Tag: comic strip

Inktober 6: Golden

Inktober 6: Golden

He grasped a great two-handled cup, as heavy as he could carry, and cast one fearful eye upwards. Smaug stirred a wing, opened a claw, the rumble of his storing changed its note.

Bilbo fled. But the dragon did not wake–not yet–but shifted into other dreams of greed and violence, lying there in his stolen hall while the little hobbit toiled back up the long tunnel. …He clutched the cup, and his chief thought was, “I’ve done it! This will show them! More like a grocer than a burglar, indeed! Well, we’ll hear no more of that.”

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

Here there be dragons! I was in almost as much a tremble as Bilbo, trying to draw Smaug decently well.

Inktober 5: Map

Inktober 5: Map

What should we do today?–Pool party off the coast of Florida? Picnic in the Midwest? Tennis in the Rockies? Puddle jumping in the Great Lakes? Oops–don’t trip over the Appalachians!

Or maybe we could help the mouse in Alaska figure out what’s wrong with this picture? šŸ˜

I love drawing a big group of mice scurrying around doing different things, and this was so much fun! Putting in the mountain ranges reminded me very much of filling in geography maps in school.

Inktober 4: Dodge

Inktober 4: Dodge

This prompt immediately, and unfortunately, brought back memories of dodgeball in high school gym class. There was always a group of boys who just wanted to see if they could raise welts on each other, and everyone else spent the class trying not to get caught in the cross-fire. I can still hear the *thwap* of a dodgeball hitting the wood floor with the approximate speed of a space capsule on re-entry….

Inktober 3: Path

Inktober 3: Path

Two roads diverged in a wood, and Iā€”
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Another comic–let no one say that I started Inktober on a slow foot!

The Mice are having a pretty rough time of it, too. Crazy dreams, squashed by elephants, dropped off cliffs…..

In school I was given the pretty popular “Be original! Blaze your own trail! etc.” interpretation of this poem, so I decided to follow that advice with an opposite interpretation. But I read that Frost actually wrote this poem as a joke about his friend’s indecisiveness over which path to take when they were out walking–rather more low-stakes than setting out your life’s destiny (assuming that there were no actual cliffs in the vicinity). So perhaps the joke is on us, too, for taking him to seriously. šŸ˜Š

Inktober 2: Spider

Inktober 2: Spider

There’s a NO in “arachNOphobia.” šŸ˜¬

*No mice were harmed in the making of this comic, but they may have experienced the heebie-jeebies.*

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If you’re wondering why there’s suddenly a random elephant in the comic…
In the very first Lab Mice drawings (a series of doodles on a high school biology quiz), a mouse met an elephant, who panicked (“elephants are afraid of mice”) and inadvertently squished the mouse. The mouse reappeared in a body cast, the elephant apologized, and the two agreed to be friends. And then Elephant almost never appeared again. So here she is, 18 years later! Does a character count as “recurring” if she’s only seen about once every decade?