I have a friend who is a skilled artist, and who wanted to start a webcomic. So we tried a collaboration where I made the ideas, and he drew, mostly. we were going after an xkcd-like comic with minimal dialogue and lots of graphs.
Here are some we made:
Anyway, now he doesn’t want to do it anymore. And I have a lot of ideas, and zero artistic skills. Is there anything I could do?
There was a book I was hearing about with advice for would be cartoonists including those with no artistic talent. And I can’t recall what it is off the top of my head so I’m sure someone will come in eventually.
The advice I can give you is to adopt a simple, repeatable style. XKCD chooses some elementary line drawings with some consistent short hand iconography, for example. Dinosaur Comics uses licensed clip art (from a package where purchasing it is the license to use it) and one template. The Order of the Stick’s stick figures are much better defined than those in XKCD while still being simple enough to come straight out of MS Paint. I’ve seen comics based on using one drawing as the base and adapting it each time or others that establish a small portfolio of simple drawings and repeat them as necessary. Impressionistic is not bad especially in a humor strip.
And now I turn nasty. Find something better to do than ape someone else. You might have the creative urge to make a comic but save those energies for a higher calling than cribbing Randall Munroe’s stuff. You’re existing stuff already shows the Xerox degrade and if you seek to do nothing other than use someone else’s voice then it will only get worse. If you can’t draw then you have to write and with humor especially people will forgive the art much more than they will a poorly written joke. Find your own way and you’ll be better off for it.
I don’t feel like I’m “cribbing” from the guy. I’m just writing about the stuff that I find interesting in my life. And that is making life-relevant graphs on the blackboard, single image ideas, or small snippets of conversation with friends/girls. Not, for instance, long verbose exchanges like the ones in Dinosaur comics.
Anyway, thanks for the honest feedback! If what we did wasn’t of much quality, I can just throw it away, and not care about the lack of an artist.
You mean, the concept about having hobbies and writing about them is, right? That I admit.
You know that recent comic where his hobby is to talk with students of a specific subject, and try to see how long time he can fake having studied the same thing? That actually is my hobby, or one of them. (History was easy as pie. Natural sciences tend to be difficult, even if you know some stuff about them. Anyway, it’s good fun to do.)
I was actually pretty impressed by these. Inspired by XKCD or not. I especially thought the supermarket hobby one was hilarious. I didn’t know it was originally an XKCD strip.
I thought your jokes were good. But, I was also super impressed by your friend’s artistic talents. Good work! Hope you figure out a way to make more. They are pretty cute and fun.
The whole format of that panel was pushing right up next to being an XKCD comic. I would toss that one or rework the basic joke into a new format.
For people who aren’t familiar, XKCD does a whole series of strips titled “my hobby” that are essentially just like that one.
The Pinocchio strip was great though, and the panel for the buying a girl a drink bit was great, but the caption again made me feel like you were trying to be XKCD. So, don’t give up…but keep working on finding your own voice.
