Made with India ink, nib pen, and watercolour.
I love this. It leaves just enough out so that it’s not immediately obvious what’s happening, but gives enough clues so that you can figure it out as you scroll.
It builds up nicely, and once you understand it, it leaves you feel clever & very fulfilled as a reader.
You’ve basically figured out Valve’s (the video game company) definition of “fun” for a short comic strip. You should be proud of that! Also love the style. I hope to see more whenever you find inspiration.
I did not get it before reading OPs explanation
When did Tatsumaki change to blonde?
Is is cuz she’s black? 🤔
- Pan to white generic cop
- Pan to white southern judge
- Pan to white suburban mom
- Back to little white girl: “No.”
am i seeing a different sketch? i don’t see a white generic cop
I’m setting a different scene to fit a more emotionally charged narrative in my head. If you have a problem with that, then stay out of my head. Or at least pay rent.
i just didn’t get what was going on. then i saw the author’s explanation further down
I was expecting that they would find too few degrees of separation from Epstein
Oof
This is really great. Awesome style
hah ! took me a minute, love it
I like how the person who clearly doesn’t have telepathy, asking to join, actually has a smile on their face. All the telepaths look dead and miserable inside.
Thanks. With telepathy, I do sometimes wonder if the telepaths see no point in making external facial expressions for the benefit of their fellow telepaths. It may be that on the inside, in their own telepathic group chat, they are joking and singing and laughing and having fun.
I recall a scene in Gunnerkrigg Court along these lines (don’t ask me to find it) and I also wonder if it’s the case in Pluribus.
Maybe it’s similar to when you text someone, “ROFLMAO” but you aren’t actually smiling in real life.
They have to focus hard, is why.
Here is the initial sketch of the same comic:
For the final version, I tried a new watercolour strategy this time: colouring in all the blue shadows first, then adding other colours for the areas in light. It helped make the whole thing less clashing and muddy compared to my usual approach. I like the businessman panel where the colours are minimal. Other panels may be a little overwhelming.
Woah, I always forget that art is an incremental refinement process, and love seeing the early concept sketched raw. The final piece is amazing btw
Always exciting to have a new comic artist tag. Thanks for sharing some of your process, i really enjoyed the premise and the great art!
I really like the coloring and style. Also i think there’s enough visual cues to suggest what is going on.
I don’t see how these panels are connected
It’s telepathy. They’re communicating telepathically. Including with members who currently aren’t around.
Thanks! I couldn’t get past the idea that they were somehow using telepathy to see their own futures without her in them.
Personally I picked up on that, but I still didn’t really understand what’s going on until I read OP’s explanation. I generally thought telepathy was limited to your immediate area I guess, and expected to see characters from the first three panels in the others.
Thanks for your feedback. Here is a walkthrough of what I intended for the reader to experience. Perhaps it falls short.
First, she asks a group of five people if she can join their telepathy club.
At first they are all looking at each other, as if to gauge each others’ willingness to accept her into the group. You may assume they are looking at each others’ facial expressions to see what the other people think about her request.
However, then it shows seemingly random people in other places, doing other activities: swimming, business deals, hair salon, working on telephone wires.
Then it switches back to the first group, who have come to a decision. You realize that the random people were all part of the telepathy club too, and they were communicating telepathically to consider her request. It turns out that after long consideration, and perhaps many debates between them all that the reader doesn’t get to see, the answer is a simple “no.”
It took some thinking to figure out what was happening, I initially thought they were reading her mind and judging her. But after noticing that the first two panels were people of the group I figured it out. It wasn’t that hard to figure out but required paying attention, a pretty good little comic if you ask me.
Maybe you should make the background colours of the second and third panels match that of the first, so that it’s clearer they’re the same peoe.
It didn’t fall short, it fell flat for me. I am sorry but I don’t see a punchline even with your explanation, which, surprisingly, I didn’t need to understand the plot. I thought I was missing something…
I also didn’t connect the dots when I read it, but I would encourage you to not listen to anyone who tries to tell you how to “fix it”. Keep doing what you’re doing. Your style is good and I love the facial expressions!
How it feels trying to make friends as an adult lol
Oh, I thought maybe they were reading her mind and the images were memories.
I thought these were images communicated by the group we see standing there as their answers and was trying to decipher the visual puns
I like that idea. Maybe I’ll make a sequel where someone asks to join, and they delve into that person’s deepest memories. Examples: childhood sibling rivalry, first kiss, being fired from a job, etc. All is good, and they will probably be accepted. Then, they see a memory where the person did something slightly embarrassing (saying, “thanks, you too!” to a server telling them to enjoy their meal). And they get rejected based on that.
mindreading and telepathy are different things; seeing the applicant’s past played out is a different kind of psychic power than being able to say “yo bob what do you think?” in someone else’s brain
Good point. I will have to explore this distinction in future Telepathy Snub comics.
That said, personally I do like this comic and it worked for me.
I do wish there was some kind of ~~~~ wavy-line professor x kind of visualization of all the telepaths exchanging info.
one last note: it’d be cool if there was some kind of ‘well if you have to flap your lip meat to ask… then probably not’
I didn’t get it, but that doesn’t mean you did a poor job conveying your intent, and I like the artwork.
Oh ok, thanks for the explanation. I did not associate the other random people as being telepathic and in the club.
I would have had all the telepathic people doing something like, have their hand on their chins as if they were thinking. That would be a visual trigger that allows me to link all of the characters together.
Obviously some people got it without an explanation, so perhaps it’s just me who has an issue understanding this. 🙂
Good feedback. I think a visual cue in the background could have worked. Like a lightning bolt pattern going from mind to mind.
Wow, how did I not understand this by myself. I am currently even watching Pluribus where this exact same situation happens >_<
Haha, I watched Pluribus too, and while this comic isn’t a direct reference, the show certainly influenced me.
My initial thought was they scrutinized her and she imagined them on these different ways, an “old ugly lady” for one of the members did the ‘no’.
I got it immediately, I thought it was clever.
Don’t be discouraged by the minority of people and AI posing as people who have a hard time with subtlety.
I hope that nobody is using AI to read and comment on a comic on Lemmy! If so, what has this world come to?
I’m glad that many people got it, but I do sincerely appreciate hearing the alternative interpretations. I like breaking down the ways in which info is communicated in this medium, and ways it could be made more clear. At the same time, the subtlety and uncertainty is part of the setup, so I’m not super bummed that the intended meaning wasn’t crystal clear to all.
There are not NEARLY enough subtle, cerebral comics out there, this is giving me vibes like the few good ones like Bizarro or Perry Bible Fellowship, lean in harder, make art and stories for yourself, not public appeal, you will get a much more loyal following and make bigger waves. (I used to be a professional artist, I know the pains.)
Also, yeah there are AI all over reddit asking how to be human, asking the meaning of things like comics and memes, the whole “explain the joke” ring of subreddits exploded in volume since reddit announced that they were going to partner with Google and AI companies to use the platform as a training ground.
AI is going towards some strange directions and it’s going to be bigger and smarter than we expect. Eventually.
But it will be a long, long time before it starts making art like this, which gives a glimpse into an internal, personal idea or experience. Keep fighting the good fight.
Thanks, I appreciate your encouragement and compliments, especially the comparisons to such great comics.
I guess that in soliciting feedback, I’m not really aiming to make sure 100% of people “get” my next comic. I don’t really see it as a failure if a few people don’t connect the dots the exact way I intended. And especially because I’m not trying to gain internet fame with it (I don’t have a website, or even title or sign these things; it’s not my main creative pursuit right now).
But I do think it’s valuable to learn from strangers how they connect the panels to create a narrative, and how the panel order, subject matter, colour scheme etc. can influence that. The way this medium is interpreted can also be deployed for misdirection, the way PBF does. Learning about how a comic is received can help me analyze that.
Thanks again for taking the time and sharing your thoughts, I appreciate it immensely.
I am happy I had a chance to interact directly, because you did touch on something in this comic that I appreciate and I know AI is a very long way from taking from us, which is that “flow of an experience” that comes with art. You feel a scene, a situation, an exchange or a mood, you have an internal experience born from your own imagination and you want to share that feeling. Keep doing that and you will easily compete with the “Greats.”
Keep at it, the next biggest thing you need is just consistency and patience. It can take a long time before enough people experience the world through your eyes that they start missing it and seeking it out.
This is the best compliment ever. I hope your day job involves inspiring youth to reach their potential and believe in themselves, and to transform their cynical self-image into optimism. Thank you.
Also, I love your art.
they’re presumably people in the telepathy club having telepathic communication (maybe to discuss including the person in the first panel?)
thus no speech bubble
Yes, exactly! Thank you
Her first mistake was talking out loud
Very nice. I love it.
Very creative, and I love the art. Well done!
She was blackballed by a lineman.
Come to think of it, if they’re telepathic, why do they need telephone wires anyway?
Shit, my comic makes no sense
Because that’s that telepath’s job and not everybody is telepathic. A bald person can still be a barber.
Gotta make a living.
They’re removing them. Telepathy just has been discovered :3
I wouldn’t worry about it as the artist (you) obviously was depicting power transformers and thus only showed power transmission as necessarily not telephony.
