Madinkbeard - Derik Badman

While I haven’t been posting here much, I have been working on some projects. One of them is an idea I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, I’ve tentatively called it the “Stolen Birthday Present” constraint.

As I read more and more archives of comic strips (so many excellent ones to choose from these days with even more coming (Terry and the Pirates! Little Orphan Annie! Pogo!), I first started noting the times when that comic strips had content that related to their actual time of publication. This is most often prevalent for holidays like Christmas or Thanksgiving or more generally for strips that follow the seasons (Gasoline Alley, Peanuts). Then I started taking note of strips that occurred on my birthday in previous years.

I’ve been wanting to do a little more with appropriated imagery/text, so I came up with the idea to make a collage of panels published on my birthday (the date not the year). The other day I paged through all my comic strip collections and marked all the strips from that date (in this case, December 29th), more options on dailies, less in Sunday strips. I then scanned selected panels from those strips, enough to make a 2 page comic with a six panel grid (actually 11 panels as I ended it with a wide panel). I reorganized these into something that resembles a visually progression, considering in my head scenarios that could draw the panels together.

I was surprised by the co-occurrence of certain visual elements in the strips I found. Poles/posts were in numerous of the strips. Two strips featured a man in a checkered coat. Two had women in beds. Two features ships. It was actually a fairly easy prospect to draw them together into an order.

My plan is to takes these collages (below), redraw them and change the words (narration and dialogue) to create a two page comic. I’ve not yet decided how strictly I will stick to the original panels (drawing all elements, pastiching styles?, perhaps making the characters more uniform). That will come in the next stage. First, here are the two pages of collage:

(Sources in order: Captain Easy by Roy Crane, Gasoline Alley by Frank King, On Stage by Leonard Starr, Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond, Popeye by E.C. Segar, Captain Easy (again), Gasoline Alley (again), Krazy Kat by George Herriman, Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray (two panels), On Stage (again).)

(It occurs to me I never went through my Peanuts collections, one of these panels may change.)

The final version can be found in my minicomic “Repetition. Sound. Appropriation.” which you can purchase over in the “>Store.