Shower Curtain Comic Strip

Here it is…..my very own comic strip!! I moved forward with my plan to draw during my breaks at work, and spent this week creating The Shower Curtain. It was a great experience, and I can’t wait to work on more.

This one stemmed from our annoying shower curtains…..annoying, that is, until we realized we needed to raise the bar. Stupid us! Anyway, our shower curtains kept billowing in all the time so that every time you moved, every time you turned, every time you shifted, it clung to you. It was sooooo irritating! We even did what I showed in the first panel, and bought a shower curtain specifically with weights thinking that would help to keep it in place. Well, it certainly kept the bottom part in place but did nothing to keep the rest of it from creeping in toward us. Our bathtub is by NO means large, so it became very claustrophobic!

I came up with the brilliant idea of pushing it back so it would stick to the top of the tub and then spraying water into the small crevice that formed. That worked wonderfully, but the best solution goes to Shawn when he did the very simple thing of raising the bar. After that, we didn’t have a problem anymore and the shower curtain stayed in place…..as much as it can when there is only so much room to maneuver in the tub.

One day when I was getting pissed off at the curtain, I was thinking about being clingy as a person and I placed that personality trait onto the curtain as well. I ended up making the joke to Shawn, “It’s clingy! Nobody likes a needy shower curtain!” I jotted that down as a strip, and intended to do it exactly as I had written but as I was nearing the end of drawing it I wondered if the end was actually funny. It might be to me, but it could fall flat with everyone else. (Of course, you can say that about everything.) I brought this up after work with Shawn, and we continued the discussion once we got home. I’m not setting out to definitely create funny strips, each one having that rhythmic punch line, but I don’t want to make duds either. I felt I needed something better, and Shawn thought I could go with one that was stronger and shorter, one that would deliver the intent more directly. So, I nixed the one I had come up with and we went back and forth trying to hit on that right one. We came up with the shower curtain trying for second base, but during lunch today that particular wording didn’t feel right coming from me so I changed it to something a little cuter…..I guess you’d say.

I’m pretty happy with the result. I know it is crude, and there are problems with its delivery and look. I’m not crazy about the word balloons or text, but they are hand drawn so automatically kind of rough. The comic might have been improved if I hadn’t gone with what I drew for the first panel, or maybe I should have gone with just three panels instead of four and left that first one out entirely. But, it is my first strip (or second if you count the one I did for the Art & Story contest), so I can only get better from here, right? Hopefully anyway! Either way, I’m having fun and feeling great about myself with the help of these strips and my sewing, so I’ll just keep at it and enjoy it all.