Well. I believe it is called hubris. Last week I was Crufts' Best in Show. This week I am a pariah dog, scavenging on the outskirts of humanity, whimpering for the love and affection of days past and receiving none. That object of fragility, my ego, has been shattered into a gazillion shards; each shard slicing and burrowing into a heart full of woe. Ummm. Where else can I go with this? I know. I'm proper fed up, me!
From the foregoing you may have deduced that I did not get a single point for this week's effort. The entire tragic history may be seen here. Which begs the question, why? What? It's crap? I don't think there's any need to be quite so brutally frank, but yes, there is some substance in that summation. To be honest, I think the main problem rests on the fact that it is essentially a lazy cartoon. My missus immediately said, upon seeing it, that it was out of proportion. True. The perspective is - well, non-existent and its basic premise has been done before and done better. As I was drawing this week's entry, I remembered that, years ago, Mad magazine did a feature called Monstrous Cliches. I think it was drawn by Paul Coker jr. but (tellingly) I didn't go and check. From memory I could recall "Driving a Hard Bargain" and "Meeting a Crying Need", but I was pretty sure Mad didn't use Nursing a Grudge, although I may be wrong.
The other main fault with this and other more recent cartoons is that I have been doing everything from scratch on the Bamboo graphics pad. I freely admit here and now that it is not a technique with which I am entirely comfortable. Given time and effort it may become second nature, but for the time being I feel happier, initially, with paper under my hand and a pencil in my fingers. I have no problem using the pad to "ink" scanned in pencils, so I think I'll stick with that method for the time being.
On to the next task, or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there's nothing so becomes a man as a new cartoon.
