Chesca Hause

Making of "Kick"

Added 2025-04-07 19:19:12 +0000 UTC

Rooting through my old tweets and found this real life conversation. I was surprised I hadn't made it a comic and decided to recti-fy (HA!) that!

J has had this thing for years where he'd playfully kick the boys in the butt and then swear blind that the dog did it. They knew it was him, but they'd never catch him doing it or get him to confess. He'd even kick them outside of the house and claim the dog flew there in his helicopter and then flew away again. Sometimes the kids go along with it and the lore gets increasingly ridiculous, other times stuff like this comic happens!

Drawing a kick isn't just about the legs, but what the body is doing to counterbalance. Nobody was around to help me with reference photos, so I Googled "father kicking son" and got a disappointing collection of soccer photos. So I turned to Grok to generate something and in it's custom, it generated some monstrosities, but one pic had potential -just don't look too hard at the hands and feet, yikes!

As you can see in the video above, Joel went though every emotion imaginable in that last panel! I have this thing where I don't like the characters sticking with the same expression through multiple panels, so it was a bit of a puzzle to figure out how this one should go, when "suspicious" would work through the whole thing!

In the end I changed Vincent to be more accusatory in panel 2 (instead of patronizing) and then swapped Joels around so he was taken aback in 3 allowing him to be suspicious at the end.

The RL kid would have replied a more dismissive "Hmm", which felt a bit meh, so I changed it to a funnier shrug.