a Smeary Soapbox Press webcomic by Dale Martin
Hope you all had a great Free Comic Book Day!
I spent part of last Saturday doing bag sketches at AstroKitty Comics and More; some are pictured below. I was most surprised when a boy chose the Marvelman bag over the Shazam! one. It must have been because of Cap’s badly drawn hand…
Things I liked about this week’s strip.
1. “Inflating my blanket”
2. Senor Talkingdog (The perfect last name!)
3. Watusi’s dark panel (I enjoy the “inner panel” technique you occassionally use. I might steal it one day!)
Love all of the bag sketches! That’s a great idea and I like seeing your versions of other people’s toys! You have to use that Watusi sketch as an actual cover! It’s perfect.
And I would have choosen The Big Red Cheese!
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Glad you liked my pidgin Spanglish there!
I was fairly pleased with the inset panel; still can’t decide if the black border was too much, though…
The Watusi bag may not end up as a cover … though it would make a good variant cover, wouldn’t it?
The Shazam one was one of the first I did, and I couldn’t resist doing the same layout as a Marvelman bag when I spotted one of his comics at the store!
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Joel, the proprietor of Astrokitty has done illustrated bags from time to time, and I thought it would be fun to try – it was a fun surface to draw on!
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Hey Dale! Ha! Inflating my blanket! That’s awesome! Another great strip Dale! Hmm, what did happen to Rodrigo? Can’t wait to find out next week! Enjoyed the bag sketches also, I personally would have picked the Madman one! Glad you had a good FCBD!
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My favorite was the Hulk bag – it was the first one that I was really pleased with as I got warmed up … and the first one that got snatched up! It did inspire me to pull out my phone to take pictures of some of them, at least.
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The Watusi bag was one of the requests (“do a tough Watusi”); the other was Deadpool – I enjoyed doing the requests, since they’re things I wouldn’t have thought of doing otherwise.
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As several have said, “inflating my blanket” was great!
The inset dark panel I think looked good. I don’t think the border was too thick. If you made it any thinner, you’d have to take off from the inside edge, because having Watusi’s nose break the outer line would make it look strange.
The bags were great. Brent Schoonover in Minnesota has done a similar thing for a couple years at the Minnesota show. he gets one bag each week when he picks up his new comics, and then draws on them, and sells them at shows and donates them to the charity art auction. Your bags were very cool. In order I would put them as Watusi, Thor, Shazam, Hulk, Madman and Marvelman – proving only that it’s different strokes for different folks, cuz they were all good! The Watusi bag image should definitely be either a variant cover or a pin-up or something when you eventually collect this saga – it’s too cool not to use again somewhere or somehow.
Given that the Thor movie opened so shortly before FCBD, I would wager that he was a very popular character for sketch requests across the country. The event I went to on Friday night, leading up to the midnight release of the comics, I was the 3rd person to request a Thor from one of the artists there, out of the first 10 or so sketches he did, and he probably did another 7-10 more sketches after that.
Also got Double Dip #1 in the mail today – THANK YOU! I enjoyed it very much.
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You know, I tend to not take bags when I pick up my weekly goodies. Maybe I should rethink that, though…
If I was to rank these, it’d probably be Hulk, Madman, Watusi, Thor, Marvelman, and Shazam. Should have taken a pic of the Deadpool one, though – I liked it quite a bit, too…
Glad you enjoyed Double Dip – I was pleased with it. Now I need to get started on the next one!
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Watusi the Talking Dog 