Making of "Flying Cars"

This happened to poor J the other day.  He bought a smart meat thermometer which sounds great on paper.  He was already cooking when he cracked it open, excited to use it for the first time.  The setup was ridiculous and his food was going wrong while he tried to get it working.  At one point he shouted the above and I couldn't help but laugh (discretely!)  We've all been there -jumping through stupid techno hoops to get something that should work to JUST WORK!

Needless to say he ended up having to wing it with his meat temperature that day. His food turned out OK, but he was still stewing about the whole ordeal while he was eating and thinking of firing off a tweet about it.  I asked if I could turn it into a comic instead and he agreed -happy to have his grievance broadcast to a wider audience.

I'd never drawn kitten Joel before and had been looking to do more with kitten Fran, so I asked if I could change it to being about her and have a slightly different tech problem.  Wanting to stick it to the thermometer company, he said no, it HAD to be about the thermometer! 🤣

So to designing kid Joel I went!  I wish I had pictures to show of the process, but I was so excited to see how he might look, I just kind of barreled through!  I basically took the linework for kitten Fran and Vincent, superimposed them on top of each other, put the opacity down and used them as a guide to draw Joely type shapes on top.  Kid Fran is a bit pudgy and closer to Cooper's shapes,, so I wanted young Joel to be a bit more wiry like Vincent.  I've drawn some pictures of Joel for the book where he's a young adult and he has a bit more fur up top, so I thought it would be fun to give kid him Vincent's iconic head tuft too.

I thought of 3 classic "in the future we'll have..." things, although in retrospect I wish I'd done hoverboards instead of jetpacks to get a Back To The Future reference in there.

J's real meat thermometer is bluetooth, but I worried it wouldn't be as clear what it was so I added a wire going to his phone.  I checked online and apparently wired ones do exist as well!

Lastly to make the 1st panel more exciting I added a spacy type background -heavily influenced by the meme background from Inisde.