FROM THE ARCHIVES: Issue One, Page Seven

This week’s post continues my From The Archives series, where I revisit one of my earlier pages and provide some insight on its creation. I’m going in chronological order, so that those of you who have just discovered the comic can get caught up!

Hi there!

This week I’m going back to take a second look at page seven from issue one!

This is the second page of the musical number. My overarching goal for this sequence was to communicate the idea that while Steve Rollerman (Steamroller Man’s secret identity) is a happy-go-lucky buffoon who rolls through life unbothered by much of anything, he’s also unwittingly annoying the people around him, and thus making their experience of life in Kurtzberg City much different from his.

I’m the first one to admit that drawing cartoon animals is not one of my artistic strengths. I had written the lyric about the sewer rats and alley cats getting along, so I knew I wanted to go for a literal depiction of that in this panel. Since this was a one panel gag, I decided to just design these creatures on the page. I tried to stay away from anything that looked too “Disney-esque” because I didn’t think it would fit in well with the art style I was using for the rest of the characters. I’m still not highly enthused by my final animal drawings, especially the cat’s face, but I think the pigeons at least have some nice shapes.

The second panel was fun - a visual gag involving Steamroller Man’s huge head in a cramped space, in this case a subway car. To add insulting to injury, he’s also spreading his arms and legs wide (Steamroller Manspreading, if you will) to take up the largest amount of space he possibly can. Like the animals in panel one, the passengers were all designed on the page as I worked. Unlike the animals in panel one, coming up with various human designs on the fly was a pleasure! I added the title “How to Deal With Annoying People” to the cover of one passenger’s book as an ironic mini-joke, and later found out that there is actually a published book with that title!

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This is the part where I share some extra behind-the-scenes pics and a bit more commentary for paid subscribers.

For everyone else, thanks for reading, and keep rolling!