Making of "Gaming Marathon"

I came up with this one ages ago after watching the kids bouncing around gaming.  I knew it would be challenging visually and I didn't feel I had the chops for it at the time, so I left it on my ideas list.  There it sat until last month when our oldest celebrated his 9th birthday.  He asked for a gaming party at home and we delivered.  Our house filled to the brim with bouncy gaming boys, I realized quite how on point the joke was and resolved to draw it!

I started by making the middle panels weird shapes to exaggerate the kinetic energy.  Using the shapes as a guide, I filled them with Vincent doing various movements.  I jumped between arm and leg movements so it felt as dynamic as possible.  The rough pencils came out better than I expected, but I knew the challenge was not over!  I had to make sure I kept the energy of the roughs in the neat lines.

I am not good at drawing without a framework, so I use pre-drawn lines from a character sheet to keep things on model.  I'll drag the lines in, make them fainter, chop them up and draw on top of them to make a new pose.  This works great for static poses, but has the danger of sucking the life out of dynamic ones.  As my drawing skills have improved, I'm becoming braver about "breaking the rules" and doing some poses freehand.  My brain fights it, because  the proportions are "wrong", but if done right they are so much more fun!

Once I was satisfied with all the poses, I turned to refining the first and last panels.  Honestly I could have left them as they were, but I get obsessive about making the read as smooth as possible.  My issues were: 1) Is it funnier if Vincent looks at her at the end or doesn't? And 2) if he is still in the last panel, will it look like he was just jumping around to trick her?  There was no 100% correct answer to either of these, but I decided to go with keeping his eyes locked on the screen and for him to continue bouncing.  Once I made that choice, Fran walking off to the right made it unclear if he was looking at her or the screen, so I made her walk left instead.

The final last minute change was Fran's eyes.  It it was animated, she would have blinked hard while delivering both lines, but as it's a comic, that would have made it look like she's walking around blind!  I had to have them open in at least one of the panels.  To start with it was in the last panel, but it kept bothering me that it should be the first.  I decided to quickly rough it out to satisfy my curiosity and damnit if it didn't look better to me, so I had to switch them around (not an easy job once the comic has been colored!)  I can be such a dumbheaded perfectionist sometimes! 😅