A Week Too Late?

This would've been a great strip last Wednesday, it was the exact year anniversary of the Red Sox winning their first World Series, the Series just ended with another Sox victory (White this time) and Theo Epstein was still with the team. However, life happens, so this was pushed to this week.

It's still a kick-ass strip, but the one thing that I have learned from this is: in life, timing is everything.

What the hell am I talking about? If you don't know, you should go on over to: www.room19comics.com and check out what you're missing. It's quite a lot this week.

There's a lot to say about this strip, for starters I did a bunch of things differently. I actually drew humans and not comic strip characters when it came to Keith Foulke, Jason Varitek and Doug Mientkiewicz (that is the first time I've ever spelled his name correctly). You might recognize the second panel, it's one of the more famous scenes from last year's World Championship image galleries.

The first one may not be so memorable, this was immediately after Foulke flipped the Edgar Renteria grounder to Minky (I'm not typing his name again) and from the looks of it, let out a primal scream. In my drawing, it sort of looks like he's bitching about a bad call or something, but I swear to you that's how he looked in the picture. I really think that I did a good job of capturing the joy in the face of Minky though; his armed raised, gigantic smile on his face. I'm really proud of that.

The second panel is something new, as Varitek is leaping out of the normal constraints of the box. I don't think that I've ever attempted that before, and I must say that it came out pretty good. With most new things, it became a necessity as when I started drawing Varitek hugging Foulke, I realized that I either made the box too small or the figures too large. I'll leave that to the future philosophers and art critics to judge.

The final panel is tying it all together with the strip, as Eddie, Kurt and Chris celebrate the utter bliss of watching your long-suffering team finally win a World Series after 86 years. I drew Kurt's right arm way too short, but I think that this panel is secondary compared to the other two because that is where the action really is.

This week I experimented with a new way of doing the boxes, I made heavy, dark lines with Adobe Photoshop after my initial lines were messed up. BTW, the text is from none other than WEEI's own Joe Castiglione.

I'm going to try do update the Blog a bit more, but with school and now married stuff, it's getting really hard.