Mimes With Orange

After a long break, here's a new Rhymes With Orange collaboration with my good pal Hilary Price:

This one percolated for a while before taking its final form. It started as a doodle in the margin of a sketch for another panel, and originally depicted a mime ventriloquist holding a dummy that looks just like him:

I thought the image was interesting, and had some promise as the seed of a gag, so I sent a larger sketch to Hilary to see what she might come up with.

Hilary thought that the ventriloquist shouldn't be a mime, but possibly a a novice, starting off with a mime dummy; or maybe a dissatisfied customer returning it to the store, saying "I couldn't get it to work." After further consideration, she came up with the very funny gag published today.

This is a perfect example of the way Hilary and I collaborate. Her final cartoon is often quite different from the submission sketch. My rough usually serves as a springboard for her own take on a concept, and the results are always surprising and rewarding to me. It's a joy to work with other cartoonists from time to time, and to gain a fresh perspective.

In fact, this sparked yet another idea that I just might use sometime in the future...

We have a few more joint comics in the pipeline, so stay tuned. In the meantime, you are invited to peruse our previous collaborations, archived in this blog's RWO Suitcase.