Cartoon Art Card colored with markers.
In general I’m pretty good at organizing things. I can usually find any file on my computer in short order. I can find any comic book in my collection quickly. I know where all my art supplies are but that’s as much about memory as order. But every now and then I let something slide and say to myself, “I’ll organize those some other time.” That’s what happened recently with my “Super-Talk” cartoon art cards.
It was earlier in the year that I started making some of these cartoon art cards. Unlike my regular 2.5×3.5 inch cartoon art cards these ones were 5×7 inches. On each one I would draw the bust of a superhero and there would be a balloon over their head in which they’d be saying something funny. A simple premise.
These weren’t even the first time I’ve made cards in this particular style. Over the years I’d make them on occasion and I already had those ones scanned in and then they sat there in a folder on my computer. I never thought of anything to do with them. I made about twenty five of them over the last five years.
This year I started making them again and I did them a little bit differently. I first drew them digitally on my iPad and then printed them out on a 5×7 inch piece of paper to be inked. This made the process faster and soon I had a bunch of them done. That’s when I decided that I was going to post them on my website.
I’ve been making my “Message Tee” comic for years. I post it here on Saturdays. The original idea was to make 52 drawings of people in t-shirts and change the saying on the shirt each year. That way I wouldn’t have to keep making a new drawing for each week. No one pays me to make these comics so I have to do what I can to make them exist. Cutting down on how much work they are helps.
Cartoon Art Card colored with watercolor.
Over the years I ended up doing a lot more than 52 drawings. I’m not sure exactly how many Message Tee drawings I made since some years I did reuse drawings but It was in the hundreds. I’ve enjoyed making the comic over the years but it is getting stale to me.
I don’t know how many “Super-Talk” comics I made before I decided I could replace “Massage Tee” with the new strips but it was a bunch. I was having a good time making them and I probably hit about twenty five of them and thought that I could do something with them. Replace “Message Tee” with “Super-Talk” for next year (2026) seemed obvious to me at that time. So I went on and eventually made fifty two of them.
I still had the twenty five or so of them sitting scanned in on my computer plus the new batch of fifty two of them and I thought to myself that I had better organize them so I could post them. They I thought that I have plenty of time to do that later. It was early 2025 and these weren’t going up until 2026. So that job of organization sat there undone.
About a month ago, despite having the first year’s worth of “Super-Talk” comics finished, I went ahead and made eight new ones. Sometimes I just feel like doing a particular thing so I do it. Eventually over the corse of a week or two I made eight more. Drew them, inked them, and hand colored them. I bought some new watercolor sets this years and have been using them to color these cards. A lot of the older ones are colored with markers but earlier this year I switched over so that I could use my new watercolors.
After I finished these eight new “Super-talk” cards I thought to myself that I had better organize all the cards sometime soon. But I didn’t at that point in time. I’m not usually a procrastinator. Just the opposite. I like to get things done right away so that I don’t have to think about them again. But with organizing these “Super-Talk” cards I was slow on the draw.
It was about a week after finishing the batch of eight that I was cleaning up around my drawing table. Things build up around the edges and every now and then I have to clean and organize my drawing table. The eight new cards had been sitting around so I wanted to tuck them away. This was the impetus that got me to finally organize all of the “Super-Talk” cards.
The first thing I had to do was find all the cards. First I wanted to find the digital scans of them and that was easy enough. I had a folder on my computer with them in it. But they had been scanned in at least three time periods over the years and the file names weren’t all the exact same. So I had to rename them all with a consistent file naming convention so that I could have them line up as number one through seventy five.
I also wanted to find the physical cards to match them up with the scans to make sure I scanned them all. I knew that I probably had but you never know. In fact I found a handful of them that didn’t have scans in the “Super-Talk” folder. I looked in my raw scans folder and found the scans. I moved copies of them into the “Super-talk” folder and all was good.
In the end there were about ten scans that I couldn’t find the original drawings for. I had to search through my boxes of 5×7 inch drawings that I’ve made over the years and found all the originals but those ten. They’re here somewhere but I have no idea where. That was a little bit annoying but since I have the scans of them it won’t slow me down in posting the comic.
All that organizing took me about two hours but I got it done. The only thing I haven’t done yet is figure out exactly in what order I want to run the comic. The earlier ones are done in a slightly different style than the ones I just made. I could run them chronologically but I think they might present better with the styles mixed up a little. A new one, an old one, and a middle one might be best. I’ll have to see. Whenever it is that I get around to that last bit of organizing.