Recently, I’ve been having a conversation with a reader around my various art styles. They noticed that in some of my longer stories, I tend to spend more time on the art and the style looks a lot more consistent, but in my daily comic strips it’s almost like the style is really inconsistent and they were wondering if that was intentional. The short answer: Yes, it is!

The longer answer: Back when I drew Charlie and the Ghost, every couple of years I’d switch up how I drew the comic strip just to keep it interesting. It’s how I ended up with a bunch of different versions of that character (and I recently made a video about how to draw each of those versions, you can find that here!)

But when it comes to the “Rob” character in GoGoMachRocketSheep comic strips, I’ve never really iterated at all. When I first started making GGMRS, the comic featured both the “Rob” character and a version of Charlie:

When I started GGMRS, I wanted to design a character that was a more iconic representation of “me” but without needing to be realistic. Prior to GGMRS, Charlie was always my alter ego in those comics, but the other character was a ghost, and so there was always a level of disconnect from reality. When I say “iconic” I don’t mean it in the sense of like a “pop icon” or something that is famous, but rather in the representative sense- as a simplified stand-in for something that is far more complex… more like how an “app icon” on your phone is a visual representation of whatever the functionality of the app might be.

Eventually, my “me” character became fairly standardized and looked like this:

That’s fine. I liked how it looked. But when I moved to my new city, and got a job instructing comic making for kids, I discovered a way to help students draw characters that are more iconic (care of Lynda Barry’s Making Comics!) that I quickly embraced for myself:

Now, I’ve done a number of comic projects and video projects for university classes that all required me to draw myself a billion times as fast as I can… and The more iconic version of myself depicted in the comic above won out. I can draw it faster, it’s actually more fun to draw, and it actually resembles me a bit better- the hat, the beard, the glasses, etc. So, having come back around to wanting to draw daily comic strips, I’ve decided to stick with the more iconic character.

There are advantages and disadvantages to this decision, but the main advantage is: I like how it looks, and it’s fun to draw.

I made this drawing in response to the person who was saying I should spend more time on hands:

I think it’s pretty funny, but only because it highlights the absurdity of trying to combine iconography with semi-realism. Pick a lane, you know?