Making of "Cardboard Dreams (remastered)

An animated GIF showing each step in making this comic.

I've never been a big fan of remakes, but I realized that if I want to release a book with a consistent style, I'm going to need to remake some of the classics if I want them included.  Rather than doing a big clump of them later on, I decided to start peppering them in here and there between the new ones.

Compared to the "Copy Cats" remake, this one was hard to get going.  There was a lot "wrong" with the other one, but I was still quite pleased with the original of this.

I couldn't justify just updating the art, I wanted to add something to it, so that long time readers didn't feel cheated.

The first glaring issue was the text, it was way too small in the original.  Once I enlarged it to my normal size, it didn't leave much room for her face.   I umm-ed and err-ed over the problem for a while before realizing I could just make the whole comic longer, which let me amp up her speech AND make the 1st panel less cramped.

My next idea was to include the baby.  Looking back now, it seems so weird that he wasn't in the original, but his real life counterpart was just a little lump of an infant back then.  His character has really blossomed lately so I couldn't imagine him not getting involved now! :)

I did miss leaving the Scout toy out of the last panel, as the idea of him setting up a toy customer really was pretty fun, but I hoped I could make up for it with the baby's "WTF!" expression.

I started out giving the mom a similar facepalm to the original, but then I remembered the "defeated" pose I scrapped from the "Boy Fights" comic and thought it would fit in here nicely.

I was pleased to redo the kid's final expression as I was never happy with the original.  I was going for an anxious customer service wince, but I didn't quite nail it and it's ambiguous nature (is he smiling or not?!) always bothered me.  I went straight for a weary expression this time, which I think sells the joke better.

I'm a lot more conscious of composition these days -what order of things should be revealed first for maximum impact?  While penciling this out, I decided the last panel worked better showing her first, so I went back and flipped all the panels to match.

Finally I did a spoof of the Amazon logo with Amazing.com instead.  Some other people already thought of it online, but I still thought it was funny.  I had a mini panic after I spent all the work on the logo that I hadn't checked it didn't go to a porn site or something, but it's luckily quite benign! :)