TITLE The Bastich By Hart
PANEL 1 (A tiny stick figure in a top hat sits atop an eraser while holding a pencil like a cane.) CAPTION: Let's Have Fun With DR. STICK MAN DR. STICK-MAN: Hi, kids! Today I'm gonna learn ya how ta draw yer fav'rit miscreant... da BASTICH. So button up an' pay 'tention, fools!
PANEL 2 (A sketchy oval with perpendicular lines through its center.) CAPTION: 1) First, just draw an oval with too lines crossing through the center. If ya can't get this part right, yer an engineer. Git out!
PANEL 3 (More sketchy ovals are added and scribbles suggesting hair, eyebrows and glasses.) CAPTION: 2) Next, add some construction lines for the glasses, brows, and hair.
PANEL 4 (Increasingly sketchy mess as all of the shapes are added leading to a blurry mess.) CAPTION: 3) Now, add some more construction lines for depth and detail. Be as Accurate as you can! A T-Square and a compass might come in handy at this part.
PANEL 5 (Relatively clean pencil drawing of THE BASTICH. DR. STICK-MAN appears inset in the bottom corner holding up a pencil.) CAPTION: 4) Now erase away the construction lines. Now wasn't that easy? DR. STICK-MAN: Any dweeb can do it!
CREDITS (c) 1996 Joshua Adam Harts
Commentary
Another quick-and-easy Summer strip. It was pretty common to find this kind of how-to-draw feature in Sunday comics or at the back of paperback strips collections. It was both filler and a way to connect with fans. And almost every one of them started out as a circle with a line down the center.
Like a lot of aspiring artists, I also had heaps of books showing different drawing techniques, and my favorite of these was How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way by Stan Lee and John Buscema. Most of its pages showed how to break figures down into simple shapes (boxes, cylinders, spheres, etc) but in one section Buscema builds up some figure with rough scribbles instead, sort of like modeling from clay. With enough scribbles, the right lines are in there somewhere, and a skilled artist knows exactly which ones to erase to produce the final drawing.
So the idea with this strip was to take that technique to an extreme. I think it would have been funnier if I had yet another panel that was completely filled with scribbles to help the gag pay off.
I don't know where Dr. Stick-Man's weird accent came from, and that first panel is unintentionally suggestive. Whoops.