Stripfight :: Put Up Your Dukes

Stripfight comics

by Tim Hulsizer (C) 2004

There's a cool weekly competition going on called Stripfight. Every week there's a new requirement for the strip and anyone can submit an entry. Visitors to the site rate the strips and there's a discussion board where you can get solid feedback on your work. Most of all, it's just plain fun! Here are my entries.

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Entry 010: Round 44 consisted of the instruction to "create a single panel Family Circus style comic strip - using any themes and/or elements that would normally be found in the Family Circus. Feel free to subvert as much as you like." Most folks used Family Circus art but I didn't want to go that route. Instead I chose to do an unfunny punchline in keeping with FC tradition, using different characters. Another failure.
Entry 009: For round 42, Stripfight creator Ed Brisson posted a link to a horribly unfunny cartoon in which a man looks at a dog and says, "I don't care what you think, the moustache stays." Our assignment was to use some aspect of that in our entry, be it the characters, dialogue, etc. I chose to use the dialogue, and inspired by my current favorite TV show "The Wire," I mixed drug dealers, urban slang and Sesame Street characters. Overall reaction to this comic was mixed. Some liked it, others said Big Bird was too small compared to Oscar, and that in my comic Oscar lacks a moustache. To which I replied, sorry about Big Bird but I don't much care about that. Second, Oscar's whole face is hairy...there's gotta be a moustache in there somewhere! Anyway, another in my long tradition of weak Stripfight entries but I had fun doing it.
Entry 008: "Sleep" was the topic for round 34, so Colin Tedford and I did this jam comic together. In case you're unfamiliar with the concept, a jam comic is when you hand the comic back and forth, with each person doing the next panel in sequence. That explains why the strip makes no sense and goes nowhere.
Entry 007: Round 32 dealt with "Revenge" and I came up with this little failure of a strip a week after the round ended. Oh well. Not sure why I did this, as you need to know several things in advance to get anything out of it. 1)Judy Blume is a popular writer of young adult novels including "Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing" and "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret". 2)Beverly Cleary is another young adult author who wrote some of my all-time favorites like "Henry & Ribsy" and "Beezus & Ramona". 3)Slash Fiction is a really weird form of fan fiction.
Entry 006: For the "Changing Of the Seasons" theme in round 24, I drew this comic about a man's errant member. Comments against it included scathing criticism from one woman about the size of the breasts in the final panel, and a couple people didn't like the fact that the penis looks different in every panel. Thanks, but everyone already knows I can't draw.
Entry 005: For Round 18 we did a Stripfight Switchup, where each person wrote an anonymous script and received someone else's script. Then we drew each other's comics. I ended up swapping scripts with Mike Stevens and I enjoyed drawing his script. I used markers and colored pencils to color it.
Entry 004: The theme for Round 16 was "Voting" and I decided to do your basic anthropomorphic animal strip. Some folks thought the rabbit needs the hacksaw to neuter himself, but my intent was that he's going to attack the mailbox.
Entry 003: For round 14 I wanted to do something different so I broke out the pastels and did this comic, using the required phrase, "I know that I shouldn't have..." I pulled off third place.
Entry 002: Round 13 required the phrase "There are two things in life I really enjoy..." and I decided to treat my entry as though it were one strip from a daily newspaper comic. I made up this 19th century duo of the British viceroy in India and his put-upon servant Selkirk. Art's mediocre but people seemed to like the writing.
Entry 001: The requirement for round 11 was to use the phrase "He wasn't actually a doctor..." Most folks didn't like my coloring style but I'm not a huge fan of the popular internet comics trend of digital coloring. It makes everyone's comics look very similar in my opinion, and "gradient" shading looks too perfect. Just my two cents though.

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