Some info behind next week's PUP PARADE strip

Here's a sneak preview of a bit of next week's Pup Parade strip. You can see the full version in Beano No.4133 when it goes on sale on Wednesday 27th April. (Or if you're a subscriber you may already have it!)

Want to hear a little bit of background information on this strip? When I was drawing it, I wasn't happy with the second panel. For one thing Bones' face wasn't quite right, but mainly I felt that the composition looked too similar to panel 1. A comic strip should have variety, using different angles and close ups once the setting is established, so I stopped part way through inking it...

...and drew a different panel on another sheet of paper. I felt this one worked much better, focusing on the character who was speaking (Blotty) and the close up brought the readers more into the action. It also provided the much-needed variety for the strip's layout as a whole. 

Happy with that, I scanned the panels into Photoshop and assembled them to replace the unfinished panel. (The ball was also a separate illustration that I added afterwards.) Solid blacks and colouring were done with Photoshop too. (Speech balloons would be added by the Beano designers, based on my script.)

Changing panels isn't something I do that often but it does happen from time to time. As comics creators we're our own biggest critics, and these are the sort of changes we make before we send the job to the editors. Usually no one in the world sees these amendments but I thought I'd share this one with you. One of the key elements of comics is to keep them lively and entertaining (and funny if they're humour strips) so tweaking bits here and there is all part of the job.