Introduction / Adam Huber

For this project I will be looking at how comedy is illustrated, particularly in a comics. My final major project will be a graphic novel that I intend to be funny, and while I have confidence in my comedic skills, I believe I lack the crucial knowledge in how to illustrate those skills. To improve upon that, I will be looking at a variety of comedic illustrators to see how they illustrate humour, and I will experiment to discover how their skills can be applied to my own work.

The first of these illustrators is Adam Huber, the creator of Bug Martini [1] (previously titled Bug Comic):

Halloween Part One, uploaded by Huber on October 29th, 2009

The main thing that comes to mind when I look at his work is the simplicity of it all. The jokes are the most important thing to the comic, and there are no superfluous details that could get in the way of the jokes being told. Backgrounds are either non-existent or only consist of one or two objects, with no use of perspective, all the characters are of the same basic design (with only accessories to tell them apart) and the comic has a purely black and white colour palette... Even the narratives tend to be simple, often consisting of a list with a different joke in every panel instead.

World Flame War III, uploaded by Huber on December 13th, 2011

The comic is also updated very frequently: a new 4 panel strip is posted every weekday, so the simplicity helps in this department. Huber needs to crank out a comic strip five times a week, so he can’t spend his time finely illustrating every little detail.

What this says to me is that the joke is the most important part of the comic. Nothing must get in its way, be it overly complex backgrounds or wordy dialogue or even time (or rather the lack of it).

Taking what I learned from Huber and applying it to my own practice, I created I few rough comics:

The main I tried to adhere to was simplicity. My comics are certainly not as simple as Huber's, but compared to some of my other work they are much simpler. It was somewhat of a struggle to keep them this simple, adding further detail almost seemed like a reflex action I had to hold back.

Another thing I noticed is that when Huber goes with the 'list' routine, he often subverts expectations in the last panel. If the first few panels are of a serious subject then he'll go with something silly in the last one (creating humour by implying the silly thing is as serious as the previous ones), or the opposite where he creates humour by simply subverting your expectations. This is something I tried to capture in all of my comics, either by comparing a gang of goofy skaters to the rapist lunatics from A Clockwork Orange and the murderous maniacs from Mad Max, or by implying that being able to scratch your back in just the right place is as good a reason to become a cyborg as super intelligence is.