[webcomic] Legend of The Foot

Well, there's a lot to unpack here, so let me just start by saying that I have a brand-new appreciation for real artists who create comics and manga. This wasn't easy to make. Lots and lots and lots of erasing and redraws made it happen. I also learned a lot of new techniques for making things easier, though. The learning process is fun. The constantly fucking up and having to do something over and over and over and over to get it right is not fun. Although some of the 'look' to certain things are parts of visual gags, there are others things that are legitimately errors that bug me. I know for a fact that NOT ONCE did I remember to give Cammy White gloves in any panel, and had to go back, erase part of her arm, and then start drawing a glove around it.

I thought drawing circles was hard... drawing perspective-wise stuff is harder, because with a circle, you know immediately if it doesn't look right. With perspective, one can end up with weird stuff happening, like someone having a tiny leg. Like, I'd draw a leg that was supposed to be further away from the viewer perspective than the closer leg, and guess what? It looked like one leg was a runt-leg. So I had to erase that whole mess and try it again a different way. It really helps to draw a "skeleton" of a person before actually drawing them. If anyone's seen me draw, they know I like to just go straight from what's in my head to the canvas, but for complicated stuff, that's not always possible.

As far as story-telling goes, I'll actually just go ahead and say where I got the idea for doing a comic. I was reading about the popular television show, Rick and Morty, and someone said that Dan Harmon takes forever to write shit and that if Justin Roiland hadn't really pushed him, the writing process would've taken much longer. That's why there was a huge gap between Season 2 and 3, allegedly. So I said to myself, "What the heck? Hire me to write Rick and Morty." and started joking to myself, "How hard can it be?" and started making up a story that is still purely in my head, where Rick and Morty get stuck in another dimension where the roles of cows and humans are switched, but everything else is the same. Mr. Cow (who I turned into a character in Itsa Me) invited Rick and Morty over for humanburgers, and then shenanigans ensue. The conflict occurs because Rick has no problem eating a humanburger, but Morty starts freaking out. I wanted to write a full-blown storyboard for it, but then I realized that I'm actually really bad at drawing and just needed to practice a bit.

Last fall, I wrote a blog that was DEEP AS FUCK (aren't they all?) basically was a stab at the commercialization of feminism, where it's become like a human bumper-sticker. I feel like the feminist movement has really gone off the rails lately, and that's largely because the loudest voices usually are the ones that the most extreme. Besides the extremists, there are also the phonies. You know, the ones who go "Look at me, look at what I'm doing for women. Look at how I'm promoting women." and I just want to bury my face in my hands. Case-in-point: a bunch of men in Hollywood who had proclaimed themselves to be feminists were called out for being sexual harassers. And there's also Amy Schumer. Now, keep in mind, I don't hate her, or think she is untalented. But her act is terrible. It's that bad, and I've sat through a whole Larry The Cable Guy stand-up show. What makes it worse is that she plagiarizes material blatantly from other comedians, which is a huge no-no. Half of her show is stolen jokes, and the other half is talking about being a ridiculous slut. I don't feel like that sort of conduct really helps the cause of "women", but somehow she's touted as this bastion of feminism, and I couldn't figure out why for the longest time until one day it finally just hit me: Corporations have commercialized feminism, and are selling stuff with a "feminist" sticker on it, like bad comedy and purple hair-dye. Just the whole thing has been reduced to empty consumerism.

So that's where some of this stuff comes from. I watched some Rick and Morty and am critical of social movements.

I also am kind of a comic fan. I never really thought of that until recently, because I never got into DC or Marvel stuff, so I didn't really see myself as being in that genre. I always liked Batman, though. I always thought Batman was cool. But then I thought how much I enjoyed reading manga (recently), and then thought back to my childhood, and I remember being really into Herge's Tintin series. Tintin basically is the story of a 20-something kid who just goes around the world kicking ass and bringing down criminal organizations and even whole governments, and being the first man on the moon, and discovering a hidden Inca civilization. He also discovers the abominable snowman. That series gets pretty wild. I find Tintin a hilarious series because Herge just freestyled the whole thing and would sometimes write himself into a hole where Tintin is in an impossible-to-escape situation, and then he always made Tintin get away by random luck. One time, Tintin was in an isolated cabin with a gun to his head while tied up. I think Hegre probably spent weeks pacing up and down his study thinking, "How the fuck is Tintin going to get out of this?" and finally just said "Act of God." and made lightning hit the cabin, which teleports Tintin out of there to safety. It was fucking great.

I liked a few newspaper comics. Most of them, I thought were dumb as fuck, or just generally unfunny. The ones I liked, I really got into. I still have ALL of Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes collections, as well as FoxTrot, Dilbert, and Gary Larson's The Far Side. I'm not as big a fan of FoxTrot now that I'm older, but the other three really stuck with me.



A lot of the authors also had versions of their comics with bits of commentary under, and I always thought that was pretty neat. Gary Larson and Bill Watterson in particular would write lots of commentary. Scott Adams wrote a bunch of books, which are pretty good.

I drew some really crude-looking comics while younger. I remember that they were really stupid, and I'd be ashamed to even look at them now. Then sometime in 2007, I started drawing some four-panel comics, but only two of them were any good. I have no idea where to find them now. Then I just kinda stopped drawing, except for some occasional sketches of animals, which were mostly cats, dogs, rabbits, bears, and pigs. All of them are "okay". Nothing really that special.