Making of "Get Baby To Sleep!1"

Back in 2019 I did this comic:

I've been toying around with how to update it to the new style for a while.  I still really like the original gag, in some ways more than the new one, but it was wordy and didn't land as well as I'd hoped.  This is one of the reasons I want to get into animation so much!  Some jokes would just work better if there was a voice over a different visual.  So for this one it would cut away to her discovering the sleeping baby in the carseat and then back to her mad face! 

For the remake I decided to go in a different direction.  Everyone knows that cats love boxes, so the twist of sleep deprived Fran buying a baby gadget only to throw it away for the box was perfect!  I'd originally planned on having the last panel with them in the box and a trashcan off to the side with the discarded baby gadget, but I realized that the camera would need to be quite high to show them inside the box, which would make the trashcan hard to make out.  After some thought I added a panel of her chucking the gadget off camera instead, so the last panel could be shot directly from above.

I brought in the linework from the old first panel, but ended up changing it completely anyway.  It's funny when you realize how far your style has drifted!  I changed the baby to Vincent to emphasize the "first time parent" thing.  I wanted to show him escaping from the swaddle because wow was that ever annoying!  The 2nd panel needed to be changed to a single box and now Amazon does next day deliveries, the "2-3 days later" caption didn't work.  I added Fran to make it more visually interesting and to suggest it's another day.

I wanted them to be curled up like cats in the last panel, but that's always a challenge because that's not how their bodies actually go!  I did the best that I could and then used Fran's tail to cover up most of the impossibilities of the pose! Hurrah for tails!