Happy birthday, BVB! I started making these around the end of November last year as part of an attempt to get myself just generally drawing more, and I couldn’t have predicted that’d I’d fall crazy in love with them. I also wasn’t expecting anyone else but me to really dig it! This comic has been one of the best parts of the past year for me, and it just warms my little heart that it keeps getting positive reactions from friends, acquaintances, family (ha ha, yep, my family’s seen all the smutty ones) and rad internet people. Love you all.
My New Comic Year resolution is to maybe put an actual schedule on these things and do more of them — because seriously, I want to tell a million pastel cartoon band stories. Onward!
Something else I’ve been meaning to mention: one of my activity pages is in the current issue of ROCKSALT, a free comics newspaper that you can pick up in Austin, Texas! Which I’ve never set foot in! This is the work of my unstoppable best comixpal Jeanne and her crew, and I’m delighted to be this weird lone Canadian connection to it.
Kind of a lot of text in this one — but hey, the text in these is fun to do.
Additional notes:
• Man, Foxy Monoxide is becoming a real contender for the constantly-changing status of Secretly My Favorite Character. She’s so easygoing.
• The first draft of this, before being cut down for Way Too Much Text, had Turpentine following up this “CLEMENTINE” bubble with another indignant question about how come Honey knows her SECRET REAL NAME. The answer (which was not in this dialogue) is that Billy The Reporter spilled it on at least two different occasions.
• As you may recall, we first saw Hair Streak Red Skirt Girl back here. The way I originally had it written, she had a rhyming line in the subsequent song — but then I ended up totally reworking it, and her one line got cut. I think this one’s an improvement anyway.
• Looks like it’s finally time to stop having to keep track of everything these guys drew on each other with markers. Onward to more band adventures!
Note: this is a world of vinyl records, no computers, and rotary phones with crazy long cords. It’s not set in the past, though — I imagine it as a slightly alternate-universe-ish present day.
Lucky comic number 33! This song’s been kicking around in my sketchbook getting re-written over and over for months, and I’m glad I finally found a place for it. It’s also got a Part 2 that I’m looking forward to drawing, but I think I’m going to shift gears back to the Candy Hearts next — I’ve totally been neglecting them due to the Sourballs being pretty much my favorite. I’m enough of a dork about this that I have detailed notes about every character (like, the bible of what traits they have, and what dynamics they have with others, and the strict rules of what they aren’t), and I definitely have the most written about Turpentine and Arsenic.
Oh, yeah, and the other thing I wanted to mention was how much I like drawing extra background characters in this world — they mostly have this thing going on where they need to look…fun…in order to be visually consistent with the main characters. Pretty much everybody dresses with this sort of fusion of the 90s, the 80s, and a bin full of costume parts.
I’m pretty sure that part of the reason people would go see this band is that they’re prone to unpredictable antics.
This one was the biggest challenge yet to the self-imposed No Swears law of these comics (which I think, overall, makes it funnier in this retro sort of way…). It was actually a real challenge to keep what they’re graffiti-ing on each other relatively clean.
Notes: Turpentine just smokes when she’s drinking, whereas Arsenic smokes basically whenever he doesn’t have anything else in his mouth.