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...