the cure and viral success…
where my ideas come from…
more often than not, someone will ask me where i get my ideas from. my answer to this question usually depends on the mood i’m in. no matter what words and phrases color my response, it all boils down to two words: my life. now, i’m not a jetsetter, i don’t travel all that much, i’m not indiana jones or some ex-navy seal… i’m just frank. as harvey pekar has shown us, ordinary people do a lot of living. there is a beauty in “the usual.”
sometimes, ideas are hard to come by. no matter how much life i experience, i just can’t seem to get those experiences into words, and ultimately into pictures. this past sunday, the ideas came to me … literally. a car lost control and plowed into my front yard, narrowly missing the cherry tree i planted almost 4 years ago. luckily no one was hurt.
the fire trucks came, the police came… all my neighbors came to see if they could help and if everyone was ok. once i found out no one and nothing was hurt i began thinking about how i would incorporate this into a comic strip. yes, you read that correctly…i was thinking about how to write a car accident into the comic strip. my cartoonist brethren and sisteren will completely understand. to add to the freaky-deekiness of the whole incident, the driver actually used to live in the house that i now live in… not only that, but lezley actually babysat for this person who was now plowing up my yard.
small, small world…and all i kept thinking was… what would bob say to all this?
little big scream…
just because it’s friday…
the squirrel and i…
do you have to love the characters you write?
does it help when you love them?
for that matter, does it help when you can’t stand them?
i think it’s all of that and a few other things. if i thought bob could do no wrong, then the fun of certain situations would be lost. this may sound kind of out there, but i honestly don’t know what will happen when i have an idea for bob. i don’t think about him as a squirrel… because if i did, i have immediately put constraints on my brainstorming. once i have the core idea… which could be anything from a single word to a covered page in my notebook, that when the fun begins. i either start riffing on that idea… take it in this direction or that… or i just stare at it. staring can either open something up or cross something out. some may think that creation starts when that pencil hits the bristol…in some instances that is true. the riffing, to me, is the best part of this job.
without that riff, there can be no melody… without the melody, rhythm can’t be established… without all of these parts working together… there can be no song… just a loud unorganized jam where no one knows where anyone is.
riffing rules. you have to riff.