This is Historic Times » homeless

Powder Keg

deephurting — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 14:00:06 +0000

I wasn’t planning on doing a 4th of July cartoon, but I had this idea on the 2nd and thought it was clever, so I executed it at the last minute.

Hope Croaks

deephurting — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 15:00:51 +0000

This cartoon references a classic piece of Warner Brothers animation, One Froggy Evening, which is widely considered among the greatest animated cartoons of all time.

This took quite a bit longer to draw and color than the last cartoon I made, which I banged out in an evening and an afternoon immediately after having the idea. I needed to spend some time re-watching the cartoon short and sketching characters from it, and after the lineart was finished, I carefully pulled most of my color palette from some framegrabs. I also spent some time researching the desk in the Oval Office.

I think this looks pretty nice, although I wish I’d come up with a good way to make the pattern on the Oval Office’s curtains without making the picture too busy. There’s a lot of careful design going on here, such as my decision to cross-hatch the background of the first panel in a manner reminiscent of a musical staff, while following a strong vertical line theme in the second panel, so as to make everything in it feel heavier.

That’s None of Your Business

deephurting — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:53:16 +0000

Bless You, Kind Sir

deephurting — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 17:00:38 +0000

That’s a nice double-entendre with the cardboard sign, eh?

Besides being an Earth Day cartoon, this one also doubles as my tribute to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. There was a flood of cartoons addressing his death, and almost all of them were extremely disappointing in how lazy and vapid they were, as well as their inability to communicate anything of value the cartoonist had learned from Vonnegut’s writings.

From his books and what I’d read about him, he seemed like the type of guy who’d rather people remember what he said than who said it, so instead of drawing a cartoon centered around him, I felt it would be more fitting to quote him on something he apparently cared about. Thus, the above.