Strip #2 in my Guest Art period, this is done by the very great Bill Holbrook of syndicated strips On the Fastrack and Safe Havens, and the legendary Kevin and Kell, which celebrates 10 years as a webcomic, which is frankly unbelievable.
I love webcomics creators. Generally speaking, people who do webcomics are some of the smartest, friendliest, strangest, funniest, most interesting people I have ever known. But Bill transcends even that, and is as good a candidate as I can name for “Nicest Person in Webcomics.” With three simultaneous daily strips going (none of which, I learned, is less than 6 weeks ahead in buffer), he’s also probably the hardest working. And his artistic and writing talents speak for themselves. I am humbled to feature his work on this page, and even more so that he’s a fan of PartiallyClips.
At his table at Dragon*Con, I showed him the script for this strip, which just had two entities labeled A and B talking. We threw some ideas back and forth and came up with the empty nightclub idea, with a comedian talking to a stage manager. This art totally brings the script to life, I realized as I laid it out on Monday at my table, on Chris Impink’s computer. This art is more than a good vehicle for delivering the lines, it really does make the lines funnier.
As a non-artist there are aspects of professional cartooning I will never really understand, but I thank Bill for the glimpse. Now go read Kevin & Kell! You’re 10 years behind!!
Heh, this actually makes sense if you’ve read Carlos Castaneda’s books, the concept of ‘not-doing’..
I know of one way to make someone actively not laugh, with good reason to make them do so. You tell them something that makes them kind of feel like laughing because it’s a little funny, but not want to laugh because it’s horrible. Then a second punchline, the true punchline, which completely changes the context of the original comment to something still funny (hopefully more so) but not socially inappropriate to laugh at. This causes the dam’s closed sluices to burst when it’s suddenly full instead of letting the metaphorical water of laughter through at a controlled pace.
Another way to make someone not laugh is to tell them something horrible or shocking, but so funny that they can’t help but snort out the fragments of a laugh through nose and clenched teeth. This works best with a target audience of one, a close, familiar audience of a couple, or an inebriated audience of a small bunch.
For a non-comedian, or a comedian who wants a serious monent, actually getting the audience to passively not laugh can be a difficult thing. I don’t know of any way to do that that doesn’t at least temporarily ruin the comedic mood and require a new buildup once it’s done.
On a less relevant note: VUUV is both a palindrome that uses visually and typographically similar letters /and/ my current CAPTCHA Code. Interesting CAPTCHA Codes are, well… Interesting.