Hijinks at the children's theater

Hi patrons!

This cartoon was inspired by an actual meeting. In real life, I was using Zoom on my phone, so my coworkers got a Blair Witch viewing experience while we were trying to discuss collaborative email accounts! I tried to draw it as a postcard and quickly realized there wasn't space. Naomi helped me find the right rhythm for a gag comic by having me try to start the same sentence three times, getting more and more frazzled, with the third and final interruption coming from my coworker.

Side note: I'm so grateful for smartphones because people can just show me the address they're looking for, easing the language barrier when someone comes to the window for directions! Sometimes it's fun to guess whether they're looking for the main entrance to the building, the parking garage, or the nearest date-night restaurants. An immigration law office in our building printed up some bilingual postcards for the box office to give out, to help us help their clients find the right suite. To be honest I enjoy the variety of interruptions at the box office.

These next two cartoons fall in the unfortunate category of do-overs. I got as far as inking an original version of each and was jussst unhappy enough to pull out a lightbox and some blank postcards. I traced them in pencil, aiming for neater word balloons, smoother lines, and better poses.

While I was tracing, I adjusted the placement of some figures and word balloons by moving the new postcard around. If you are a digital artist reading this and feeling superior about drawing digitally... you are probably right.

Here are the first attempts:

If you're looking at these and thinking "they don't look that different," you might also be right. But I'm happy with the result! There were just enough things in each cartoon that were either going to bother me or be difficult to clean up digitally.

This one, on the other hand, felt easy and fun to draw.

 The weather has been stunning recently, 60s and sunny while I'm standing outside waiting for the buses to arrive. I wanted to capture that weather, as well as the cuteness of tiny kids going to a show. (One kid really did offer to catch the bus driver up on Frog and Toad afterward. It was so pure!)

 I hope you enjoyed these cartoons! Thanks, as always, for supporting me on Patreon.