#16: Loyalty, lessons, and illegibility

Hello my learned friends,

It’s time to kick off those boots and get this train moving with another set of cartoons. This week we have an early lesson in loyalty, an advanced puppy school, and a struggle I suspect many cartoonists face.

And it’s all for you, and all right here.

Enjoy!
Chris

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Caption: "And here we find an early loyalty program."

We all have them, the cards in our wallets, fraying at the edges from that one time we went to that cafe on the other side of town and got a loyalty stamp, knowing that you were unlikely to go back there.

But maybe loyalty programs started earlier than this. Maybe they weren’t just for coffee. Maybe our ancestors also had loyalty programs for different things, you know like oversized plates of meat. This cartoon considers all of these things.

I hope we’ll find this in a cave somewhere, eventually.

A little artist’s note: Caves are funny things to draw. In the initial drafts of this cartoon I had an almost excessive amount of shading. There were simply layers upon layers of it, there to try and show depth and darkness. However, while this, eventually, look kind of cool and interesting, it also felt super crowded and a little lost. Definitely not something intended. So, instead, what we have is the opposite of shading: lines. Ever increasing lines. It’s not the same effect as a full shade, but it does make everything feel a whole lot less crowded.

Caption: "Now let me take you through how to organise your day."

It’s a modern world and we are all modern people and maybe dogs are also a bit modern too.

Where do dogs get their sense of loyalty? Why is it that it seems like they are here only to serve us, their humans? Maybe it’s through centuries of domestication, or maybe it’s through an advanced puppy school like this.

It’s likely we’ll never know.

A little artist’s note: This is one of those cartoons where I feel like I spent an almost disproportionate amount of time thinking about how the dogs would visually represent the schedule on the board. How to make it easy to read and clear for everyone. Does it work? I think so. Have I presented it in the best possible way? That’s a clear maybe. I’ll let the real world decide on that one.

Caption: Cartoonist struggles to draw hands.

I really love this visual, but perhaps only because, as a cartoonist, it’s something I really do struggle with.

It seems almost implausible that something that we see everyday, that we use constantly, that we feel, would be something that could be so hard to draw. And yet, time and time again I find myself drawing a set of hands and noticing that the thumb is definitely not where it should be, or where there is somehow one too many fingers. And don’t even get me started on a pointing hand.

I guess what I’m saying is: it’s the things that you don’t think will be a struggle that end often end up being the struggle in the end.

A little artist’s note: No artist note for this one. This entire cartoon is an artist’s note.

Thanks for reading MiddleSquiggle!

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