Comic Stripper 05 - Monkeying Around

A comic competition on creating sanitation awareness in developing countries led to this:

Monkey 'Business'

The Breakdown:

• The brief required breaking the taboo on talking about, well, SHIT. I was quite pleased with the just-about-but-not-too-subtle dialogue, though I didn't find it funny - ah well. Each monkey's line has something to do with their role, but now I'm just spoon-feeding.
• The conscious choice to work in black and white (and grey!) led me to choose the langur as my model of choice for the monkeys. The black extremities and face made it easy to get away with zero lines, with just a few extra shadow fills to define the body and limbs.
• I continue to worry about symmetry in composition; as with my first competition entry four years ago (in 2010), the speech bubble, if it can't be avoided, must play a visual part in addition to its communicative role. In this case, it pretty much carries the joke.

While the fly was added last minute to make the mute monkey's 'stench bubble' more obvious, in hindsight I would have placed the fly inside rather than hovering nearby. This would have provided the added option of interpreting the third monkey as making a buzzing noise in disgust, similar to the visual gag of a snoring person with a sawing log image in their speech bubble.

The Closest I Can Get

In my last weeks of work, I was asked to help design another clubhouse, because of my experience in working on clubhouse detailing for the past TWO YEARS.
One of the components is a 'leisure pool', the kind you see fat people flopping about in, because swimming is for fools ("No wait, pools are for swimming, not vice versa";"I said 'fools', not pools"; "Oh"). 
As opposed to a lap pool, it is supposed to be curvy and 'organic'. In such situations, architects generally take design cues from a strong concept, or criteria such as views, privacy and access. I just decided to be inspired by 'Nature':

Fig 01: Site Plan - The pool had to fit in the long space north of the building

Fig 02: Ex-Miss Universe Sushmita Sen decides to drop by

Fig 03: I trace around her body, breaking out into a sweat in office

Fig 04: She leaves, with only a ghostly outline as evidence (was it just a dream?)

Fig 05: I 'rationalize' the curves

Fig 06: Leisure pool complete!

To the right of the leisure pool would come the straighter, less organic lap pool. Wait, did I just say 'lap'?

Updates are always a pain, unless they're like this:

@onepitcher And you have me smiling!!! :)) quite the architect!! Interesting design!! :)) cheers!
— sushmita sen (@thesushmitasen) April 3, 2014

The Cursed

They sat apart, disgusted with the rest of the world that they looked down upon from their enlightened perch. They sat, because they saw nothing to stand for, nothing worth committing themselves to, except their own ideals, which had no use but to judge the world with.

While they sat, the world moved on, unmindful, precisely because it had no mind. They were aware of this, there was no way they couldn't be, and it was possible that this was at least partly the source of their disgust. There seemed to be no way of saving them, in fact, it was quite obvious they didn't consider themselves in need of saving, and perhaps they were right. There was no knowing, either way. It was much easier to let them be, however pathetic they might seem.

They were immortal, in that their rejection of this age and any other lent them a sort of detachment from time itself. They had no beginning worth tying themselves to, and no end worth fearing. Looking down at the oatmeal-coloured history of the world, they believed that they could see the distinct lack of pattern that everybody else had been content to wade in all their lives.

But they were also acutely conscious of their mortality in the more mundane sense of the word; their dialogue betrayed a sense of loneliness and acceptance of a fate quite terrible. The shared space they found themselves in gave them no sense of camaraderie, each sitting enamoured in a mirrored dome, and seeing only the desert with themselves in it.

Nothing surprised them any more, at least not since they realised that they knew everything - what they did not know must have simply not been worth remembering. The laughter and tears that seemed to make up the lives of those around them was met with scorn, although they could not be sure themselves if yearning was not mixed with it.

In this plane, courage had no place - the apparent sameness of all options removed the possibility of violent upheaval and the need to face or flee it. Looking at meaninglessness in the face required only the inability to feel despair, which came naturally to them.

In these circumstances, there was only one way to react - so they laughed. The world moved on, unmindful.