I am reading the Diesel Sweeties promo kit from United Feature Syndicate. My thoughts so far are:

1) The artwork looks really sharp in black and white. The contrast has obviously been bumped up and some of the backgrounds simplified. What were light grey clouds of smoke are now dark black. There’s obviously been a lot of thought put into the presentation rather than just doing a straight conversion to greyscale.

2) It’s weird how some of the dialogue has been reworked for newspapers in ways in which the logic completely escapes me. For example, instead of saying “I wish I had more friends like you, Mr. Toaster,” the newspaper version says, “I wish I had more friends like you, Johnny Toaster.” Instead of saying, “Why are you so mad? What did I do?” newspapers will get Clango saying, “What did I do to make you so mad?” Weird. I suppose some of this is probably space considerations, some of this is Stevens taking the opportunity to rework his older material, and some of this is the soul crushing syndicate machine demanding that toasters be addressed according to proper AP style.

3) I never realized these characters had legs before. My understanding of each character’s motivations is completely different now that I more fully grasp what types of shoes they wear and how long their pants are.

This hits newspapers begining January 8. I’m looking forward to it.

Note: This was x-posted at http://users.livejournal.com/_eric_m_/

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 2:56 am and is filed under Print Comics and Graphic Novels, Webcomics (Non-MT). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.