The Phantom Hourglass

Edit: Uploaded a larger version so you can actually SEE what's in the sketch when you click on the image.

How do people have jobs? Seriously, from the time I wake to the time I collapse I am either working, thinking about what to work on next or aggressively unwinding so I can remain sane enough to work. The more I learn about this webcomic world, the more I realize how behind I am.

Then again, I put myself in these situations. I want to be a badass, but badass requires effort. Today started a five week effort in which I will present the parents arc in color, with update days expanding into Sunday. It should be awesome enough to make up for the awkward timeline shift. The only problem is that I'm currently working without a net! I used my entire month of buffer strips to take care of many other art things in my life. I put myself out there and drummed up lots of support. I tweaked the website to be more awesome with each incarnation. I made a bunch of giant paintings and submitted them to a show. For the next Precocious strips? I sketched them out! That's a good thing, but it still leaves inking and coloring.

Oh god, the coloring. With any luck, I'll speed up as I go. Right now I'm like an awkward teenage trying to take off a difficult bra. It's still rewarding in the end, but the process is lengthy and disheartening.

Fortunately, I don't have to color this one quite yet. This is the "cover" illustration, which won't run until the arc is completed. I'm not sure how much comes across, since I messed up repeatedly to cause eraser (and, subsequently, scanner) hell. It should be nice and spiffy in the end, but for now you get a sketch on the sketch blog. (I didn't see it coming.)

The new goal is to produce two strips a day, allowing the buffer to build up anew. In addition, I have general ad/website/life maintenance to do. That's a full time job in itself, so I have to choose my battles. Finally, I need to keep the sketching and art going to fuel the blog/my soul. If painting becomes a relaxing luxury, that would actually be pretty sweet.

Right now, my unwind time is spent playing a certain Zelda game you should be guess from the post title. It's one of the best designed games I've ever played, and it is a lot of fun... but to play a game in which the temple one visits over and over is a race against the clock that ends with your soul being sucked out if you fail... what was I thinking? Last night I screwed up repeatedly, died (had the item to save me at least) and nearly ran out of time. I finished the dungeon with 9 seconds to go, which is not only miserable pacing, but meant I was stressing and panciking all through the last three floors. WAY TO UNWIND, ME!

For my next trick, I'm going to sooth my aching drawing hand by putting it in a blender!

Background dude 2: Genetics-friendly edition

Today I started working on the new comics. Progress is slllloooooowwww. Doesn't help that the current stuff needs lots of planning and blocking to make all the elements fit in those tiny panels properly. There's also the weakest strips of the bunch - but I needed to do *something* to get the story started, so it works. I hope to have a handful sketched out by the time I pass out tonight. Current total: One. And a half. Woo!

Taking a break from the brain-teaser aspects of spatial relationships, I turned to my skechbook and began drawing randomly. When I hit up on lovely shocked expression, I decided to focus on it a bit more. The face was too old to be a kid, and Harvey Linkletter just doesn't play that game, so I went back to Vincent's ever-shifting daddy.

This roughly represents my first idea for daddy Iddenstein, which is fairly standard cartoon parental cloning thing. While I understand it's visual usefulness, I still don't like playing it up too much. At least eerily-similar parents and children happens. The previous version stressed the science behind walking, talking cartoon animals. (If we don't have strict rules on this, characters start singing, "Here is my hand, where is your paw?" That shit ain't right!) Still not sure what incarnation of background dude will end up in the comic, or even if his strips survive the cut, but there you go.

Here's to you, Mr. Background Character

As mentioned before, the upcoming bake sale storyline was initially slated to appear farther down the road. Inspiration striking when it did meant I suddenly introducing parents without first showing their kids. The result was a surprisingly early entry and starring role for Kaitlyn. Ahh, but Kaitlyn's good about these things. Once the storyline is over, she gracefully shows herself out and the comic is allowed to continue with the classroom turf war the same as always.

Kaitlyn's classy exit does open up the door for ANOTHER classmate from the other side to get a debut. To lighten the sudden new character onslaught, I could have had her talking to Roddy. To be accurate to Kaitlyn's relationships, I could have had her talking to Quincy. Instead, little Vincent will get his time to shine... and promptly disappear from the strip for a long time. I believe his debut shall end something like this:

Kaitlyn: Back to obscurity with you, Vincent!
Vincent: Aww, shucks!

So why Vincent? He's the most innocent on the other side; if hopes are to be crushed, he's the fitting victim. Also: Kaitlyn syndrome. It's just weird to use a parent without giving the kid, the far more important character, some face time.

You might notice there's some schlub in the sketch above. It's hard not to notice the guy, seeing as he's the subject of the post title. This dude is Vincent's dad, who doesn't even get a name. He is there to add some dude into scenes where no other dudes are willing to step up. He's a token. He's a background character.

Continuing my horrible blight of hetero-normative behavior, the PTA meeting is dominated by the mommies. Look, I am not Mr. Wonder Artist who is willing or capable to draw a full PTA meeting with a bunch of background characters. The only strip I've done so far WITH any background characters is the Black Friday bonus strip that isn't even on the main Precocious site. The parental speaking roles in the bake sale plot are all moms. In steps... some dude! See, some fathers do care about the PTA! Sky's talking to him! He looks totally out of place, but he is there because FATHERS ARE DEDICATED!


While he doesn't have a name, he does have some background information. Daddy Iddenstein is a single father who is trying his best to be a good parents. Life is hard, man! Not only is he the sole breadwinner, but he's also tasked with parenting a little genius who likely has undiagnosed ADD. (Vincent's more the scrambled-brain type than hyperactive troublemaker, so his crippling mental problem is charmingly benign!) Anyway, that's still not enough to buy him more than one or two panels without dialog. Back to obscurity with you! SOCIETY DOESN'T CARE ABOUT YOUR BROKEN HOME/CHILD!

I had fairly loose goals when designing this dude. He needed to be canine to sire Vincent, COMPATIBLE SPECIES and all, and he shouldn't look too much like Vincent. The first sketch featured the backwards baseball cap, but was too obviously Vincent's dad. I decided to try again. The next sketch turned into a fox by accident, which would explain Vincent's look - but I wanted to go for canine variety. Then I decided to see if I could draw a droopy-eared doggie and still make it look male. (There's a reason I have only one character with such ears, and she's the militant girl power chick.) The result was the above sketch, which I think is quite nifty for a background dude. Only problem, he now looks NOTHING like his son. This is not important if he's just a background character, but it does eliminate the chance for readers to make the connection. It would have been a neat touch. "There was this strange fluffy canine father in the background of one strip, and now there's a similar-looking fluffy canine child talking to Kaitlyn. I get it!" Now... Vincent's dead mommy bust have been one fluffy, stripy bitch. See, it's one thing for the Et family to be varied - such fur pattern variations are common with domestic shorthairs. After doing 15 minutes of Googling, I have decided Vincent is a Keeshond, yet his dad looks like an English Setter/less fluffy breed mix. CANINE GENETICS DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOODNIGHT!

Oh, and those who have been reading this blog since post three or four (which is just me) is wondering if I'm going to follow up with my "rich lives of background characters" indicator that Dionne's mom was going to make an appearances. At the moment, she's been cut. Adding Kaitlyn in meant backgrounds will be omitted to accomodate dialog and the placement of small children. Heck, if I take a chainsaw to the arc and cut out a week - a strip with Sky pulling a "wall of text" to allow me to tie up logistical and conceptual loose ends is only interesting to me - there's a good chance my token dude's strip(s) get axed. I'm not looking into a play-by-play rundown of the story here. I want to get in, make funny jokes, gloss over the plot points and jump to the highly-amusing finish. I SEEM TO BE ENDING EVERY PARAGRAPH IN ALL CAPS!

The potentially-deleted strips also make jokes based on everyone understanding a character's personality. I've been dealing with these folks for years, so I know them. People who only read the comic (which is every reader but me) will only know these folks from the handful of strips in which they appeared. Good cartoonists know not to make these jokes until their strip is well-established. *I* made a joke based on Jacob's dad in the third friggin' strip. Jacob's dad makes his first appearance OVER A HUNDRED STRIPS LATER. Way to go, me! I mean, WAY TO GO, ME!

The Et Family! *click* *click*

What can I say, crazy families are on my mind.

Drawing something like this is a MAJOR challenge, since every character (well, not the twins) are different heights and sizes. I can't claim the shot is any good at all, but anyone remotely close to accurate is wild success at this point.

I still love how varied the Et family is, even if it means more trouble than it's worth when cartooning. Gene is a buff-colored kitty, Sky is a gray tabby, Tiffany is a calico, Michaelangelo is an orange tabby, Frida is a tortoiseshell and the twins are white. This counters an earlier Et family breakdown, but now that all of them have been drawn in the comic, the current roster is more or less official. (I can still alter colorings if I want, but thinking of doing the strip in color makes me cry in fear.)

Oh, yeah. In case you're wondering, eight new strips are done (nine if you count the Black Friday one) and progress continues. 24 strips to go before Precocious BECOMES REAL!

Be fruitful and multiply

These designs are hardly set in stone, but I've made my first attempts at drawing ALL the Et children. Going by age (right to left), here are the kids:

Tiffany, age 9 - Yeah, I think we know her. This is an old sketch. I added it just to show relative size.

Michelangelo, age 6 - Mostly he is the "extra" kid pulled in if I need another for a story. He's innocent enough to provide a contrast when needed. For his look, I went with a gray tabby kitty look and an old school TV cowlick hairstyle.

Frida, age 4 - As of now, her sole purpose is to exacerbate situations. If her surroundings are quiet, she is quiet. If kids are going crazy in the room, she adds to the chorus of insanity. For her look, I wanted to do a tortoiseshell cat, but that proved difficult. The final Frida will probably look completely different. This sketch was the second I made, where all the black patches were eliminated. I choked. I might not even keep the dual braids, as they conflict with the tiny figure. *sob*

"This" & "That", age 2 - I'm not sure what exact age they'll have, but terrible twos sounds right. They were going to be tabbies, one orange and one gray, but I decided simplicity was the best bet with my fumbling fingers for now. They exist to make adults regret procreation. Like the rest of their siblings, they are named after artists Gene and Sky admire (don't asked about Tiffany...), but we'll never know which artists as they are always referred to with duo nicknames. (Yes, they are often called Thing 1 and Thing 2.)

Overall, the goal is to use the extra Ets for general background chaos in family scenes. If I want to use them, they're there, but mostly they are just really annoying pieces of furniture.

The Boys Wanna Fight

But those girls? They appear ti be happy to dance all night.

While they average out to a combative group (Bud, Roddy, Quincy, Xander = Fight. Jacob = Toss Up. Vincent = Space Cadet. Max = Filthy Pacifist.) the title is just me reaching for a song with "boys" in it to match the girls post below. Since I have been on a Garbage binge today, it was all too easy. Note to world: Version 2.0 is one of the best albums EVER!

The boys of the Poppinstock Academy 4th and 5th grade class, clockwise from top left: Bud Oven, Roddy Finnegan, Xander Upton, Jacob Linkletter, Vincent Iddenstein, Quincy Wozwax, Max Zeit.

Unlike the girls post, this was not an inspirational page where everything went right. Instead, my sketching has been rather icky the past few days, so I had to cherry pick. Xander and Vincent are OK (both sketches done the same night as the girls post, of course) and Bud and Jacob are within the standard deviation; but I'm unhappy with the other three. For one, Roddy is rarely that pleasant. I went through a day where I drew all my characters chubby for some damn reason, and this Roddy was the only one thin enough to scan. Quincy is *almost* there, but his nose should be shifted more to the right. He's a German shepherd but the nose placement makes him look somewhat feline. For Max, star of the current strips in production, I had tons of better sketches for him due to relevance. This one is rather weak, but the others were too good to fit in with the rest of this wonky crowd.

One thing I tried to do with this crew is line up the kids according to height. This mandated the separation of doggies from kitties due to ear discrepency. (It also meant using photoshop to shorten some sketches.) Bud's Scottish fold ears means he'll be the shortest no matter what, even though body-wise he's taller than both Jacob and Vincent. Roddy and Xander are average height for cartoon kitties, whatever that may be. On the doggie side, Max should be the clear tall one. Quincy is a bit too tall, but I was too lazy to fix it. Jacob and Vincent are both tiny (they're 9, while the rest are 10) with Vincent coming in as the shortest in body. Luckily for Vincent, he is a fluffy dude and his ears give him a boost.

Yes, this post is filler done only to keep the streak going. That is, unless you really wanted to know about cartoon animal height. If so, I guess it was fascinating.

The problem with minorities...

Hey, let's talk racism! Oh, yes, let's do!

By introducing kitties that are black and Siamese, I open myself up to dangerous racial undertones. It can be, dare I say it, a tar baby of a situation!

OK, have I used enough language to make this post show up on some inappropriate Google searches yet?

When I first began designing characters, I was advised by a classmate (who is a better cartoonist than I'll ever be - and thankfully on hiatus so I have less competition) to work with blacks in making my characters stand out. With that enabling, I set about designing my characters to really stand apart from each other. Bud's vest went black and his ears went darker, Autumn's extremities went black, cream-colored Jacob's shirt gained stripes and Tiffany...uh...Tiffany got one shaded ear and a ring around her eye. Thankfully, Tiffany is one to accessorize, so she gets her shot at tonal variance in other ways.

But did I stop there? Oh no! For my other classmates, I really went wild! Suzette, Max and Vincent have lots of shading. Dionne and Yvette have spots and stripes, respectively. Xander's design is still not finalized - as he might never get a line in the strip - but most of his coloring will come via clothing.

Then I went really nuts: CHARACTERS IN BLACK FACE! Sure, it makes sense for those kitties to appear, but cartooning is a black and white thing. When the most expressive parts of a character would appear as a flat black blob, that might not be the best planning. Hey, I'm all for an artistic challenge and I'm up to figuring it out! It just absolutely terrifies me to know I'm just two story arcs away from needing a solution.

That I'd create these characters was inevitable. On that same magical night when EVERY Gemstone Estates support characters emerged fully formed, along with the bulk of the initial Precocious storyline, the rest of the class was named.

Kaitlyn Hu was easy. With my love of giving my characters silly names, the temptation of the "Hu's on first" baseball gag was too great to resist. Also, how I could I *not* include a Siamese kitty after spending so many years around Dana's Siamese brigade?

Of course, by creating Kaitlyn I opened the race box. She is obviously of Asian heritage in a world of cute animals. Does that apply to all critters? Is Dionne African because she's a cheetah? Is Quincy proud of his European heritage as a German Shepherd? (Quincy's also a black faced character, but the secondary racial implications don't exist in his situation. Who doesn't love the Germans?) How global am I going?

This is not an issue with which I want to deal. All I wanted was the Hu name so I can make puns! Kaitlyn Hu ("'K, who?"), her brother Wen Hu ("Who? When?") and mother Shii Ann Hu ("Who is she?" "Shii Hu?" "That one over there!" "Shii Ann." "No, just her.") are just too fun to drop in now and then. All I can say is that I'm going to keep Kaitlyn away from chopsticks until I figure it out.

This also brings up the racial purity issue. In order to invoke specific species, the parents must naturally be the same. The Pingo family is pure red fox. The Hus are pure Siamese. (Siamese kitties are easily mixed in with regular kitties, but Dana's kitties were racially pure and I followed suit! Way to make me a furry racist, Dana!) All the other families are mixed. Even Dionne - clearly a cheetah - has markings that don't match the normal cheetah look, which is meant to show she's *not* a purebred. I slightly tackle this in the second story arc, but I still fear the Aryan race implications. It's the role of the creator to fret over every little detail - even though almost all readers will never think of such things - right?

Roddy is my way of countering the Kaitlyn problem. His name is so...so...white! Finnegan! He's Irish! Like the Et and Oven families, Roddy is just a normal house cat when "race" comes into play. In real life, it seems there's *always* one black cat in a litter. That's all Roddy is. (Although the idea of "litter" isn't valid in my strip as my characters are merely humans disguised as adorably cute critters.) Neither of Roddy's parents are pure black. One might be a boots kitty, but that's as far as I'll go.

The reason Roddy is black is because of the bad luck connotations. Roddy's life kinda sucks. He's on the outside and always ends up in second place. Overall, being second-best in everything makes Roddy a very talented person, but he never gets any respect. Scrappy losers don't make it into record books. Is there any wonder he's bitter and belligerent?

Yes, I am aware this means I am keeping the black man down. And creating an angry black man. I can't win, can I?

All I can do is ask for you, the reader, the know my strip is about CLASS WARFARE and not RACIAL DIVIDES! I'm all about getting into issues about money and intellectual differences, and I do know in real life these issues do have some overlap - but my world is one of critters! This is supposed to give me a "get out of race issue free" card.

But then I went and made Kaitlyn Hu. I wanted to have cake and eat it too.

AND I have no idea how to draw these animals with India ink yet. Way to go, Chrispy!

Fathers Day

As promised, here's another Precocious parent. Originally Harvey Linkletter was also going in this post, but his sketch was lost to a tragic Photoshop accident. Oh well, gives me time to make better sketches to share. (It'd been about a year since I last drew Harvey.)

Gene Et, Tiffany's dad, is a blessed soul. His unnatural good luck has allowed him to find success without even trying. Currently, he's a VP in some big corporation and lost in the bureaucracy. He's too highly ranked to take the fall for small mistakes and not ranked high enough to take the fall for big ones. In truth, he has no clue what his job actually is! All he does is show up, play online for eight hours and go home with glowing performance reviews. Sitting a desk with nothing to do may not be your definition of blessed (it's not mine either) but Gene makes the best use of his time. Oh, and pay is excellent! Like any blessed individual, Gene tends to be more fun-loving and irresponsible than most. Still, things always work out in the end for him.

Gene is a character I struggled with in designing. It would be a cop-out to just make him an older, male Tiffany. Yes, it's cartoon logic to have parents look exactly like their children - and, yes, I know it's the other way around, but in these cartoons the kids are designed first - but it bugs me so. When taking on Precocious, I wanted to mix things up. In fact, the idea of family likeness is the center of Precocious' second story arc.

When it comes to kid/parent clones, you have the Pingo family. As they are red foxes, there's only so much wiggle room there. At most I will play with the coloring of each individual Pingo, but their similarities are something I will use in storytelling. Autumn is the spitting image of Ivy as a child, much to Ivy's chagrin.

Harvey and Deirdre Linkletter also have a clear resemblance to their child. To illustrate how well they match up, each parent has one floppy ear. Their son, Jacob, has both. Physically, Jacob and Harvey are both cream-colored mutts. The difference, non-floppy ear aside, is that Jacob is far fluffier. Said fluffiness comes from Deirdre, who is modeled after a border collie. The family ties are visually obvious, but the characters still have their unique looks. I'm happy with this balance.

Both of my kitty families were modeled after actual kitty genetics. We all know that house cat litters can contain several coloration varieties. In the Oven family, Bud does have a clear resemblance to his mother, Sydney. (The Scottish fold ears go a long way.) Joseph Oven, however, is a giant, hulking white feline. Father and son look like they have nothing in common - but that's kitty cats for you, right?

For the Et family, I went for the general mix. Gene is a buff-colored cat. Sky is a simplified gray tabby. (I refuse to draw all those stripes!) Tiffany is a simplified calico, who might get more noticeable patches of color on her paws/tail as time goes on. The rest of the Et children will be traditional cat variances. While they haven't been designed yet, I'm thinking one will be a tortoiseshell and the rest will be a mix of gray and orange tabbies.

Have I put too much thought into this stuff? I'm sure. Still, I hope that by planning things out like this I can create a rich strip with more sophistication and depth. Only time will tell if this strange ambition pays off.