Hey, readers! It’s Day 3 of my “Rhymes With Orange” week. Take a look at today’s cartoon here!
If you’d like to read a short humor bit that I wrote about my garbage can (I know, how exciting, right?) you can take a look here (Reading Time is a mere 1.99 minutes!)
“Velia, Dear” will be back on Friday!
This isn’t the usual comment these strips get… rather, it’s a question about technique. In panel two, you have the months falling away so that the last in the sequence (November) is in the back. In panel three, November is still in the back, but the months that ought to follow it are now ahead of it. It took me a moment to realize you switched the method of motion, changing the style of depicting the passage of time. I assume this is a deliberate choice on your part, as opposed to just continuing from where you left off. Was it to create the illusion of time passing at a different rate, or some other kind of artistic experiment?
And do you ever want to see this kind of question ever again?
Neil: Wow — first of all, I DO want to see questions like that! I love how insightful that is!
I remember really thinking hard about those two panels– If you’ll notice, in the very first panel of the strip, the calendar says it’s August. In the second panel, I wanted to show that August had come and gone (as well as Sept. and Oct. too) so that by the beginning of the next panel, I can show the passage of time going forward in another way (sheets of calendar days flying off) starting from November where I left off — but I had to change the direction, because I knew that the reader’s eye reads top-to-bottom, and Left-to-right. So I did it this way, because it’s intuitive, and therefore less able to ruin the timing/flow of the strip.
Boy, you have really hit on something there. I love this stuff — it’s insightful, thoughtful, and gets to the very fundamentals of comics. Thanks!