Where Do Ideas Come From...
...when the comic strip is about your LIFE?
With other comic strips that I've done in the past, like “Dandy and Company” or “Marjorie of the Weirdlings”, coming up with ideas was often a process of putting the characters in an uncomfortable situation and seeing how they managed it. But with “Finding Dee”, I have to approach this differently.
The characters in the strip aren't fictional; they're me. They're Heidi, our pets, and occasionally Rick. At such, I don't usually just dream up a scenario, put us in it, and imagine how we will work through it. A majority of the strips are based on actual things that were happening in our day. Little, generally unexciting observations about our lives that gave me a chuckle when I thought about them.
It is often referred to as a slice of Life comic strip, and coming up with the strip is usually about figuring out exactly where to slice.
The strip runs between 4 and 6 panels on average, with the occasional single-panel gag. That isn't an abundant amount of space to set up a circumstance, play it out, and give a fun twist, but that's the job anyone who does a humor comic strip has to figure out.
I used to keep a pocket notepad with me in my purse to keep track of ideas or things that occurred to me throughout the day, but honestly, my handwriting is atrocious. So for the past few years, I have been cataloging my ideas in a Google document on my phone.
I will regularly stop in the middle of what I'm doing, pull my phone out, and write a brief synopsis of something funny that I just observed happening to us.
Sometimes it's as simple as one or two words that I hope will spur the memory of a broader idea when I don't have time to stop and write it all out.
So, taking those seeds and writing up a new strip out of them is all about taking a direct conversation or incident that happened, trimming out all the superfluous fluff on the sides. All the “Um” and “Aw” and awkward word choices and trimming things down to a succinct bit of dialogue, figuring out what the absolute funniest point in that interaction was, and ending the strip there.
It also requires a good bit of playful exaggeration. Taking what happened at a “4” and turning the volume up to a funnier “8”.
Sometimes, however, a lot of strips come about through what I call “the imagined conversation.”
I'll be up in the bathroom getting ready for work, and a thought will occur to me, and immediately I will imagine how that conversation between me and Heidi would play out had she been in the room. Eventually, when I get a phone in hand again, I will write down the core ideas of that imagined conversation. It's why Heidi frequently plays the role of sounding board for exposition in the strip, OR asks me a question that she obviously would know the answer to in the real world.
These are situations where a thought occurred to me for an observation that would be funny in the strip, that didn't actually happen, but played out in my head.
This makes up roughly a quarter of the strips in the archive, with a LOT of the rest made up out of aggregate experiences smushed together. Heidi and I will often have multiple discussions on a single topic spread out over months or years, and I will pick through my memory, pull out the best bits, and rework those into ONE strip that makes the point I want to express.
But regardless of the actual techniques used, at the end of the day, what it all means is that to generate ideas for “Finding Dee”, we have to ACTUALLY do stuff.
I sympathize with you regarding those notes! One time, I found a line on my phone that I had clearly typed expecting to know what I meant later that simply read, “unicorn roommate playhouse” and I still have no idea what it was supposed to be years later. Lol