Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween!

A 'toon from a Halloween comic that I put together, but didn't get to print.

SPX

Less than a week to SPX! Here's the cover for the "Howzit Funnies" shebang.

Four More

Another couple of the 4-panel funnies. The first one underwent some pretty extensive drawing changes... originally it was a very sparely drawn comic. I decided to beef it up with some more physical cartoonininess, though. The second one I thought of while waiting for a bus at Logan Airport. I had the idea for the words to the last panel and I was shooting through ideas for other panels when I came up with the gag. I forget why I chose a turtle, exactly, but I do remember that I didn't have enough money for the bus (or rather, I had a wrong, but cheaper, ticket, and no additional money). The driver let it slide, though.

On My Way

"On My Way" was a fun Funny to do. Came up with the initial bit, worked on how many different ways I could wring it, and then at the end finally turned the joke in against itself for a punchline. It was fun to draw, too, because the narrative and the images are pretty separated until they converge at the punchline of each verse. It's pretty long, but these are the first three pages to give you a good gist of the thing...

Black Rooster Reel

This one is a little sedate, I admit. Here, no one is really talking... are they not really thinking, either? Feeling? In the Summer-Autumn seasonal transition the Rooster is the flip side of art-as-communication, playing with what's behind the door and around the corner; outside the window, under the water and behind the button eyes.

All Beasts

I essentially started this one with just the first four panels. I had a vague sense of where to go from there, in that I wanted a steady undertow of violence and damnation, but I didn't have anything solid. As I played with it I ended up scraping together a dozen different "marches and tunes," to give it body and form and make it work.

In a lot of ways, though, for all of the violence in the story, it's really about the winter.

Here are the first two pages...

Another Day

Here's another Funny, very much about August in D.C...

The Professor

I started this comic with the story structure and words. One of the things I worked very hard to avoid was to just illustrate a song or a poem. I always worked with a very fixed notion of making comics, using words and pictures and panels. Certain conceits like rhyming and rhythm provided structure and functioned as starting points, but I was always focused on the idea that I was making comics. I had to scrap a lot of ideas at one point or another because I felt that they were too illustrational... To be a Funny, it always had to be about the interplay of words and picture, words vs. words, and pictures to panels.

Four Panel Fun

In some ways, "Bear Bar" and "Fat Frog" were designed as the antithesis of "Hang On," posted below. "Hang On" was something of an effort to create a rollicking, crashing, pile-on of jokes, rhymes and pictures that's (barely) guided to an almost abrupt ending.

These two comics are examples of some four-panel toons that pull in the opposite direction. The pacing here is almost metronomic. I tried to pare things way down, to just four panels, minimal words and almost primitively cartoon images. The original drawings I felt were primitive, but not necessarily in the right way, so I re-drew them. I'm happier now with the somewhat inappropriate pairing of arch-cartooniness to the writing. These four panellers were actually pretty tough, I found. It was difficult coming up with suitably cold, forthright text that methodically works up to a punchline. Matching it with a cartoon that plays off of the text, rather than illustrating it, was equally tough. I had to scrap a bunch of them because they erred in one direction or the other, but of the ones I kept I feel like these two are particularly strong.

Hang On

"Hang On" was really the first "Howzit Funny." It was one of the first that was written, drawn and completed. It's been re-drawn since I first put it out, but the re-working was strictly technical. Anyway, when I put together the first photocopied comic I made it the first toon, and when I made the finished collection I kept it first. It's always been the standard bearer, so it's fitting that it kicks things off here...

Howzit Funnies

"Howzit Funnies" is a group of collected cartoons done by me, Andrew Cohen.

The comics use a rhyming, musical form to track out the beats of comic book rhythms, hijinx, doodads and jazz. The tempos and tones roam over the map, but they're always situated by the "Howzit Funny" style and outlook.

This blog is a place for you to see samples of the Funnies, find new Funnies, and maybe discover the Funnies for the first time. If nothing else, hopefully you find them funny.