beanytuesday
patreon
A Comic About International Cuisine
🕑 Added 2020-10-05 20:04:16 +0000 UTCThis is a comic that I originally wasn't that thrilled about making; the joke itself I thought was a little overplayed. However, actually ended up rather liking this one: the art is crisp and fun, the characters were fun to draw, and I think I took the joke in a funny, unexpected direction at the end, experimenting with a new tool in my comedy writing belt; the third person narration in the final panel.
Necessity is the mother of invention. In the last panel, I wanted to forego the more hack reaction of a simple "ewww, gross!" for a funnier, more complex emotion: the food being so utterly foul that it immediately ruins the playful, mean-teasing mood, bringing down the whole room with how utterly grim it is, to the point where the two bullies even partially believe that it is itself a joke; a cruel, grotesque one that takes the taunting to a needlessly dark place. What was meant as a show of pride against the teasing ends up being a self-indictment so powerful that it is far meaner than anything the bullies could have come up with.
Obviously, I found it hard to convey this humorous, yet somewhat abstract emotion simply through the characters' in-universe thoughts/dialogue, since such phrases are left up to the reader's interpretation. By using third-person dialogue, you can unambiguously declare what the state of affairs is, as thoroughly as you'd like. Here, I tried to do so concisely (brevity, etc) in a way that communicates clearly a funny situation, and states what the mood is to set up the jokes that follow. Did it work? Was the mood clear? Or did I over-explain what would have been funnier and straightforward with dialogue alone? I hope I did the former. It should surprise few that part of my inspiration for this was the writing in Kaiji, which uses a third-person narrator in addition to character dialogue to clearly communicate the characters' feelings, and build tension. I'd like to try and use this type of narration more, maybe in future Bad Enders installments or other sorts of comics.
The food pictured is "Jellied eels, liquor and mash." Nauseating. The last thing your appetite sees before it takes its own life.
Comments
Stephanie Lin
I always love how dynamic your expressions are, they add to the humor so much
