Making of "Superstitious"

When we handed the Comictober reins over to the new hosts, I also gave them my leftover prompt ideas, one of which was "Monkey's Paw".  I had a vague idea of a comic about Cooper getting attached to a monkey's paw, like how our youngest fell in love with a pair of skeleton hands one year.

Unfortunately for me, the prompt ended up being Day 2 and I couldn't get a comic together in time.  I was going to shelve it, but found myself wondering what Cooper might wish for.  It suddenly hit me.  To be a different, "better" cartoon family!  I LOVE excuses to draw in other styles and I'm a big fan of Bluey!  This thing practically wrote itself!

I considered trying to draw them as cats in the Bluey style, but I worried it might not be obvious what was happening.  Drawing them as the real Bluey family had it's copyright dangers, but it was too funny not to try.  I crossed my fingers, hoped I wouldn't get sued and began finding reference pictures to mimic the style.

I cut out the reference pics, arranged them and then filled in the gaps to create my scene:

Once I knew it was going to work, I started shoring up the rest of the comic.  I briefly considered having the 3rd panel stay on Cooper while he made his wish, but it made it hard to tell who was talking.  I needed to make it absolutely clear that Fran was the one in the wrong, to justify Joel's strong reaction at the end.

The final panel was a lot of work!  I drew the whole thing by hand, trying to stay as close to the originals as possible.  It wouldn't have been so bad, but I rearranged things a bit and every time something moved, even slightly, I had to draw in what was behind it, which sometimes meant removing and redrawing lines to make them smooth.

At the 11th hour I decided to remove the speech bubbles at the end.  I'd liked her "Don't be silly - Actually, I think it might be real!" sudden switchover, but I wasn't confident that it was reading as I meant it.  Telling the story with their expressions was cleaner.