Air Raid Robertson

Author notes

Savage Brick Ballet

Air Raid Robertson

on May 12, 2010

As you can likely tell, this strip is an homage to "Krazy Kat", a surrealistic comic strip by George Herriman that ran from 1913-1944. I've been wanting to reference this comic in Air Raid Robertson for ages, and I've been planning the layout of this page since I was working on "Phenomenal Voyage".

George Herriman would frequently paint watercolors over his old comics and give them to people as gifts. I decided to use watercolors for this page as result. My page doesn't look a damn thing like a watercolored Krazy Kat page, but I think it looks okay anyways.

The layout of this strip is based on a Krazy Kat Sunday page from the mid-1920's. This is especially apparent in panel five. Some newspapers ran jumbo-sized spreads of Krazy Kat Sunday strips, but not everyone wanted that format. For the ones that didn't, Herriman was required to draw a vignette panel that was unrelated to the rest of the strip in any way. Shrinking the strip to a smaller format left a large gap in the middle, and the vignette was meant to fill it.

I swiped my vignette directly from a Krazy Kat page.
And, I colored the vignette using a greytone palette. This was so it wouldn't interfere with the narrative of the comic as much. I think it looks more like a centerpiece when rendered in this fashion.

I gave the "Air Raid Arfington" logo its very own panel, which isn't the way Krazy Kat did things in the 20's. (It usually ran its logo over the top of the page) The method seen on my page is derived from Krazy Kat in the mid-1930's, which was when the strip switched over to a color format. At this time Herriman would design various different logos for each week rather than rely on a single, static font. I believe this might've influenced Will Eisner to do the same thing with The Spirit.

In addition to the Herriman reflections, I also decided to work in a shout-out to Windsor Mckay. The creature you see in panel three is derived from Gertie the Dinosaur. Gertie was created by McKay in 1914, and is arguably the first animated cartoon character ever.

I hope you all like this comic. It took forever for me to pull it off. It'll be a while before I do another watercolor comic.