Making of "Whatchamathingy"

Been playing around with this idea for a while. Initially it was shorter:

Joel "What are you looking for?"
Fran "Those candies I hid from the kids. "
Fran "I put them someplace clever”
Joel "Oh, they’re gone forever then."

It was alright, but nothing particularly... well -clever!! I thought I could punch it up by having looking for something funny, but nothing came to mind, so I started playing around with it being something vague instead:

Fran "Have you seen that thing I got the other day?"
Joel "Urmm"
Fran "Bout yay big.  The kids were trying to stab each other with it so I had to hide it"
Fran "I put them someplace clever”
Joel "Oh, they’re gone forever then."

That was funnier, but I really wanted the joke to be about the "someplace clever". I rewrote it more like it would go down (with me having trouble remembering what the thing was called) and tried to fit it into 2 rows, but the timing was off. Adding the 3rd row and building up the drama before the "clever" face was the ticket!

I wish I didn't have a policy of not posting my kids faces because when J took photos of me posing for the 5th panel, 10yo kept getting in the way. iPhone does this thing where it records a little snippet before a photo, so there's all these videos of me looking like I've lost it, with 10yo bouncing up merrily in the foreground! 🤣

For the "stuff drawer" in panel 2, I really should have gone downstairs and looked at ours, but I was feeling lazy and it turns out that Google has sufficient "stuff drawer" results -which actually made me feel a bit better about ours!

I had some trouble posing Joel at the end. I wanted to convey him switching from being attentive to jokingly dismissive, but it was coming off as mean. I settled on him folding his arms, but it still wasn't quite what I was going for.

I played around with the colors on the 5th and 6th panels to up the drama. I was pleased with the ominous red tint on the 6th, but wasn't completely happy with the depressed blue on the 5th. It was good enough though and I'd already spent too long on this comic. Kind of exciting in a way when you realize there's still things to learn!