About

The Cartoonist | The Comic | The Drawings

The Cartoonist

A drawing of Adrian J Wallace

  • Adrian J. Wallace writes and draws jumbodeluxe comics from his secret headquarters in Portland, Oregon, USA.
  • His secret headquarters is actually a small house he shares with his lovely wife, two cats and a big dog. His wife often helps with editing on the comic strip.
  • Adrian was born in Nottingham, England and lived in various places in Canada for several years before settling in the the USA’s Pacific Northwest.
  • Adrian is 6 foot 3 inches tall,  has brown hair and  hazel eyes.
  • Adrian’s cartooning influences are too many to mention here, but as a kid he read a lot of American newspaper comics, and graduated to small-press ‘indy’ comics in the early ’90′s.  He also enjoys European comic books.
  • Adrian drinks coffee and dislikes getting yelled at.
  • Other activities include making lists and writing about himself in the third person.

The Comic

  • This is humor-type comic with slapstick and visual jokes, there’s also a storyline that holds it together, so it’s recommended to start from the first strip and reading subsequent installments to get that dreaded continuity.
  • Much of the story and humor is character-driven. Check our evolving ‘characters‘ page
  • The story structure and the cartooning are both made to resemble an old-timey comic strip, despite the present-day setting.
  • Barring accidents, illness, jobs, and laziness; this comic is supposed to update every Thursday morning. Actually, for those of you with insomnia, It actually gets posted late Wednesday night. There’s no regular schedule for blog updates.

The Drawings

  • Layouts and dialog are conceived in a sketchbook.
  • Reference images come from various places around the web, but flickr.com is a big favorite.
  • Tricky perspective drawings are sometimes devised in Google SketchUp, particularly those involving vehicles or detailed architecture.
  • Finished strips are drawn on smooth bristol board, approximately 15 inches wide by 11 inches tall, first with a 2H pencil and then inked over with various crowquill pens.
  • Artwork is scanned at 600 dpi, on a rickety old usb scanner.
  • Images are assembled, corrected and colored using Adobe PhotoShop and a 10 inch wacom tablet, running on a Macintosh G5 desktop with OS X 10.4.
  • Lettering and graphics are applied with Adobe Illustrator.
  • The dialog is set in a custom font based on the cartoonist’s hand lettering style.