Moss Piglet (September 2022):
Comic Stips
This year, I've been contributing to a small art magazine out of Wisconsin, "Moss Piglet". It's a round-about tale involving my High School Art Teacher getting in contact with me to see if I was interested in doing an Art Show of former students (I was and did participate in the Art Show back in July), and he suggested sending work to "Moss Piglet", as he was friends with the publisher and he contributed to regularly. It seemed like fun and I've been contributing ever since (although, through a mistake on my part involving a deadline, I did miss the Cryptid issue in March 2022, which I was looking forward to participating. D'oh!).
Each month they have a prompt/theme and the various artists and poets work around it. September's was "Comic Strips", so that was something right up my alley--and fits with the Blog here a little bit. In this case, I thought it would be fun to do a series of self-referential comic strips based on various comic strips throughout history ("The Yellow Kid", "Little Nemo in Slumberland", "The Far Side", "Zippy the Pinhead", and "Peanuts"). And, of course, egomaniac that I am, inserted myself into the story, as well.
I used Clip Studio Paint to create the strips and added a series of newsprint-style textures from Retro Supply Company over top to give it a Sunday Paper feeling to the cartoons. I will admit that the idea behind the cover was better than the carry through. I mean, it's OK, but it was so much better in my head, of course, with comic characters coming out of their strips to look at a Sunday Paper, etc. Also, the "Zippy the Pinhead" pilfered a bit of Grant Morrison's "Animal Man" with the "I see you!", and I did use the same joke twice with characters pointing to themselves on the page. And the self-portrait on the last page/panel... eh, it could be a lot better, but ran out of time, alas. Ah, well. I had "The Yellow Kid" joke of "I was in 'Moss Piglet' and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt" done before the self-referential comics idea and it looked a little plain all by itself, so I added other older comic strip characters in the background to fill it out a bit. And, yes, I actually have used "Hully Gee!" as an interjection every once in a while throughout most of my life because of "The Yellow Kid".
[Aside: While getting together some research for the comic strips of yore, I read some "The Yellow Kid" strips and was fully expecting it to have some racist content from the time period it was written... but, Holy Smokes, while the strip was amusing and imaginative at times, anytime there was a black character... YIKES!]
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For those of you interested, here's the link to the Homepage for "Moss Piglet": https://www.krazines.com/
You can also view previous issues online at: https://www.krazines.com/archives.html
Feel free to subscribe and tell 'em John D. sent you.
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Done digitally in Clip Studio Paint.
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