Moving to Tapas as my main outlet has exposed me to a lot of cartoonists who come from a webcomics and meme-based background rather than the old-fashioned newspaper strip cartoon tradition I cxome from. And that means there are a whole new set of tropes to deal with. For example, there’s a new comics shorthand which originates from manga comics which I have to learn. Why are all sweat drops perpendicular? What’s with the eyes that keep disappearing into a dark shadow? Why the pout?

But that’s by the by – it’s a different culture and one I have to learn. The only thing that really annoys me is what I’ve come to call the curse of the Greys. There’s a strain of slice of life comics which are all bout the cartoonist. And they have a habit of casting the protagonist as the only real person in a universe populated by generic ‘randoms’, rendered as blank human outlines. You can usually tell the level of self-obsession of the cartoonist concerned by the amount of detail they are willing to put into their Greys.

When not standing in as icons for ‘those idiots that don’t have the sense to think and be exactly like me’ they stand in for abstract concepts. In that way they tend to act in the same way as labelled objects in the laziest sort of political cartoon. I thought I’d have a little fun…