Cartoons and Visual Art 10

I finally finished another panel.

Except for going for a run in the rain, this morning I stayed in, did chores, read classic strips from The Far Side and completed this latest experimental, pseudo-abstract and psychedelic dino panel that’s been hanging over my head for a while.

While finishing this one I was listening to Dan Senor’s and Sam Harris’s respective election-autopsy podcast episodes, followed by the Steve Earle record Copperhead Road (the song “Copperhead Road” and the whole album, which has two of my favorite Earle tunes back-to-back: “The Devil’s Right Hand” and “Johnny Come Lately,” the latter of which has a rollicking showing from The Pogues as the backing band on the track).

This most recent panel was the first one for this series which I laid out in Photoshop before I began penciling it. I’ll be doing more of that going forward.

Now I have a template not just for each cartoon but for each batch of four. I’ll try to stick to this layout as I produce more of these cartoons and leave it up to someone else one distant day, probably long after I’m dead and not around to enjoy it, to decide if these installments should be presented one at a time in a book, four to a framing on a wall or in yet some other format.

For now I’ll continue to assume that it’s my role just to make this stuff and continue to seek fun in practice. My current goal is to get to a point where, to quote Heat, “the action is the juice” — where I continuously value the process more than the result, or lack of result. I’m getting closer.