Artist's Notes: Family Likeness
These are the notes for Comic #347 – Family Likeness
My original plan was a four-comic sequence, starting with the cliffhanger before the break, and finishing with a neat resolution on January 4th. When I sat down to finish scripting #347 and #348, however, it just wasn't working. The material I wrote was okay, but not satisfyingly funny.

I'd love to produce a guffaw-inducing, beverage-spewingly-hilarious comic every time. I think that's an unreasonably high goal. For one thing, advancing plot and developing characters sometimes constrains the humor factor. More importantly, I don't think it's realistic. For example, I'm a big fan of Dave Barry's humor column. He's written approximately a gazillion columns, and frankly, I haven't found each and every one of them funny. Most of them are, though, and many of them are very funny. But not all the stones have to be in the center of the house; they just need to cluster at the proper end of the sheet (Note to self: Nobody gets sports metaphors when they're about Curling).

It's probably better to describe it as a bell curve on the standard 10-point Humor Scale:


The red curve above represents what I'm aiming for, counting all episodes created. I'd like comics to be at least amusing, but I recognize that some are funnier than the others. It's a win if the reader feels that the amusement value generally outweighs the effort to read the comics.

And the reason I bothered to explain all that is to say that I was finding the results for the comics I was developing in the "Droll to Amusing" range, but not much better. So I asked myself, what's the most bizarre thing the characters could do in this scenario?" I explored a couple ideas, but I found the pageant the most entertaining. I think I'll get to show how each character has their own twist on the experience, and if all goes well, the results should be funny.