Making of "Recursive"

I had a lot of fun making the zombie comic last year, so I thought I'd try a robot version.  For these kinds of comics, I make a list of all the typical family things (bedtime, mealtimes, getting kids ready etc) and imagine how things might go down in a zombie/robot/whatever world.

I LOVE Futurama, so I wanted to channel that with my robots.  I realized the way robots talk is similar to The Beings in Strange Planet, so I went to look at his comics for inspiration.  I reverse engineered some to see how they work and most are very ordinary conversations written in an awkward way.  I wrote out some ordinary family conversations myself and played around using tech speak to translate them into robot.  

I liked the idea of some sort of error occurring and found my way into the kids getting stuck in a loop.  A song seemed logical and I was about to start dabbling in tech speaking up some nursey rhymes when Baby Shark hit me.  I googled the scientific name for shark and put it all together.  The doo doo doo's sounding so perfect coming from robots and I hoped they'd trigger the reader into recognizing the song.

With the script down, I started designing the robots. I already had "Future Mommy" from a previous bonus panel, so I only had to do the other 3.  J is into vintage things, so I made his robot look older.  Then I combined elements of both parents in the kids:

I flatted out the comics colors using the usual pink background and B&W speech bubbles, but I thought I could do better.  I played around with some more Futuramay background colors and made all the speech bubbles green and black.  J then had the idea of making some of the speech bubbles Gameboy colors, so I switched the boys (GameBOY, gettit?!) which solved an issue I was having with the last speech bubble getting lost in robo-Cooper's face.