Chesca Hause
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Making of "Recursive"
🕑 Added 2021-10-22 19:13:25 +0000 UTCI had a lot of fun making the zombie comic last year, so I thought I'd try a robot version. For these kinds of comics, I make a list of all the typical family things (bedtime, mealtimes, getting kids ready etc) and imagine how things might go down in a zombie/robot/whatever world.
I LOVE Futurama, so I wanted to channel that with my robots. I realized the way robots talk is similar to The Beings in Strange Planet, so I went to look at his comics for inspiration. I reverse engineered some to see how they work and most are very ordinary conversations written in an awkward way. I wrote out some ordinary family conversations myself and played around using tech speak to translate them into robot.
I liked the idea of some sort of error occurring and found my way into the kids getting stuck in a loop. A song seemed logical and I was about to start dabbling in tech speaking up some nursey rhymes when Baby Shark hit me. I googled the scientific name for shark and put it all together. The doo doo doo's sounding so perfect coming from robots and I hoped they'd trigger the reader into recognizing the song.
With the script down, I started designing the robots. I already had "Future Mommy" from a previous bonus panel, so I only had to do the other 3. J is into vintage things, so I made his robot look older. Then I combined elements of both parents in the kids:
I flatted out the comics colors using the usual pink background and B&W speech bubbles, but I thought I could do better. I played around with some more Futuramay background colors and made all the speech bubbles green and black. J then had the idea of making some of the speech bubbles Gameboy colors, so I switched the boys (GameBOY, gettit?!) which solved an issue I was having with the last speech bubble getting lost in robo-Cooper's face.
