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.