#21: Shoes, moods and dudes

Hello rule breakers,

Maybe it’s me, or maybe it’s the cartoons talking, but this week is all about rules. Specifically the kind that get broken.

Inside you’ll find a cartoon about shoes and floors, a cartoon about the multitudes that clowns contain, and a cartoon about sick days and surfing. And all of them are about breaking rules.

Keeping the door locked,
Chris

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Caption: “You can leave your shoes on, just as long as you don't mind me wincing every time you step on the floor.”

I am this person. And the other person too.

Because I always want people to take off their shoes, but I also don’t want to annoy people. Thus, the paradox emerges when I have to make a choice. And often, that choice is to wince uncontrollably. Of course, I’ve also been on the other side of this, and have spent a lot of time at friends’ house wondering if they are going to wince as I walk across the floor in my shoes.

Let’s just say that it’s all a rather complicated emotion.

A little artist’s note: This isn’t a complicated cartoon, though, but it definitely has a real focus on feet and shoes and it makes me smile every time I see the socks. Also, in early versions I was attempting using oversized heads. It didn’t work out, but you’ll see on the woman that her head is, well, kind of sizable.

Caption: N/A

There’s happy clowns. Check. Sad clowns. Check. Killer clowns. Reluctantly check.

I’ll admit that clowns are a bit of an old fashioned joke and visual, but for some reason there is always more to mine from them. Clowns really do contain multitudes, often unnecessarily so.

A little artist’s note: There is nothing overly complicated about this cartoon either, but the challenge wound up being trying to find an angle where you could easily see the switch on the clown’s back, while also being able to see that they were a clown. It’s a cartoonist’s dilemma, I know.

Caption: “I left home thinking it was Friday, which is also when I was planning to call in sick.”

Have you ever woken up thinking it was Friday?

This has happened to me a few times recently. I’ll wake up, and for a good 5 minutes I am convinced that it is Friday, and not the Wednesday or Thursday it actually is. This cartoon pushes this further to ask: what if someone was going to call in sick on Friday, then they realised it was only Thursday, but only when they were halfway to the beach?

We’ve all been there.

A little artist’s note: Would you look at those sandals? Just look at the detail on them. It’s almost like I put so much detail into them that I failed to think of the rest of drawing… Okay, that isn’t quite the case, but the more I make cartoons, the more I get to enjoy the little details like the fine lines of the shoe. If you’re wondering, he’s holding a boogie/body board and not a surfboard because I realised the sheer length of the surfboard would considerably extend the width of the cartoon. Also, they seemed like a lot more effort to draw.

Thanks for reading MiddleSquiggle!

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