Mike Dawson Comics

In case it feels like I’m doing nothing except podcastin’ these days, I’m posting some new stuff to prove it’s not the case. I’ve been drawing continually, and working on something that I think is going to be pretty substantive. Here’s some recent panels:

Since I think I’m going to be working on this story for quite some time, I’m trying to decide if and how I should get some of it out there. I think I’d like to print it as a series of mini-comics*, but I also wonder if putting it on the web might be best. Maybe I’ll do both.

* This idea is really appealing, because I’ll have a lot more incentive to get myself to more conventions in 2009.

I read this review of a book called “Why We Make Mistakes” on my subway ride this morning.

Key quote:

In the first chapter, for example, Hallinan posits that people take information in on a purely need-to-know basis, without even thinking about it. He then mentions an experiment conducted at Cornell University, where participants were instructed to ask strangers for directions; the twist was that the conversation would be blocked, literally, by two men carrying a door. In that split second, a door-carrier switches with the stranger, and the directions-giving continues as if nothing went wrong. Hardly any of the experimentees noticed the change, and Hallinan follows with evidence that you, the reader, wouldn’t have either.

An interesting little anecdote. It made me think a little about character design in comics. I’ve sometimes worried about my own inconsistency in that area, especially because I tend to design the character “on the page”. By this I mean I draw them almost for the first time when I get to the page when they first show up, and develop/evolve their look as I progress. A particularly egregious example to my eye is in Freddie & Me, the character of my friend Rob in High School. He had appeared in quite a few scenes before I felt like I really got his design down, and the character started looking more consistent.

The quote above makes me wonder if readers even notice stuff like that though. They probably don’t. Nobody has ever asked me why the Rob character had a longer head when he first appeared, and a potato shaped head later on. I think as long as a reader can always tell who’s who, then the small changes in character design probably don’t register much at all.