Arsenic Lullaby short comics - Obscure and not good enough

My desk, sketchbooks, and folders are filled with stories and gags that for one reason or the other haven’t seen the light of day. I’ve probably done/half way finished almost as may pages that I didn’t use as I have used. Sometimes I’ll have a joke that’s good, but then see something similar on a t.v. show or hear a comedian do it...Well, those obviously get thrown out.

The following pages are some examples, of stuff that was solid but didn’t make the grade, or was seemed funny at first but I just thought "meh" after looking them over later. Y'see...it takes 10-15 hours to illustrate a page from start to finish...so It's really gotta be good for me to get myself to look at it that long. I have a measurement I've been using since the beginning- if there are 100 comedians in the room and more than 10 of them could have come up with it...I don't do it.

Tooth Fairy Glasses-

I love the horrible scene and look on the kids face at the end, but it’s a really outdated gag. When I published a joke about Twinkie the Kid and no one under 25 knew who he was...that put the nail in the coffin for this one. Y'see, many many years ago comic books used to have advertisements in them for novelty items you could mail order. Joy buzzers, fake ice cubes with fake flies in them, whoopie cushions...and "X-Ray Specs" which claimed to give the wearer X-ray vision. I'm guessing they just had bones drawn onto the lenses or something.

Anyways, the core of that final panel, kid with befuddled look after horrifying conclusion, did live on in the fairy gag below.

Indian Mascot-

This is solid, and I can up with it maybe five eyars ago and thought “meh, by the time I publish it and get it on the shelves, people will have relaxed and getting pissed off about team mascots will have gone by the wayside...sigh.

Barbie Doll-

This may get done, the two things holding it back are my concern that the dolls are being spray pained to have black skin might be a tough thing to get across visually. That and the two two rows of panels seem like they’ll be really boring to draw.

Pinocchio-

This is the opposite problem, it’s to clear, there is nothing for the brain to figure out and get jolted into laughter by. It’s a rare time when a clever juxtaposition is just...flat. There’s no punch to it. He wants to be alive, and when he gets his wish, something bad happens that could only happen to the living. To me it’s mild irony trying to be massaged into something funny and the insertion of a vampire is out of left field, in a way that is somehow more forced then when element come out of left field but works. This falls in between failing at the 100 comedians test, and just being nonsensical.

Alien-

This one flat out fails the 100 comedian test...simple as that. It's only saving grace is the dry dialogue from the alien in the last panel. It gives it some uniqueness, a way that you'd only see a joke told by me...but not enough for it to get done.

Mermaid-

I'll be honest...I really don't find this one that funny...it only even made it to the sketch phase because I know full well the original artwork with an illustration of a sexy mermaid would sell real fast.

Having said all that...there are times I've gone ahead and drawn stuff that I probably shouldn't have ( well...to a normal person 90% of what I've done I shouldn't have, starting with cartoon fetuses) in the sense of hardly anyone got the joke.

Most the time it's because the information you need to know to get the punchline is really obscure, the other times...I just couldn't figure out how to deliver the joke.

These here fall under the "obscure" problem

This next one falls under the "couldn't figure out how to deliver the joke". To my mind, it's one of the funniest, most close to brilliance, gags I ever did, but it's got issues...

Maybe you read that and laughed, maybe you read it and scratched your head. See...the kids were kidnapped and turned into vampires, just like the plan. BUT after becoming vampires the kids turned into bats and flew off. ...if you have to explain the joke, it's not funny. I'm going to try this one again, though. There's a Greek publication that likes the vampire characters and I'll have more room than just one page to pull this gag off.

The there this one...

That makes me laugh, but it's really not a joke, in any normal sense. It's just weird...which is fine in most cases, but the last panel ruins it. I tried to give it some normal punchline instead of just letting it be a weird funny scene. It sits there long enough to grow up...? How? and worse, this ending could be misconstrued as me trying to convey some opinion, which I assure you I was not. If I had to do it all again, I'd just have some bird swoop down and grab it and fly off.

anyhoo...now that I've shown you some stuff that was off the mark. allow me to rebuild my ego showing off some of my favorites

You can see me in November in Michigan!

and I'll see you back here in a couple days!

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