this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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This is what happens when an axebeak breeder and a blacksmith get married.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

Here's a bonus image that I didn't include in the original

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Missed opportunity to call it a halbird

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

10/10. Approved.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Good, I'm not the only one who immediately remembered that movie

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The possibilities for bird based warfare are clearly endless

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

These are awesome.

… but why no bohemian ear spoon beak?

😔

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_earspoon

Thanks for this awesome meme!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I know you're joking, but let's give it a serious answer. Why not! let's talk about comic flow and joke writing!

When I draw a comic like this, there's a bunch of factors that go into deciding what to include and what not to include.

The most important thing here is to have a bunch of similar-ish entries, then one silly one to serve as the punchline (in this case the punchline is mostly a visual gag.) - The first part of comic gives you one joke "haha "axebeak" is silly, and if you replace the word "axe" it's also funny" - then the last part gives a different gag "what if we take this too far? Look at the poor bird faceplanting"

For this format of comic, I need to be able to make the double-gag for it to be worth drawing, it's not really "funny" enough with just the first part. It's funny, but it's not funny enough to warrant the time it takes to pencil it out and ink it and colour it - my art is all traditional media, so it's a time sink to make. (I'll post a comic here tomorrow with some medusa variants, you'll see how I use exactly the same flow to make the jokes there.)


Once I've decided that I've a good enough punchline that I can make the joke, I need to pick a bunch of entries for the first part. You want enough to establish the gag, but not so many that a reader gets bored. 3 is a bare minimum and 6 is pushing it.

In this case I'm picking "weapons" or things like weapons as my entries. My first priority is "how easy is this to draw?" - I don't want to do something like "crossbow-beak" because it's real hard to sketch out and adds needless timework to the comic without actually improving on the joke. My secondary consideration is "how easy is it for a casual reader to understand what I'm drawing here" - so a word like "dagger" or "sword" is better than a word like "glaive guisarme" or "yklwa".

I could include obscure stuff, but if a reader gets hung up on something because they don't immediately understand it, it slows down the pace they proceed through the visual flow, and that blunts the impact of the punchline. You want the audience to immediately grasp everything so it's fast and punchy to follow along.


Those are the main factors that go into selecting entries for something like this. The punchline would work as "bec-de-corbinbeak" or "bohemian-earspoonbeak" and there's the added silliness of what I did with a silly sounding name - that's potentially funnier, but also potentially confusing, so I went with mass appeal over a slightly sillier option here.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Here's the scary part - when you see a comic that looks simple like this, often the artist has gone through this entire process thinking it through in quite a lot of depth. It takes real work for something to flow well and read well, and the better the comic artist is at this stuff, the less it looks like they thought about it at all.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

"You see, son, when a bird and a... uh... power drill love each other very VERY much..."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

This reminds me of irl sword-billed hummingbirds. They have beaks as long as the rest of their body. Fantasy creatures based on them could be really fun.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Ah, when the Great Darwin Finches encounter an island filled with knights.

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