This isn’t everybody. There were a LOT of great aunts and uncles, cousins, friends… so many of us, all still walking around above ground in nineteen seventy-six. I didn’t think about my own mortality because mortality had not yet touched me. That was coming, of course. Over the next ten years we would lose many of those pictured here. Now, as my younger brother pointed out, there are only three of us left from those in the drawing. At the time, though, my ignorance of mortality was bliss… and optimism. The things I didn’t see then, couldn’t see, are very obvious now. Now I understand that a long life inevitably includes a great deal of loss, and that living to one hundred and fifteen years might be very lonely.
I took care in drawing my people. I used old photographs and memories. These cartoons are my attempt to convey likeness and personality - simplification without caricature.
Grandad, me (on his right in that striped sweater), and my brothers and cousins about 1966
My family plus my best friend Kenny on a trip to Disneyland in 1971. We are in Chinatown Los Angeles, I believe.
Thanks for reading The Unified Theory of Mister Pitts! This post is public so feel free to share it.
I will probably need to do some dedicated character design work with some of these people as they will be featured in future episodes. It’s customary to do that kind of work while preparing to draw a cartoon, but I am not actually in the habit of doing much prep work. I typically do a couple of sketches and then get going on the final comic. The character who appears most consistently in these is me, and if you have read many of these, you know that my depiction of myself has changed over the course of the stories. Basically, I am doing the character design work as I go, in the comics themselves.
I sketch in a hard lead mechanical pencil, go over in ballpoint, lightbox in a soft blue lead mechanical pencil - not non-photo blue, but it drops out just the same when I adjust threshold in Photoshop.
But I am wanting to start doing a little more prep work in general. Thumbnails, storylines, more thorough character design, etc. My goal with this project is to produce print versions eventually, probably 28-page comic books (aka “floppies”) initially, then compile those into more substantial graphic memoirs of about 100 pages each. I think a little more thorough planning might be in order.
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