Comic Stripper 04 - Ironic Comic on Antarctic Economics

Ah, fateful last minute! The sweet nectar of work it extracts from me, mix'd with the bitter syrup of delay it delivers me into, are like the yin and yang of my creative process. 

Yet another comic competition lit the proverbial 'thing' in me to get to work. The theme was 'Rich and Poor', so it's only obvious I'd come up with something abstract like this:

Whale of a Problem

I guess some of my obsessions with composition are manifesting without my thinking about them - the whale's mass being balanced by the iceberg, and the frame divided into 1:2 vertically - but I didn't really think about sharp perspectives and suchlike because I was more focused on the organic characters and conveying the underwater scene satisfactorily in black and white. I've noticed my humour combines simple\slapstick with obscure\ironic, but that's if you even get to the point of understanding the joke, seeing how hard I make it to do that.

Unfortunately, the idea and final spur to do this came at the last minute, and by the time the comic was submitted, the competition had closed (Your mouth should strike a match about now). Ah, well, the fish was probably sour.

Any title would seem pretentious

Being asked to write 'creatively' fills me with the urge to be clever with language in the wrong ways.

I juggle with words/ In struggles with haikus/ And get cut off abr-

Acrostics Cause Reactions Of Similar Type In Contemplating Sentences.

Limericks challenge me to be clever

But though the rhyme scheme is forever

A-A-B-B-A,

It, to my dismay

Doesn't improve the text whatsoever.

My dissatisfaction with my attempts at poetry leads me to try my hand at hackneyed prose replete with words that don't 'sit' well together, and long sentences; the use of pretentious punctuation is also a temptation I fail to resist. I'm just lucky I've so far escaped the clutches of the Dreaded Capitalization of Important Words.

Attempting humour in creative writing is perhaps the hardest. Self referential text can only be funny for so long. After that, it is the style and timing that carries it forward. Too easily can something aimed at being funny start to become instructional and boring. Reading other greats of humour only demoralises me, which is as far from a humorous mindset that one could begin writing with.

Sometime's I try to isolate lines to make the sentence look profound, or just to make a fresh stab at the whole process, but that doesn't seem to work very well.

Then I try to turn back to using alliterations as taught to me, but it turns out I'm doing that wrong too. Thnak heavens for spellcheck though. With experience, I've learnt that sarcasm and obscure humour works best for me, and my best writing has elements of both. Now you know why this post is such a laugh riot. I've contemplated the use of emoticons in formal text as a new element, but it seems kind of preachy to suggest the desired reaction; I'd have the courage to get away with it in sneaky ways such as:(before parenthesis). 

Generally, I try to structure the body to flow from one sentence to the other, but I seem to have abandoned the basic benchmarks I set for myself in this case. This is an attempt at creative writing with a humorous bent. 

It is for the sake of it, and not with any subject in mind; perhaps therein lies the rub. Using quotes I'm not fully sure of the meaning or origin of is another trick I employ, come to think of it. Thus the whole thing becomes a confused mishmash of techniques, so I've effectively crossed out the 'style' and 'timing' that I just said carries humorous writing forward.

But I guess the best way we can deal with our failings, whether in creative writing or anywhere else in life, is not take them too seriously, and keep on going. Which is why I will never stop trying.