Morning Cartooning

An old friend of mine recently shared some of his youngest's morning doodles with me. Apparently, his daughter has taken to doing some drawing before leaving for school. Mostly for her own amusement, so many of them get discarded or forgotten without anyone seeing them, but her dad has managed to catch some of them. Evidently, the doodles have taken a turn lately to comics.

The art, as you can tell, isn't spectacular and the writing is a bit hard to decipher in places, but that's largely due to the speed with which she cranks these out. In case you can't tell, those "T" shaped things in panel 14 are flashlights, which are converted into overheard lighting for the bar in panel 17. The story itself here is a little odd but, like I said, it's for her own amusement.

But here's the one that really caught my attention.

Again, the art and lettering is hurried, but the pacing of this is fantastic. I was about the highlight that second tier as a prime way to put punch to the punchline, but really the whole piece is spaced out very well. Despite the rushed execution, she still took time to linger on discrete moments in the strip. Breaking the dialogue between panels 2 and 3, the totally silent panel 5, the punishment reiteration in panel 6... brilliant pacing, I think.

There's a lesson here that a lot of professional cartoonists could take to heart, I think!

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