Things By Mike

The Evolution of a comic strip and its characters - Part 2

Aug 30, 2007 Blogging, Comics

In part one of this series I talked about how artists tend to continually tweak their characters over time, refining them to an ultimately more polished product. Garfield was a great example since the strip has been around now for just a shade under thirty years. That’s a whole lot of time for tweaking! While my Gummy comic hasn’t been around nearly that long, it’s gone through a little bit of change over the span of its brief life as well. I will talk about those changes later, but in order to do that I must first talk about where it began and how it came to be.

Why do I draw little aliens and where did they come from?
Comic books and graphic novels are cool but I’ve always been drawn to the less realistic looking and much sillier side of comics. There’s no better place to find those silly comics than in your local newspaper. For as long as I can remember I’ve been a huge fan of strips like Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, Marmaduke and many more. I loved that you could tell an entire story in as little as three short frames. For someone with a short attention span like me, that’s perfect!

Back in the early 80s I actually grew up practicing how to draw comics by creating my own little Garfield strips. Unfortunately I don’t have any of those drawings to show you now, but I eventually got to a point where I could draw him pretty well. I always thought it would be great to one day have my own comic strip. I never imagined it would take me about 20 years to finally create one, but better late than never, eh?

I like to think that I didn’t actually choose to draw little aliens but in fact they chose me. I spent a lot of time not paying attention in school and instead doodling on the same pages that were supposed to contain notes. If I wasn’t drawing Garfield I always seemed to be drawing little alien-like creatures. They didn’t quite have the appearance of what Gummy looks like today, but they had similar features like the antennae on the top of their heads and the big black eyes. I guess it was only inevitable that all these years later I’d end up drawing aliens once again.

My original idea for Gummy
In the very beginning I honestly had no intentions of creating a comic strip with the Gummy character. I liked the idea of just drawing simple single frame illustrations. If done well a single frame can be just as effective as several in telling a story.

The image to the right is one of my very earliest drawings of Gummy created about a year ago, which I actually can’t even remember if I ever completed. As you can see it’s pretty rough compared to how I draw him now. I definitely spent more time giving Gummy his personality and demeanor before really polishing him off and developing him into what he has become. He was a sad and lonely little guy, traveling the galaxy looking for love. When he eventually landed on our little blue planet, Gummy’s first true love was a street lamp. It was the bulbous, alien-like head which attracted him to her. She was beautiful.

In the third part of this series we’ll take a trip down memory lane and look at Gummy and how he’s changed in just one short year and how the Lovesick Alien comic strip eventually was born. I’ll of course also talk about the addition of Bella, Gummy’s sweetheart and how she came to be as well. I hope you’ll join me :)

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