You might be thinking that they're just too good to be done by a single person, and you might be right. Ariane, the artist of the comic, has admitted that she gets her "ideas from small Peruvians I keep in my basement who work day and night to find the best jokes… and also real life. My all-time inspiration is Garfield, of course!"
"Hi, Bored Panda readers! Tons of love from Paris, France where I live! From me, my cat Jasper, my lizards and my shrimps, we all wish you an amazing day, may your pillow always be cold and your wildest dreams come true!"
Ari's been doing "great, juggling between my webcomic and working freelance as an illustrator right now but I'm loving it! And yes, there might be 2 big things coming up... regarding a book and a plushie... Not at liberty to say more."
Well, if you like my comics, I have a full trilogy of comic strips available on Amazon! It's called "Johnny Vampire" and it's about... a vampire called Johnny, who gets his manor taken away by the government for non-payment of his taxes. So he has to move to the city and deal with the struggles of living in a society™.
Ari's not a traditional standard by any means, and her medium is "all digital, baby! Way better than paper. I hate paper. My home is paper-free. And also pepper free. That last statement is false. I love pepper. What was the question again?"
Besides Ari, there's another major character in her comic (and even that is an understatement), and that's Jasper, the sphynx cat. "My cat Jasper comes from the planet Cathar where he was discovered to be force-sensitive," jokes the artist. "But the empire declared him too powerful and put a bounty on his head, which is why he had to exile to planet Earth, he loves it here but he misses death sticks a bit."
There are a few ways that Ari manages to make it fresh after all these years of comic creation. What works best for her, she said, is "changing art style once in a while! Subtle stuff. I experiment and see what I keep so that the style evolves!"
"I'd say create what you'd like to exist and don't compare yourself to others, only celebrate them and draw inspiration from them!"
Ariane thinks that "The best thing [about comics] is anyone can do it, you don’t have to be Michelangelo to draw comic strips, the important part is the joke, not the art per se. The worst thing is some people don’t understand the minimalistic approach in comic strips for the joke to work and will criticize the art as if you were drawing a graphic novel. But trust me, drastic changes of angles and poses with too much added details spoils the comedy timing and you end up with a weird unfunny chimera between two genres. I've seen this, I've done this, you don’t want this."
If you ever wondered how Ari works on her comic, she gave us a little sneak peek:
"I have a long list of comics in the notes app of my phone, I don't search for ideas, they appear here and there! I'd say it takes me one hour per panel: storyboarding > sketching > inking > coloring!
My favorite part is the reception of the fans that comes with each comic! When they notice small details, make jokes, fanart, theories... It brings me so much joy!
My least favorite would be... drawing things that are not characters like furniture, backgrounds, buildings."
If you've been on the internet long enough, the chances are that you've stumbled upon them out there in the wild, or at least seen them out here on Bored Panda. Not so sure about that? Here's a refresher, where you may find the links to the previous parts: I, II.
And if you want to binge a little bit more on comics we published, here's a random selection of a few of them: I, II, III, IV.
