#25: Short, middle, and long distances

Hello captains of industry,

It’s another week of mayhem.

In this week’s cartoons you’ll find a shave gone wrong, a peculiar dating situation, and a distance worth looking into.

Cleaning his glasses,
Chris

Like what you see? Follow me on Instagram (@chrisshorten), or talk a friend into following me on Instagram.

Caption: “You got anything for beards?”

I am a card carrying member of the beard club. My face would be lost without it. Not only that. Without my beard my face would look like that of a rather large toddler.

Recently, I slipped while shaving. Nothing major, and my partner just shrugged and claimed no-one would notice. But every time I looked in the mirror, it was all I could see staring back at me. And it made me wonder: is there some sort of beard toupee out there?

If not, perhaps it’s a business idea on the horizon.

A little artist’s note: This one hits quite close to home. I’ll admit that I’ve never been to a toupee store, but I kind of imagine this is how they look. But the challenge here is not trying to guess what the store would look like, but trying to come up with a ton of different hair/wig styles. The question I had to ask myself was: how can I make them all look different and all look real? The answer, in the end, was to just draw a load of random styles and hope for the best. They’re all fun, and the curves are a little Muppet-inspired, but my personal favourite is the one with just the small amount of hair above the ears. Because, if that’s your look, then I guess you need to own it.

Caption: "I'm just not looking for anything more than a person of interest, right now."

Does fighting crime and a dating life exist?

I’m not sure how intended it is, but we watch a lot of crime TV. You know, someone does something wrong, and someone else tries to track them down. But what about the love lives of those doing the tracking? And how much of that life seeps unintentionally into their love lives?

There’s probably a handcuff joke in there somewhere, too.

A little artist’s note: This one is a pretty simple composition, but I really didn’t want to push it too far. I could have made the background fairly intricate but it really wouldn’t have added too much to the scene beyond what the two people already say. Instead, there are just got a few small details here and there, and some fine lines in some even smaller places. Simple.

Caption: “Let's go darling, we have a perfectly good distance to stare into at home.”

The distance is a funny thing.

We climb that mountain. We sit on that rock. We gaze longingly to the horizon. We get that epiphany. It can be a truly lovely moment. But is the ‘distance’ everywhere? What makes the mountain so special?

Food for thought (while you stare off into said distance).

A little artist’s note: I really like this visual. The couple, sitting on the rock, staring off into a distance that can only be imagined by the reader. It’s a really nice sort of feeling. The challenge in this cartoon was not the foreground, but our old friend the background. In earlier drafts, this had an almost excessive amount of background detail. From clumps of trees to amazing cloud cover around the mountains. But, as is predictable in these things, there was so much background that it took a lot of attention away from the foreground. The solution, in the end, was to lower the mountains so that only they were actually visible. It’s not as detailed, but it makes the focus fairly clear.

Thanks for reading MiddleSquiggle!

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