This Is What Happens When Your Hero Goes Full Musical

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Issue One, Page Seventeen

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!

Hello, and if you’re a new subscriber, welcome! Today I’ll be sharing some thoughts and reminiscences about making this page:

Aaaaaand... scene! The song is finished!!

I completed this page in October, 2018, and at the time, I had conflicting feelings about having put a musical number into the comic.

On the upside, I loved the absurdity of it all. My initial idea was to cut from the dark, foreboding atmosphere of the opening scenes in Sugar Daddy’s lair, to the happy, smiling face of Steamroller Man strolling the sunny streets of Kurtzberg (another example of comedy coming from contrast, like I touched on in my post about the previous page). I then tried to push that contrast to its wackiest boundary by having him so happy that he launched into song!

It was a funny idea to start with, and I really enjoyed coming up with the rhyming lyrics… but then I actually had to draw the thing! The drawing itself wasn’t the problem as much as working out exactly what to draw. Some lines immediately suggested a gag - the subway scene on page seven being a good example. Other verses were a bit more abstract, and forced me to use more generic scenes. In these instances, I tried to reference movie musical tropes. On every page, I tried to come up with a funny lyric, or a funny image. If I found a way to do both, even better.

The downside of the whole sequence was that it stopped the story in its tracks. Halfway through drawing the song sequence, I realized that it was a complete indulgence that didn’t advance the story at all. Each page was taking around 10 hours to write, draw and letter at this point, and working on the comic only an hour or two each day meant I could be working on this song sequence for a couple of months, in real time! When this dawned on me, my enthusiasm for the work sank, and I just wanted to finish it as quickly as possible. By that point, though, I had committed too much time and effort to it - I’d gone too far to change direction, and the only way out was through.

I could say that this was a good lesson on the downside of diving in without a script… if I’d actually learned that lesson, at the time. I’m only just now trying the idea of writing a script in advance of drawing issue #4!

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Looking back at this page years later, though, it still makes me chuckle and I’m pretty happy with it. I love the humor of coming back to Steamroller Man in the same place we last saw him (on Page Twelve - more about that page in the post linked below), and finding that he’s been holding the last note of his song for the length of the intervening four-page Sugar Daddy interlude.

A Simple Way To Go From "Pantsing" to Plotting

Overall I think it’s a successful page. The art’s decent, I got a couple of gags in there and I reinforced the theme of the song, which is also based around contrast, now that I think about it - Steamroller Man’s happy obliviousness unwittingly creating unhappiness in those around him.

Thanks for subscribing, liking and sharing my posts! Your engagement is the rocket fuel that keeps me going! If you’re a paid subscriber, I’ve got some behind-the-scenes process stuff about the making of this page, behind the paywall!

Keep Rolling!

Matt