Doodlin'

Here's a tryout of a doodle for the comic, admittedly hastily done, but it was a test of using a Wacom tablet to draw with. I've never really got the hang of that hand-eye-monitor-tablet thing, and end up fighting the mouse and the pen which I have in each hand, like a prog rock keyboard player. It's a left handed thing I think - I've got so used to controlling the cursor right handedly (?) with the mouse, that when I get the pen, and default back to leftness, i feel like a toddler trying to copy Escher, and the cursor flies around of it's own accord.



I kind of like it, although I think the line is a bit too brushy, too painted, but I think that might be some of my own clumsiness causing that. I'm so used to dragging my vector lines around to make outlines, that it feels a bit uncomfortable, and like I'm not getting on the screen what I get on the page, but I'm going to stick with it for a while...

The bigger question I'm asking myself is about the character design, and whether this kind of design can carry a longer, more mature narrative. I've always held that there's enough weight in really simple characters to carry stories, that part of why I wrote 'Angels', to kind of take the deadpan playmobil characters and see how they'd hold up in an 'adult' narrative. I kind of think these new style characters may be too cute to carry yet another spooky tale of grief, loss and loneliness. The look a bit er, card-y to me, or like they suit a single shot panel or 3-frame strip. Oh, I dunno, I guess I wont be able to tell until I've done more work on it. I'm also concerned that it might be a bit self conscious to force difficult themes on cutesy characters like when people deliberately gross-out sock puppets or fluffy bunnies. And I don't want that, I want people to care about the characters, have an emotional connection, and perhaps the cutesy thing just knocks people back...

In other news, and I'm not going to go into too much detail, I talked yesterday with the Harris about the idea of a game based around one of their collections, a kind of Monkey Island point and click adventure which would reveal the history of the collection and the person behind it. That is so deliciously Web 2.0/ARG/Transliteracy that it makes me feel a bit sick with joy and so on. I'm loving working with the Harris, it's like having a big fat digital canvas to play on, and everyone seems to be getting really excited about the potential for their Internet work to become a significant part of their plan.