Minions at Work: A Photocomic

Writing a single panel cartoon with a caption is — hard. One of the challenges is identifying who is talking. My role model for the single panel is Gary Larson’s 80s to late-90s comic-page sensation, “The Far Side.” But drawn cartoons have a definite advantage in that you can always draw a character with their mouth open to show that they’re the one talking. I couldn’t do that with my action-figure characters (and you can’t see the mouths on several of the characters anyway because of their masks), and so I had to resort to other methods. That’s why several of the characters have very distinctive speech patters. No. 1 speaks in garbled pseudo-Russian valley-girl speak in the style of the movie “Clueless.” Number Two can’t seem to get a sentence off without saying “fricken.” The rest of the minions are more generic in their speech, but I often indicate that they’re talking by having them gesturing with their hands, or by giving some kind of positional context clues in how I set up the scene.

But for the life of me, I have no idea who I intended to be talking in this panel. It sounds like something No. 1 would say, but it isn’t his speech pattern. It isn’t Newbie. He doesn’t speak on panel. Number 67 is also pretty hard-core to be expressing regret. Number 10 is definately take-no-prisoners, and he doesn’t talk much either. So I’m thinking it’s Number 9 probably. He’s the sort to have a little touch of guilt, but the man loves his candy.

Which is why, Minions at Work 2.0 is going to have word balloons. Doing it the old way was an interesting challenge, but I’ve proven I can (usually) do it. Time to move on.