FurBabies Furrst Sunday Strip

One Week Old!

The opening panel from the June 11 Sunday FurBabies.

FurBabies is now a week old. The first Sunday strip appeared today.

I’m pleased at the reception it got during its first week and hope that you are enjoying it. Now that the main characters have been introduced, I start developing their personalities. The leader is Floof the kitten, who gets Sirius into Mischief. She always does this in a state of innocence. Sirius also reveals his innocent, babyish side; he blurts out exactly what is in his head, sometimes at the wrong time. We will learn more about Stella and Shawm next week.

In animation we have a saying that ‘characters come to life’ and start to tell you what they want to do. They start to react ‘in character’ in a new situation. Their reactions should not resemble those of any other character. This also applies to comic strip characters. “In Character” developed very quickly with the animals in FurBabies, but it took longer for Kate.

Kate was the most difficult character to create; there are many clever little girls in comics, some of whom talk to their pets. There are also some little girls who are perfect, or ‘who do anything they want’— in animation. I find perfection extremely boring. Characters with flaws are interesting. But the flaws should not be too negative. We must like the characters even when they get into Mischief.

Comedy comes from frustrating a character’s attempt to do something.

Charlie Brown never got to kick the football.

I threw out the ‘original’ first FurBabies daily because after six months of drawing her, Kate had changed. In that first strip, she is an obnoxious little girl who is angry at something. She starts throwing things. Her flaws were Anger and Impatience. There was no way of saving that daily comic, even when it was rewritten, so it was replaced. Maybe someday it will appear in an article or a book.

I only found out who she really was about a month into the strip. Kate told me herself.

Kate makes mistakes, but she can adapt to changing situations and figure a way out of them. This is sometimes done with the assistance of the animals, although Floof and Sirius, being very young, cannot solve problems themselves. Kate makes suggestions and they happily participate. Kate is extremely resourceful, especially with her Stripey Socks. The Stripey Socks are practically characters in the strip.

Kate can still be angry and impatient. She is only nine, and nine year olds are still immature. She is never in a rage, like she was in that deleted comic strip.

A word about the art style. The characters are hand inked with brush pens on paper (either animation paper or smooth hot press bristol paper.) They are deliberately left ‘rough’. I enjoy animation roughs and feel that they have far more life than tight ‘clean up’ drawings. In Ye Olden Dayes comic strips had to have a tight pen line so that they would reproduce well on newsprint. Digital reproduction and online publication now makes it possible to have rough lines in comics; one of my favorites, BULLY, has a wonderful broken line. https://www.gocomics.com/bully/about-bully

I ink the characters and backgrounds separately and combine them digitally, animation-style.

Floof and Sirius, original drawings for the June 11 Sunday strip. They were inked on paper and digitized, then composited into the strip.

I hand lettered the early strips. After about a month I created a font from my hand printing, and used that to speed up the lettering. There is still a lot of hand lettering when something needs emphasis.

I like a watercolor/gouache look for the color so I paint on top of the black line rather than under it. I only used the fill bucket in one panel of one strip.It suited that strip’s subject matter. You will have a pop quiz in a few weeks to find out which one it is.

FurBabies looks different from most comics, and it will evolve in many ways as new plotlines develop and new characters are introduced. I almost wish I could show you them all at once, so you can see what I see.

Fortunately you can view them here, from the beginning. The character profiles were written three weeks ago, and reflect where the strip will be going.

https://www.gocomics.com/furbabies

I hope that you enjoy FurBabies. And if not, I hope that you find another comic on this wonderful site that you enjoy reading.