While I am in no way a great artist, I’ve been passionate about drawing ever since I was a child. Back then, I would illustrate all kinds of stories filling the pages of every notebook or notepad or even any post-it notes I could get my hands on - some of these would be meta enough to reference pop culture, myself, or my other stories. While I enjoy simplicity like stick figures, there are times where I’m a stickler for the details. My work nowadays can be found in the storyboards I draw up for my film projects, and are typically freehand.
I wanted to tap into a lot of this experience when working on my comic. I wanted it to be funny at first, but dive deeper into something directly connected to me as its creator. I wanted to be cheeky enough to reference something funny in the past that only a few people would get, but at least be funny enough at first for many to smile at. I wanted the comic to break the fourth wall to some extent, which plays a big part in my sense of humor overall. Lastly, I wanted to go a little over the top while also keeping it painfully plain.
On an Intro to Video Production and Editing class quiz last year, one of the questions required us to draw a diagram of the 180-degree rule in filmmaking - naturally, I thought it would be funny if the stick figures in my diagram would acknowledge the fact that the axis of action was more than just an imaginary line, but a literal one in their cartoon world. I wanted this reference to be the endgame of the cartoon I made in this comic strip, as doing something so simple was me thinking outside the box to make something tedious a little bit fun.
I made “thinking outside the box” the theme of the entire cartoon, structuring the rest of the “plot” around it. Why not have a cartoon character literally break the fourth wall of the panel that contains them so they can be free to think outside the box quite literally?
The drawings took a couple of failed attempts, even if I was only using lead pencil. I decided to attach several pieces of paper together to not only make the canvas large enough for my idea, but to also show that each line of panels was breaking into a new level of reality, like inception. A cartoon within a cartoon within a cartoon.
All of this culminated into the cartoon you can see here (that is, if you can read my handwriting).
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