You may have noticed that the strip is now in black and white. Don’t worry, the painstaking watercolor will be back soon, we just need to solve the mystery presented by GONOGO’s latest character: Bazooka Remex P.I.

I have always been a fan of Noir comics. Not so much for the plot, but for the use of black and white to create drama and mood. In fact, my favorite Batman anthology is “Batman, Black and White” which is a series of short stories where each artist interprets Batman through the black and white lens. Someone once pointed out that artists do best with limitations (mostly because it gives them rules to break) but I truly appreciate the elegance of the project behind Batman, Black and White. The limitations are set out with elegance and economy: Make a short story just using three ingredients: Black, White and Batman.

While Bazooka Remex P.I. is no Batman, he is a hard-boiled noir detective. My hope is that once this set of episodes is done, that we will have an opportunity for him to come back and struggle to solve more mysteries under the Roosevelt Bridge…in Black and White.

Back again with a brief discussion of last week’s Episode (#2)

This project was many years in the making, which means some of the jokes were first written down a long time ago. Fortunately, bashing Republicans seems to be a perennial punchline, who knew it would be so very true today? Also, because this comic takes a bit of time to make (its drawn and watercolored by hand) the jokes and ideas need to be able to land as far as eight months into the future. The idea of a Troll and Monkey living under the Roosevelt bridge is actually one of the elements that has survived from the very beginning. The first element was, in fact, the bridge. I have worked in Arlington and lived in DC for over twenty years, and I often cross this bridge during my commute. It not only connects Virginia and DC, but it also flies over Roosevelt Island, Federal parkland in the middle of the Potomac. I wanted to speak to characters that were in DC but not an actual part of the DC political scene (that is, I didn’t want to do a straight-up political cartoon, nor did I want something along the lines of Doonesbury) In this “no-mans-land” underneath the Roosevelt bridge give the characters the ability to travel between worlds without going anywhere.

If you have a bridge, you need a Troll. Foggy Bottom is just the Troll for the job. He’s named after the neighborhood just south of the bridge. I think today we encounter Trolls more often than they ever did in ancient times. I like the idea that he is not up to speed with the times, he doesn’t have a computer, and he seems powerless to enforce tolls for crossing his bridge.

Foggy is so bad at being a Troll that he even has a companion (trolls usually being solitary creatures). Smithson is a monkey. He is named after the founder of the Smithsonian, James Smithson. We will get into his past a bit more in the coming episodes, but for now all you need to know is that he is the erudite counterpoint to the brusque and uncouth troll.

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Tune in next week for Episode 3!

Welcome back to GONOGO. On Thursdays between comic postings I am going to feature some commentary about the previous week’s comic.

First, let me introduce myself, I am Jared Davis. I’m an artist, painter, set designer and occasional “Elvis” living in Washington DC. Last year, during the darkest days of Quarantine, I decided that the world needed another webcomic. So, I dusted off some of my old drawings that were rattling around in some pocket sketchbooks, and began to “get serious” about this comic thing. I  created some comics back when I was in high school. Of note was Sign of the Times, which was a comic critiquing the draconian sign ordinances in Novi, Michigan that was published in the Novi rotary newsletter….I know, once a cartoonist has reached such great heights, its only downhill from there.

In the intervening decades I did a lot of painting, and a bit of comedy writing (mostly for Elvis’ Birthday Fight Club) and it took a global pandemic to get me to realize that I could “put the chocolate in the peanut butter”, so to speak. The nature of comics has changed in the past few decades. When I was creating Sign of the Times, there were gatekeepers and barriers to entry (like the editor of the Novi Rotary Club newsletter) but those barriers no longer exist in the brave new world of webcomics. Aside from barrier smashing, the actual way comics are made has changed. In the early Nineties, I was drawing with India ink on Bristol board and then sending it out to be photographed. Today, I modestly submit, that I am a Photoshop wizard. The kind of comic I wish to present has been greatly colored by the changes in the technological landscape. To be honest, I have been struggling with these changes, and I hope that you, dear reader, will come on the journey with me. These first few episodes are going to be a bit wobbly (Have you ever gone back and read any of the early Garfield? Those drawings of Garfield represent the Neanderthal state in the evolution of the Garfield strip)  so I hope you will indulge me as GONOGO finds its comedic footing over the next season or two.

Now that we have introductions out of the way, I am looking forward to the next blog post (after Episode 2, on April 22) where we can discuss the development of your newest favorite Troll and Monkey duo: Foggy Bottom and Smithson.