945 "Jabberwocky", the famous poem within Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass.
This is the annotated listing of my Lewis Carroll Bench strips. Click on a thumbnail to see the strip. (Each strip is less than 80k.) The Bench died, and now all my comics are at Ko Fight Club.
945 "Jabberwocky", the famous poem within Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass.
Something clicked for me, and I got several ideas for Lewis Carroll crossovers! The first strip "Jabberwocky" simply placed Gabe into the Tenniel scene after removing the original vorpal sword wielder. (I did have to paste one Gabe head onto a different Gabe body, and of course add a light saber.) But then I got the idea of colorizing the Alice characters to surreally be the Bench characters. It is extremely labor intensive, but I love the results.
968 The Cheshire squirrel. I love this strip. It's one of my favorites. I think it's kind of poignant, and it's cool that 3 different pictures of Alice exist in appropriate poses for what I wanted to do. I like that Gabe simply is Alice here throughout the strip, instead of that being the punchline. There's also more background experimenting going on. I like the simple canvas effect for this stark strip.
977 The caterpillar and the hookah. I love this strip, and it kept me up till 5am working on it. I knew it would be much harder than any I'd done previously. So many selected regions and layers and colorizations and special effects! There have been plenty of previous Bench strips with drug-inspired special effects, but none with a classical literary allusion like this or as much varied detail. I put in obsessive perfectionist touches like removing Alice's hair below the mushroom in the middle frame when it's Gabe's head. If I were to do this one again, I'd make the squirrel's mouth line up with the smoke blowing out, which I didn't notice till I was done. The floating skulls are from Red Meat and are a reference to many previous Bench strips that have used them.
981 Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I did this one before the Cheshire cat and the hookah but forgot to submit it until later. It was my first time to get the idea of colorizing some other character to look like Gabe. The scanned version of Tweedledee had all black to the right of his head, so I had to make up the contour of his hat, hair and ear on the right.