic page is that it is entirely Halloween-based, being all pumpkin riddled and whatnot. Murderous Jack-O'-Lanterns make for delicious fun as far as I am concerned. If you want to see what I originally wrote about this comic, visit my post about it at http://cinema4pylon.blogspot.com/2009/08/comics-on-road-to-nowhere-pt-4-of-11.html. 

Enjoy!