Suburban Fairy Tales

One thing that I’ve always found the most difficult to draw in cartoons are “dot eyes.”

Before I attempted drawing dot eyes for the first time, I would always draw a character’s eyes as a circle with a dot in the middle to show their pupil.  In my style of cartooning, that method looks like a mix between Garfield’s eyes and big Japanese manga-style eyes.  When I started Suburban Fairy Tales in 2005, Little Pig #3’s character design screamed out to me that dot eyes would suit him best, so I thought I would go ahead and try something different.

Little Pig #3 circa 2005

At first, I drew Little Pig #3’s dot eyes perfectly round with a little shine in the corner – they looked almost like little black buttons on his face.  I found this way of drawing eyes much more challenging than in my past cartoons.  Sure, I’ve used dot eyes occasionally, but never on a main character.  Using this method introduced some new challenges.  How do I use dot eyes to show varying degrees of emotion?  How do I show dot eyes looking up, down, left or right?  It was always so simple with my usual way of drawing eyes, but now I was struggling.

Error the robot from "Made To Malfunction"

As long-time fans know, Suburban Fairy Tales took a two-year hiatus starting in 2006 so I could concentrate on Made To Malfunction.  The star of this new series was a robot named Error, who also happened to have dot eyes.  The way I drew Error’s dot eyes differed from the way I drew Little Pig’s.  Error’s eyes were drawn more oval instead of circular, and gone was the little shine that was present in Little Pig #3’s eyes.  Being that Error was now the star character, he was featured in almost every strip.  So I really had to push the way I drew dot eyes the next two years.  By the time Made To Malfunction ended in 2008, I felt I had come a long way with conveying emotion using dot eyes.

When Suburban Fairy Tales re-started in 2008, I took what I learned from drawing the robot Error and applied it to Little Pig #3.  Gone were the little circular button eyes with the shine that I had previously drawn him with.  Instead I took the same eyes what I had used for Error – big, black oval dot eyes – and put them on Little Pig #3.  Humpty Dumpty and Goldilocks (a new character) also used these types of eyes as well.

Little Pig #3 with BIG dead-looking dot eyes in 2009

The problem with the big black oval dot eyes on Little Pig #3 (and on Goldilocks and Humpty) was that Error was a robot.  Big black oval dot eyes worked well on something made of metal and circuits.  But Little Pig #3 was organic, a living thing.  Taking a machine’s eyes and applying them to Little Pig didn’t turn out to be the best idea.  Error’s dot eyes were just too big for Little Pig’s face – he looked like he was dead!  So as time went on, I shrunk Little Pig #3’s dot eyes (along with Goldilock’s and Humpty’s) to a more acceptable size.  Now the size I draw dot eyes are just a tad above what Charles Schultz used for his characters in Peanuts.

The way I draw dot eyes has been a bit of a roller coaster ride from when I first started, but I’m very happy with the way they have evolved. As they say with anything you do — you only get better with practice.

Little Pig #3 as he looks in 2012

Coming up with the name of a comic strip isn’t necessarily an easy process.  You want your title to be something different than what’s already out there, and you also want it to be memorable.  But most importantly, you want to make sure that you pick a name that will allow your strip to grow and change.

I’ve made the mistake of limiting the growth of my comic strip in the past with Crunchy.  Crunchy originally followed the adventures of a pet turtle of the same name.  As the strip went on, however, Crunchy the Turtle was featured less and less.  Soon the strip started to focus more on the neighborhood kids and Crunchy the Turtle went from the strip’s star character to a recurring character.  After I ended Crunchy I made a mental note that the title of my future comic strip series would leave them more open for evolution.

Shortly after Crunchy ended I came up with the concept for Suburban Fairy Tales.  I had originally thought that Fairy Tale High School would be a good name, but then I thought… what if I don’t want them to be in high school anymore?  What if in ten years I wanted my characters to go to college or even beyond?  As a comic strip writer, you never know where your mind will be in five, ten, or twenty years from now. Suburban Fairy Tales sums up the concept that my strip is about Fairy tales characters living in a suburban community.  There’s plenty of room for growth and change in that title.

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts is a great example of what a comic strip title should be.  I know he hated the name and Lil’ Folks would have definitely been better, but the point I’m trying to make is that the name Peanuts didn’t handcuff the strip to its original premise and characters.  If Schulz had titled his comic strip The Adventures of Charlie Brown, Shermy, and Patty he would have been forced to use those three characters for the next 50 years.  But Shermy and Patty eventually disappeared from the strip and the Peanuts of the 1950s is a completely different strip from Peanuts of the 1990s.  Peanuts was allowed to grow and evolve because the name didn’t hold it back.

So when coming up with the name of a comic strip, keeping your title open is advice you may want to consider.  Because what you’re writing about when you’re 15 isn’t necessarily the same thing you want to be writing about when you’re 30.

Drawing a comic strip is a thoughtful process.  Most of the time I sit down for an hour or so and sketch a whole bunch of ideas into my sketchbook — whatever comes to mind, good or bad.  Then the following day I’ll go back to my sketchbook and re-read my ideas.  Sometimes the ideas are really great and they go right into the comic strip.  Other times the ideas are so-so, but have potential, so I attempt to re-write them to make them better.  Other times the ideas are simply awful and I put a big X through them.

Sitting down to write these ideas is a pretty straightforward process, but sometimes an idea comes to me out of the blue.  That’s when I have scramble to write it down somewhere because I know that in two minutes I’ll be distracted by something else and forget the idea entirely.

One example of an idea popping up is when I was sitting at my booth at NY Comic Con.  I was drawing sketches for fans who purchased a copy of my book.  Most of the sketches were characters in simple poses, but one sketch featuring Red Riding Hood spawned an idea that I thought would be great for the actual comic strip.  So I made sure to snap a picture of that sketch before I gave it away so I could remember it for later use in Suburban Fairy Tales.

Below is the original sketch idea from NY Comic Con.  The other photos are each step I take in drawing a strip — from pencils to the final product.  The final completed strip was posted on October 28, 2011.