Occasionally in these last few years of It’s Walky!, I’d try to… go fancy? when I did a closeup?  I dunno.  Like, for some reason, I thought these guys were less cartoony when you saw them up close.  And so here I, for reasons that seem ridiculous to me now, tried drawing a more realistic Sal in panel two.  Like, she’s even nearly got nostrils.  Did I think the normal dots for eyes weren’t expressive enough for the situation?

Regardless, I would do this a handful of more times through the rest of the run, but less and less as I realized it just doesn’t really work.  These guys look like cartoons.  Stop trying to make them look like not cartoons.  Not looking like cartoons is not what these guys look like.  So when I draw Sal (or anybody else) in closeup in Dumbing of Age, you don’t get any fancy extra linework.  You just get Sal drawn normally but, y’know, larger.

salcloseupredrawI mean, this is exactly as effective, right?  I don’t feel I’m losing anything without the nostrils.

Anyway, Sal’s kinda murderous, but she’s also right.  At any point, Alan coulda told Walky he’s an abductee and Walky coulda stopped the mind-control cold in a flat second.  Thanks, Alan.