Mynarski Forest Official Mirror Archive

This Week's Strip

#48 "The Tree Fox" March 23, 1998

This was the first Mynarski Forest strip where I tried to emulate the realistically drawn "documentary-style" gags Bill Watterson used to such great effect in Calvin and Hobbes. I always enjoyed the humorous contrast between the serious narrative tone of those strips and the absurdity of the underlying joke, and wanted to do something similar with my comic.

Besides being fun to do, this type of strip can also occasionally be helpful for teaching readers something about the animals that provides a useful foundation for the jokes. In this particular case, most people are probably aware that rabbits can't climb trees, but may or may not know that red foxes can't either; the narration provides this interesting factoid and sets up the joke of Skippy and Liska being stuck up the tree. Other documentary strips would eventually go on to offer information about swift foxes, dietary habbits, mating rituals, and more - handy stuff for MF readers to know!

Part of the fun of drawing strips like these is the challenge in trying to draw in a realistic manner, although they also vividly demonstrate my severe limitations as an artist in that area... The early ones are especially rough; hopefully the later strips show gradual improvement as time goes by.


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