More practice with pen and ink. I felt this strip deserved it nice doing, as it’s one of my favorite Higgins speeches, and it’s #200 and all. (Whoo.) That’s why I didn’t put up the sketchy-ass version of it I threw together last week. (And that is why we went down to one comic a week. I’d rather do one good one than two phoned-in ones.) In some ways, I think my drawing is technically worse when I’m using real-life ink, but it’s also more charming-looking.
I found the text for this strip in my old notes from April 2007. It was fully-formed pretty much as you see it now at the same time as I was scripting out the Port Side Story comics, that’s how far ahead I was thinking then! Basically, I brainstormed the entire arc from the beginning to one or two storylines from now in about three days. The rest has just been filling in the details.
All right, this is one of the more obscure strip titles: a bad linguistics pun on a line from the not-very-well-known and very threatening “love” song “Ev’rything I’ve Got.”
I’ve a powerful anaesthesia in my fist,
And the perfect wrist to give your neck a twist
There are hammerlock holds, I’ve mastered a few,
And ev’rything I’ve got belongs to you.
One of my favorite false claims about myself is that I have a powerful anaesthesia in my fist.
PICKERING: Oh! I forgot my purse.
LANCE (chivalrously): I’ll get it for you.
Lance hops out of the carriage and heads up the walk to the house. Pickering and Eskimo look at each other.
ESKIMO: Fair warning, if you hurt him, I will kill you.
PICKERING: Wow.
ESKIMO: Yep.
PICKERING: Nobody would ever be that protective of me.
In the drawing room, Lance holds up Pickering’s purse as a shield while Higgins backs him into a wall.
HIGGINS: …And that might not sound very menacing coming from a linguistics professor, but you should know that our discipline is highly fractured and more often than not our conferences dissolve into gang warfare. “Henry Higgins hit the boy with the bat” may seem like an ambiguous sentence, but I assure you I have only one meaning in mind.
Ha! I recognized the line as being from an “old” song, but I couldn’t remember what the person had really mastered. I thought it was, like, some dance moves.
I always thought that song was very clever! But I also admire that Sublime (?) song where the guy sings, “I’d like to hold her/head under water.” What great enjambment! I think I like songs that seem to be about tenderness & devotion, and kind of are, but there’s an underlying (and unsubtle) current of violence?
Comment by Caolan — July 9, 2008 @ 9:47 am
I love the pen and ink work on this one!
Comment by Nate — July 9, 2008 @ 6:41 pm
I don’t know about values of “technically better,” but I really like the inks here also. :) They’re a bit busy in places, but there’s something very substantial about them. Anyway, pretty!
I love the body language (and facial expressions) in the second & last panels! And the idea of Higgins threatening someone with physical violence makes me chuckle, but Lance does seem intimidated. Or at least taken aback.
(I’m unexpectedly very busy lately, but I’ve been meaning to ask if you’d be up for a cafe drawing session sometime. I think I have a rain check to redeem?)
Comment by Allie — July 10, 2008 @ 8:47 am
Yeah, your inks definitely kicked up a notch lately… Are you using a brush?
Comment by Alison — July 11, 2008 @ 6:07 am