Guys and Dolls

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Welcome, Jazz Pickles and tourists alike! Let’s see if we can find a way to have fun with the words that follow. 

Beginning at the top of this page, I used one of my favorite little cowboy cartoons to create this Sunday’s funny pages title panel. Here’s the original cartoon.

I don’t personally have that problem at a four-way-whoa, but I’ve come across a lot of folks that do. That doesn’t make them bad people.

Let’s move to the next image above with the gunslinger and his action figure. Probably because of the year/when and place/where I was born, I was obsessed with cowboy movies and TV shows as a young boy. I dressed as a cowboy and played with plastic horses and built miniature log cabins and drew cowboys, Indians, and horses all day every day.

Though I grew up mostly in Oklahoma, I did not have personal contact with cowboys or horses (which no doubt added to my propensity to glorify them) and so my fascination with them faded as I got older and I became obsessed with girls and rockstars instead. Meanwhile, all things “outer space” replaced the Old West in pop culture of all kinds so I kind of figured I was done with cowboy lore altogether.

But, as an adult, I became a cartoonist and over the decades I found myself doing many dozens of cartoons about cowboys and the Old West. It seemed it was just in my blood. You’d think 35 years of cowboy cartoons would exorcise that demon, though, right?

Well, shortly after semi-retiring my work on Bizarro, I began to write and illustrate a graphic novel about—no surprise here—the same goll dang thang. I’m beginning to wonder if I didn’t have an unsettled score from a previous life in the Old West that my soul is trying to work out. Probably just wishful thinking.

As you regular readers know, my cherished pet project, the graphic novel, is called Peyote Cowboy. It’s fun for me because though it is still cartooning, it is necessarily a very different type of cartooning in both writing and art.

For Bizarro, I wrote a funny line or two in the middle of a scene I never had to write, spoken by characters I never had to develop.

Peyote Cowboy, on the other hand, required writing hundreds of interconnected scenes complete with plot and character development that are sufficiently interesting to keep readers turning pages, as it were. Too many graphic novels, in my opinion, seem to rely too heavily on art and are short on story.

Art-wise, because a graphic novel is basically like doing an elaborate piece of art for every ten seconds of a long TV series, the art had to be at least a little simpler, or I’d not live long enough to finish the job.

So I aimed for a simpler style of art but, somehow, the more I sketched, the more complex it became. That, too, is just in my blood. The style I ended up with is a bit simpler and quicker to draw than Bizarro, but it’s still much more detailed and time-consuming than I’d hoped for. I’m a big believer in being true to yourself, however, which to me means channeling your art as opposed to engineering it, so here I am.

What a long, boring way of saying I thought it might be interesting to compare and contrast the styles a bit,.

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Here’s a shot from a very early scene in Peyote Cowboy in which we also have a bartender and a cowboy in a saloon, like today’s gunslinger panel above. First, you probably notice the color scheme is quite different and more dramatic than what I normally employ in Bizarro. That’s partly because Bizarro still prints in old-school newspapers and their printing presses are not always very sophisticated.

Almost-monochromatic schemes like this are not typical of the entire story, but I use them from time to time and intend to continue to do so as the story progresses. Another obvious difference is the lack of crosshatching and chicken-scratching in the linework. In Peyote Cowboy, I do the majority of shadowing with color instead of linework.

As regards similarities between the two, I obviously think of bartenders of the Old West as being portly, balding, smoking types.

Next, we’ll compare landscapes from Bizarro and Peyote Cowboy.

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Above is a fairly typical western background from Bizarro. (I love this gag, which was a collaboration with a cartoonist friend of mine, Dan McConnell.) Notice again how much linework I use here to define everything. It’s incredibly time-consuming, which is one reason I don’t do it in my novel. Also, I was ready for a change.

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And here is an upcoming landscape from Peyote Cowboy. The colors are much more vivid and the linework is cleaner and simpler than what I do in Bizarro. Overall, the art is more fanciful and less strictly realistic than my Bizarro landscapes tend to be, especially regarding color.

By the way, this is the first image from the next episode, which I hope to post in the coming week. I’ve removed the text so as not to spoil this part of the story, especially for readers who’ve not caught up to the latest episode yet. You can access all of the episodes posted thus far on this page. The story is free for anyone to read online at peyotecowboy.net. I’m posting it as I illustrate it so the story is far from complete at this date.

Let me know if you enjoy this kind of process-and-art talk and I’ll do more of it in the future. If you have questions or curiosity about how I work, feel free to ask in the comments section and I’ll be sure to answer you and maybe do a post about it.

Now it’s time to find out what navel-gazing Wayno may have done about his process and art in this week’s Bizarro cartoons!…

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Secret insider cartoon tip: Pirates are how mainstream cartoonists get away with doing jokes about disabled folks.

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Two of my least favorite breeds are King Charles Spaniels and Shih tzus but if anyone creates a Shihtz-Charles Spaniel, I may be in the market.

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Looks like Wayno has created another Bizarro Alien variant.

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On Wayno’s weekly blog post about this same batch, he relates a fun, true-life story about Yo Yo Ma getting his Covid vaccine.

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This cartoon conveniently reminded me that we have Bizarro scout badges for sale in our shop. Silly products like this are how we keep this site ad-free!

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He had a brief film career appearing in The Godfather, however.

That thud you heard was the sound of our cartoon tug-o-war coming to end. Thanks for hanging out until we gave up and fell into the mud. If you dig our groovy vibes, man, and that we offer them without pop-up ads and paywalls, please contemplate the joy of giving us a little something back by way of one of the links below. We’d be all smiley if you did!

Until next time, go long and don’t turn around until you get to the goal line.

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