Making of "Let it Out"

Bad news: this one was a nightmare.  Good news! it generated a bunch of behind the scenes content! 

I was approached by Skybound to do a comic to help promote Mr. Lovenstein's new book Kickstarter.  I was truly honored to be asked because I always feel a little different from those "cool" webcomic folks.  I'm just a silly mum drawing cats and it feels a bit different than the pure crisp humor they do.  

He said the comic could be whatever I wanted as long as it was about "Feelings" -the name of the book.  Now, those of you who have followed me a while know that I enjoy a good style copy, and as this was an advert for his book, I thought it would be fun to draw my characters in Mr. Lovenstein style!  I started on the comic above and it was going well, but then Skybound casually dropped that it was also going to be *IN* the book!  That changed everything.  Now it was no longer just an ad for my fans to check out his book.  It was an ad for HIS fans to check out MY comic!  Also if there's going to be a section in the book with guest artists, it would look a bit weird for everyone to be drawing in their own styles and then there's my comic looking like I just copy him! 😅

I needed to change direction, but I was having one of my shitty hormone weeks and just couldn't figure out how to do it.  After listening to me rant and rave, J came to my rescue with this sketch:

Even with this though; the comic was like pulling teeth!  The characters at the correct proportions didn't fit and there were a lot of tangent issues (eg Vince in front of Fran or how to clearly show the chair being thrown when it's intersecting the table legs AND Joel's legs!)

After much stress I came up with this:

-But I thought it was too aggressive.  Vincent is throwing chairs and has a parent teacher conference.  Well... yeah!  He's clearly violent!  And now Fran is too!  It worked when it was in Mr. Lovenstein style, but once it was in mine it was uncomfortable.  I wanted to do a different, happier comic, but my brain wasn't forthcoming with solutions!  I asked J and he said the faces just needed to be a bit sillier and drew me this:

It was better, but I still thought the aggression was over the line.  Last thing I wanted was people thinking I'm some kind of abusive mom!  I went into a panic trying to think of other things Vincent could be mad about that would in turn make Fran mad.  He's the step by step where you can see me exploring it in panel 2:

Eventually I settled on Vincent eating the last cupcake.  It made the rage more ridiculous and had the additional joke of him being mad at himself for eating it.  Can't have your cake and eat it too and all that!  It wasn't perfect, but the deadline was closing in.  I also changed their strained UURGGHH noises to catty ones to try to coax it into more of a "cats being weirdos" direction.

In the end I kind of hate it, but I got it done and it's hopefully better reading it fresh than looking it after the hours I've spent fighting it!  As of writing, Mr. Lovenstein's Kickstarter is still ongoing, so I might try to redraw the comic in his style to give him some more advertising and make myself feel better about the whole debacle!