Sea Change

My latest collaboration with award-winning cartoonist Hilary Price appears today in her comic strip Rhymes With Orange.

In an email message with the strip attached, Hilary said, "As these things go, it morphed." A glance at my submission sketch confirms that she richly deserves her merit badge in understatement.

About the only thing these two cartoons have in common is the word "Ness," but Hilary was kind enough to credit me, illustrating how truly collaborative the writing process can be, with one idea sparking another.

The pun in the final comic is a major improvement, requiring the change of a single letter. Even better, that change could conceivably be a typographic error, since n and b are adjacent on a QWERTY keyboard.

"Loch Ness Mobster" rolls off the tongue much more elegantly than "Goth Ness Monster." I do like the strangeness of the original art, but Hilary's version earns a bigger laugh. Well done, HP!

My previous collaborations with Hilary, including last year's week as guest cartoonist, can be viewed in this blog's Orange Archive.