I have no idea if this comic has external relevance, but it has some personal experiential validity at least. I remember spending literally hours as a kid swimming underwater and thinking about haunting things: What it would Look Like in Atlantis, How Similar is this to Flying, etc etc. There was this terrifying altered state associated with the pool: your basic systems of movement are overloaded; your whole way of interacting with the world changes utterly, into something more eerily natural. I guess that’s what I’m trying to capture, that way swimming TAKES OVER THE BRAINS OF CHILDREN, and I think it kind of does a good job of it, but I just seriously have no idea if other people have this creepy hypnotic relationship to swimming, of if it is just me and Betty Spector, a character I have created. Please weigh in on the subject with your own terrifying water stories!
Also, question: how old does Betty look/seem? I have like zero experience with drawing kids, other than the somewhat older kids in The Man Who Hates Fun, and I may need to figure out some alternate way to do this.
Okay, sad news: there will be NO COMIC THURSDAY OR SATURDAY. It can not happen! I am sorry! If you wish to send me something to put up in lieu of a comic on those days, totally feel free to do so and everyone can party in my house while I’m not here, all right? But OTHERWISE, please join us next TUESDAY for a Quiet Dinner Conversation with Mona and Inez, followed WEDNESDAY by some Existential Girls Action.
I feel like Betty is maybe 5? I don’t know! I mostly just want to commiserate on this point of not being able to judge how old kids look. I rarely draw kids, and when I do they tend to be these ambiguous halflings about three or four heads tall.
Jaime Hernandez, who’s normally really super scrupulous about figuring out very individual body types/facial types for every character, draws all children as kind of Peanuts-style caricatures with the huge heads and really small bodies — basically he says it looks creepy if you draw kids with correct proportions. I kinda agree, and I guess generally with Betty I just try to make her head larger and simpler relative to her body, but her height is like all over the place. KIDS
There’s a Love and Rockets story in this anthology that’s currently kicking around my place that features a lot of child characters, ranging from preschool to young teens…and it’s really impressive how they’re all differentiated and look age-accurate, even though many of them have that thing going on where they’re more cartoonish and facially simplified than the adults. A MASTER AT WORK.
I have this feeling with swimming. I used to live by a lake and spend hours in the water. I too used to have this eerie way of thinking there.
Okay, that’s awesome — I seriously thought it was JUST ME who had these really eerie thoughts in the water when swimming. I am glad other people feel the same! THE COLLECTIVE STARTS TO RISE.
Betty’s limbs are too elongated to be a five year old (I work with them, sorta). I’d say she’s somewhere in the 7-9 range? (Her dialogue is also definitely 7+)
Yeah, I kind of figured that early on I’d have to go the Calvin and Hobbes route of having the dialogue not really correspond to what a five year old would literally be capable of. Really good info about the elongated limbs though. What I need to do is make a model sheet for Betty and other characters at various ages, since the idea is to do a Gasoline Alley thing and have the characters age — surprising I haven’t done that yet actually. Thanks much!
When I was a child I had a large and elaborate underwater world complete with different scenery and characters for basically every body of water I ever interacted with.