No, your eyes do not deceive you. You are getting two strips this week. And yes, these have both appeared on the blog already, but in a different format. The originals are here and here if you want to compare.
For the life of me, I am not sure why I redrew these. I mean, yeah, both strips look a lot better redrawn. And the newer strips are in the 1×4 format instead of the original 2×2 so they look consistent with the vast majority of the other strips I drew over the four-year run. But why did I redraw these two particular strips?
My first thought was that maybe I had redrawn these in the summer of ’91, after I had graduated and was working as a recruiter for the VTCC (yes, I was a recruiter, which is rather scary when you think about it. Me, recruiting new cadets. Egads, what was I thinking? And what was the VTCC thinking when they hired me?!). That summer, I was asked to put together a collection of the best Rats! cartoons to leave in the lounge at Rasche Hall, where potential recruits came to visit. So it would have made sense for me to redraw two of what I thought were the funniest (but worst drawn) cartoons I had.
But then I noticed that one of the strips was dated ’89, the first year I drew Rats! And that same strip had “reduce 79%” written on it, which was the CT’s short hand for how much to reduce my original cartoon so it would fit in the newspaper. So obviously at least that cartoon was redrawn and reprinted in the newspaper the same year it ran the first time. As for the second, I can’t find a date on it or evidence of it having gone to the CT for printing, but it’s so similar in style – same paper, same type of pen. And since I frequently switched the types of papers and pens I used to create the comics, I’d say it’s fairly certain this one was redrawn at about the same time and ran again in the paper as well.
I can also say that these cartoons were redrawn on the same paper using the same pen that I was using when I switched from 2×2 panels to 1×4 panels (are you dizzy yet from all these minute details?). So they both obviously belong to the batch of cartoons drawn in ’89-’90.
But again, I have no idea really why I redrew them. I just realized that I did, and so I thought I’d post the nicer versions together this week. Just so you can see how much the cartoons had changed in the space of a few months.
