"Mulberry Sharona, Slayer of WASPs" Talkback

[Peter Paltridge]

http://www.platypuscomix.net/mulberr...e=1&seriesID=4

I've had this one planned for months. It's an important story that develops Mulberry further; we know she's different, but this will illustrate just how bad she is at fitting in with her "class." There was a planned sequence where Mulberry told her backstory and how she met Jack and Tiff, but it ended up cut from Part 1 and I don't know if it'll fit in Part 2 (maybe in another story, someday...)

This cartoon also introduces someone I've been planning to add for a while now, the character of Mary Roach--another heiress, but Mulberry's opposite; annoying, selfish and dumb. Mary is supposed to have crazy, awful white-trash hair a la Jaime Pressly, but I couldn't get it right just yet. Anyone with drawing skills care to take a stab at it?

[J. B. Warner]

You write such good dialogue for prissy characters. Can't wait for Part 2!

If you want, I'll look for photographic reference for Jamie Pressly and see if I can tweak Mary's design for you.

EDIT: Here you go! (You'll have to forgive me - I had no reference for her shoes.)

[Dynamite XI]

Ah, J.B. beat me to it! But I did a sketch anyway....one thing I noticed about some of those Jaime Pressly pictures (and I've seen this where I live, too) was that her white-trash 'do sported a top knot not unlike those on shih-tzus:


It's sort of cropped off there at the top, but you get the idea. And I didn't get the shape of the head correct, although this sketch was slightly modeled on someone I know.

[Peter Paltridge]

I took those two and tried to combine them into new ideas:


Let me know what you think of some of those.

[J. B. Warner]

I'd say the big one in the middle probably looks the white-trashiest.

[Dynamite XI]

I'd say the big one in the middle probably looks the white-trashiest.

Agreed. You've hit the nail on the head with that one.

[Peter Paltridge]

Well, great; I was able to add the second half of this story barely on time (IT'S STILL MONDAY NIGHT IN MY TIME ZONE) but that's all I was able to do for the site this week. I know the Net is filled with website owners that you'd be lucky to hear from once a month, but it still bothers me when I can't deliver everything once a week. I feel if people are tuning in, then I owe it to them.

The main problem was that this story got some last-minute rewrites. The photographer wasn't even in it until last Wednesday. Originally, after Mulberry kicked the lecherous sixty-year-old over the horizon, she was going to go inside a dark room where some old guy in a wheelchair was. She was going to gripe some more about how she hated the club and the people in it and then the guy was going to agree. Then Mulberry would tell her life story and why she's not like everyone else, and the guy would find that appealing and say that he came there to talk with somebody about investing in their company, but that now he wanted to invest in Mulberry's family's company instead. Then Mary would walk in and scream bloody murder because it was her parents that were going to meet with the guy, and he was notorious for being mean and hard to pressure into anything, and that it took months just to schedule the meeting.

That was the vague outline that existed in my head, until it came time to actually write and draw it. I came to the realization that not only was it not that interesting compared to Part 1, but that it would make up only five pages. I had to come up with something better, and fast.

So over the next few days I fit together a new plot while drawing what remained of the old one to keep ahead. And even that changed--the original REVISED ending had Mary approaching Mulberry, seemingly to chew her out about the photographer...but instead she was happy about it because she hadn't gotten so much attention in months. It fit with her personality, but it was a tad too predictable and a little too weak an ending. I had to look at the situation from all angles, and decided upon showing what the other girls would do once word spread about their being photographed--instead of looking for him, they'd sabotage each other; such is the mean world of high society. Conflict is always funny, so I went with that. But I'm still worried about it....mainly that it's not clear enough that the girls framed each other; I worry that some readers will think Mulberry planted all the cameras instead.

I didn't want to turn in a bad story, especially one that introduced a new character. I don't know if there'll be a new cartoon next week--I'm pretty wiped out from this one, so I may take a little break. (There will be SOMETHING--you didn't get a new article this time, so you'll get one of those then.)

But I'm still proud of it. There are those who can't stand the art as it currently is and think I'm an egomaniac because I actually think I can get hired if I keep working. They think anyone who says they like this stuff is a brain-dead suck-up and I should just give up on what I love, go practice knitting and die miserable. "Who thinks that?" you might ask.....well, those jerks are out there. They just know better than to troll here.....usually.

Often, when up against deadline, the art is the first thing to suffer since there's no time to experiment with anything. It's not that I WANT the environments to be extremely simple and sometimes nothing more than a gradient; it's that I don't have nine hours to spend tracking down building, car and environment photos and learning how to reproduce them in pen perfectly. The parking lot scene on page 11 was a huge frustration on that end; not only have I not drawn a lot of Rolls-Royces but I've never drawn them at that angle, in descending depth. The end result wasn't completely flattering, and there are those shallow first-timers that will see the first page of part 2 and then skip the entire series just because it doesn't look like a J. Scott Campbell illustration.

I only have time to really work on evolving the art when I'm on break from the feature cartoons. I think it's come a long way, though.

I'm beat; I'm going off to watch Gummi Bears.

[J. B. Warner]

Well, I must say, your hard work and revisions paid off. Part 2 is just as excellent as Part 1! With the way the story flows, I would never have guessed that you reworked it so much. And the swipe at those Allstate ads was hilarious.

Well done!