Becky Hawkins

"Personal Vehicle Arms Race": a Political Cartoon with Barry

Added 2025-01-18 22:28:44 +0000 UTC

Hi patrons,

Happy new year! I'm sharing a cartoon that I did with Barry last November because a) I'm super happy with it, and b) I'm visiting family for the next 2 weeks and I wanted to post something that's not a half-finished SuperButch page.

Here's what I wrote about the cartoon for Barry's Patreon:

I've been a bike-commuter for twelve years and in that time I've noticed the average vehicle size getting bigger. There's something unnerving about waiting at a red light and realizing your head barely reaches above the hood of the truck behind you.
I'm in a bit of a media-bubble and assume that everyone regularly hears about the dangers of taller, flat-fronted vehicles. Apparently that's not the case, so I was happy to draw a comic about the "personal vehicle arms race" in the US! I even drew Bill as a really friendly guy in the last panel, because good-hearted, kind people regularly reach the conclusion that it's best for themselves and their loved ones to drive the biggest thing on the road.
I follow an Instagram account called Mobility For Who that includes lots of POV footage of biking around Santa Monica. I watched several videos, looking for driver-shenanigans that could be condensed into one comic panel. (Be warned, sometimes these videos are fun and sometimes they'll raise your blood pressure.)
Video: Did an entitled cyclist run a red light and block traffic?
The videos are full of interesting apartment buildings that I'm slightly too lazy and time-crunched to draw. I was, however, inspired to give the buildings in the cartoon a southern California flavor.

Funny story, I got the images below by taking a screenshot of an Instagram video. The video was recorded from a mounted camera during a bike ride, so the image quality was pretty terrible. I didn't care because it was just for drawing reference. After drawing the cartoon, I decided to include these images in the Patreon post. Barry enlarged the images and cleaned them up in Photoshop--removing some lettering and some distortion from the camera lens--before posting the cartoon. The result was a discussion in his comments about these quirky but very real buildings "very obviously" being "the result of generative AI."

I sketched several versions of panel 3, and Barry chose my initial sketch: an SUV driver cutting off a car, implying that the SUV ran a stop sign. I tried to trace the screenshot below as a way to quickly draw a street corner in perspective. (I flipped the image so that the sidewalk would be on the left where I wanted the characters to be.) In the end, instead of tracing, I fudged the perspective, as I did to some degree in each of these panels. It just needs to be close enough.