Big Ears & O.K.B.S

April 13, 2012

Woke up at four this morning and got right to work on sketches for the main character in my O.K. Project:

This led to a tighter pen and ink of Kid Burns:

Man, do I know this guy! Totally from New Jersey. Ha.

He's an old guy (one of the last standing Baby Boomers: the year is 2046), which got me to thinking that there aren't really a lot of old guys in comic strips. Found a few, did some sketches:

Also working on an opening scene for this story that is rather ambitious. I'm trying to break it down to the essential parts:

Speaking of being sensitive, a close friend of mine has a big schnozz. He jokes about it, but I think he's taken some major grief over it. Me, I was traumatized by a professional photographer for our high school yearbook, who took one look at me and said, "Big ears, turn your face to the side."

He was just being gruff and impatient because he had a couple hundred class pictures to take and he didn't want to mess around, but I was really impacted by it. Carried that around for years and years. In fact, some of my attempts at drawing are probably as a reaction to that comment. Gee, I wonder what ol' Gopnik has to say about this?

"Clever people are usually compensating for something, even if the wound that makes them draw the bow of art is no worse than an overlarge schnozz and sticking-out ears."—Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker