223 – Not a Creature was Stirring

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When I was drawing this page, I had a bit of a conundrum that I think more and more artists face these days: What device should Becky be using to illicitly view Christmas specials under the covers? The obvious answer would be an ipad or something like that, since that’s what the kids use today, right? That was my first thought, but then I realized how boring ipads are to draw. They’re just basically white squares! Plus, in my weirdly stylized drawing style, it would be difficult to really tell what it was supposed to be! So instead, I drew her using an archaic portable TV set complete with rabbit ears and the two dials for UHF and VHF. I know that no one uses TVs like that anymore, but they’re just more fun to draw. I think a lot of cartoonists are finding that new technology just doesn’t have the same visual flair as their old timey counterparts, which is probably why so many cartoon characters still use boomboxes and rotary phones.

Of course, Christmas specials really aren’t the phenomenom that they once were. In this day of the fragmented audience, it’s not like the whole family gathers around to watch one channel. Now that I look at it, since a lot of this story is based on my own Christmas experiences growing up, there are a lot of small details that suggest this might actually take place circa 1987/88.