Mynarski Forest Official Mirror Archive

This Week's Strip

#70) "Particular Tastes" August 24, 1998

You would think that the hardest strips to draw would be the ones with all the interesting/bizarre eye candy in them; the strips with the explosions, crashing jet planes, misused power tools, blood 'n' guts, slapstick violence, etc. But those strips are actually relatively easy to draw because the subject matter is fun and you have a pretty good idea approaching them how you want the finished product to finally look.

No, the really difficult strips to draw are the ones like this one, where all the humour is dialogue driven, but you still have to try and put something in each panel to maintain visual interest. In this particular case, I resorted to changing the scenery as the characters walked through the forest, but that can be a lot of work to do on a regular basis. In later strips I'd put a greater emphasis on the characters' facial expressions to keep the audience engaged.

The fourth panel demonstrates a technique I've come to use quite a lot in the comic. That is, I usually like to include a dialogue-free panel between the setup and the climax, in order to give the characters and the reader time to contemplate and react to the situation before hitting them with the punchline. If you take the panel out and just head straight to the end, you lose a lot of the anticipation and connection to the characters, and the timing just doesn't seem as natural.

It may seem like such a little thing, but the overall effect it contributes is very different.


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