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Description
For Spiritchan's contest. This is not so much an entry as a present for Spiritchan...there'll be a lot more who deserve a prize, but I wanted this to be a totally traditional cartoon, nothing but black and white, done with pen, brush and ink and no digital manipulation other than erasing some little specks of crap that the scanner saw that my eyes couldn't. It's really hard to do cartoons this way, you get a new respect for the cartoonists of earlier days who didn't even have copying machines. I also wanted this to be as minimalist as possible. Easy for Groucho, you could just do the eyebrows, glasses, moustache and cigar and you'd be done. Harpo needs the hair--so that means Groucho needs it too. But Chico isn't so much a visual caricature as he is a verbal one--it's all in the accent--so you have to give him the whole face to show the family resemblance to his other brothers ... and the hat. Now you have three faces in a row which is a kind of boring composition, so Harpo gets HIS hat (and the frog which sometimes finds its way inside) and suddenly you're a lot LESS minimalist than you'd wanted. But it's a good composition...

Description
For Spiritchan's contest. This is not so much an entry as a present for Spiritchan...there'll be a lot more who deserve a prize, but I wanted this to be a totally traditional cartoon, nothing but black and white, done with pen, brush and ink and no digital manipulation other than erasing some little specks of crap that the scanner saw that my eyes couldn't. It's really hard to do cartoons this way, you get a new respect for the cartoonists of earlier days who didn't even have copying machines. I also wanted this to be as minimalist as possible. Easy for Groucho, you could just do the eyebrows, glasses, moustache and cigar and you'd be done. Harpo needs the hair--so that means Groucho needs it too. But Chico isn't so much a visual caricature as he is a verbal one--it's all in the accent--so you have to give him the whole face to show the family resemblance to his other brothers ... and the hat. Now you have three faces in a row which is a kind of boring composition, so Harpo gets HIS hat (and the frog which sometimes finds its way inside) and suddenly you're a lot LESS minimalist than you'd wanted. But it's a good composition...