Keeping Things Light

This newspost is inspired by ozoneocean’s recent thread and quackcast about evoking emotion. I've recently been struggling with the opposite issue in my own comic. The whole project is really just a light-hearted excuse to draw my favourite things and write odd characters, but it's also held together by a narrative. The issue is: how do I introduce conflict, and engage readers, without making things too serious and veering away from my intended tone?

For my comic's prologue, I think I've just accepted that it's going to be a little bit heavier than the rest of the comic. I'm keeping that bit brief so I can get straight into drawing cats and trains, and throwing in some background jokes so that readers hopefully won't get the wrong idea about what to expect.

In my first draft of the following chapter, I had simply written myself a note to "keep it light!" But re-reading that draft, I didn't feel like I had succeeded. I re-wrote it with the same plot elements, but added an obliviously irritating character at the most emotional point to keep the protagonist (and the reader) from just wallowing in her feelings. I'll probably use a similar technique of throwing in dumb jokes here and there for later tense points in the plot.

I would be interested in hearing everyone's techniques for keeping things light! Even for more dramatic comics, I'm sure there are times when you want to keep things from getting too dark. Aside from dumb jokes, how do you keep the narrative moving along without things getting too sad? Or, conversely, do you totally embrace the idea of evoking emotions from your readers, even if your comic is generally more light-hearted?

MILESTONE



Phinmagic has a pretty incredible milestone this month! From phinmagic:
“October 3rd marks the start of my 25th anniversary issue of Phineus, commemorating the 25 years since his first comic was created in October of 1991.
The issue will continue through until the end of the year. It will recap all that the characters have been through in the first 25 years and set up things for the next 25.”

—

Have a comic milestone, a community project or some comic-related news that you'd like to see here? Do you have original art for our newspost image database? Send it to me via PQ or at hippievannews(at)gmail.com, or leave a comment below!
For more info on News, please check out this DD Help Site article: https://sites.google.com/site/theduckhelp/getting-started/news-and-getting-your-news-in-it