This cartoon might not make sense to you if you aren’t familiar both with the comic strip Mallard Fillmore and with the cartoonist Bruce Tinsley’s feud with Jon Stewart, which started with a critical parody strip being published in The Daily Show’s book:
That’s where “Oops! I forgot to tell a joke!” comes from. I saw the Duck Dynasty topic as a way to kill three ducks with one stone. I was able to make fun of two recurring themes in Mallard Fillmore:
1. Liberals Are Dumb; and
2. Reality TV Stars Are Stupid And People Pay Too Much Attention To Them.
And I also thought it’d be funny to have a duck-focused strip cover a political issue that involves the king of duck-killing.
I need to get better at cartooning. I’m still very new at this, people. I only started during law school two years ago and even after then I was only practicing maybe an hour per month until recently. I keep spending so much time tweaking my drawings in Photoshop until the cartoon looks right. I get obsessive about it and it takes me longer to release things.
Here’s an earlier version of the strip lined up against the final version. My friend Matt Bruenig told me it’s like playing “Spot The 8 Differences”.
Old version on top, final version (I hope) on bottom:
I made various tweaks to the text and the positioning of different objects, and I changed some shading and the color on Swan F.K., but the biggest difference is in the Phil Robertson character. I made him wider, shrank him, expanded his eyes, changed his eyebrows, changed the gun length, and added a whole bunch of shading onto him to give him more depth and to make him look like the human characters Bruce Tinsley draws in his strip.
Anyway, as I get better, hopefully I’ll start getting it right the first time. And more importantly, hopefully my “right” will keep getting better.