EXPRESS YOURSELF

The Sisyphean Task of Drawing Sisyphus

Or, how to draw comics, again, and again, and again

“Drawing comics can be an uphill battle” is a cringingly obvious way to start this article, so I’d like to apologise for that first and then apologise again for this next one before we get things rolling.

The undisputed home of single-panel cartoons is of course, a largely unknown weekly called The New Yorker and having taken the time to look through their entire back catalogue (yes, I have the time; I’m a cartoonist) I can confirm that our old mate Sisyphus and his bestie The Boulder have been a comedic mainstay on the comedy-duo circuit for at least the last 3,000 years or so.

Their enduring popularity is obviously a complete mystery. Just what is it about the plight of a person toiling away at the same rewardless task for eternity, only to have to repeat the same thankless task the next day that enamours and fascinates the public to this degree? We’ll never truly know.

As every cartoonist, Kardashian, or accidentally famous bystander has mused however; there’s no point analysing the reasons for fame, but rather expertly mining that popularity for every bit of continued attention and reward it might contain.

And so, let us — as aspiring cartoonists, take the millennia-old fame of Sisyphus and his Boulder and exploit that famous comedy duo for all that they’re worth. (We’ll be using these two in this particular case, however the process we’re embarking on here can be used for any number of setups or situations, comedic or otherwise.)

So, let’s start with the obvious. The classic setup: our guy Sisyphus and his Boulder (who is being capitalised in this article because The Boulder is just as a significant character here as Sisyphus is).

Here they are, doing their thing:

So from this perspective we already have multiple options. Without even changing the drawing we can caption this with several different gags.

“This month” Sisyphus thought, “This month I‘ll remember to cancel the subscription.”

“Naturally, it was impossible to calculate the money he’d saved on an eternity’s worth of gym memberships, but Sisyphus figured it ought to be fairly significant by now.”

So, that’s the basics. From here, the trick is to change the perspective.

The most obvious perspective change is time, and in most cases (including both of the above captions) the comedy is found in applying modern-day life to an ancient Greek myth.

To tap into how else this could look, just shift the myth into a modern-day format. For instance, instead of telling Sisyphus to push a boulder up a mountain endlessly, a 21st-century version might see Hades tasking him with delivering The Boulder to the top of the hill via an endless string of redirections…

Or, we change the perspective of the image itself. Let’s move the camera. The age-old image of this gag is what we’ve drawn so far; left to right, side-on, Sisyphus below, The Boulder above and ahead. What if we left this scene and took ourselves to the top of the mountain?

Or, what about the perspective from individuals in the scene? I mentioned that The Boulder is just as much of a character in all of this, so how do they feel about it all?

Or, instead of therapy, maybe they did the next closest thing and laid it all out in a depressing one-man comedy show…

In this regard we’re now removing The Boulder from the original setup and putting them in an entirely different situation, which of course is most of the fun. So why not do that to our main man as well, who at this point is probably pretty keen to get rid of The Boulder altogether…

Alternatively, we remove both of them from the mountain. You’ve got to assume The Boulder would be a pretty good nightclub bouncer, and keen to get away from his pushy friend…

To further mine the original setup for material, we can then start looking at the slope itself in the image, and apply a more famous slope by shifting the whole comic to Everest base camp.

At this point, we’re now drifting into the more conceptual aspects of the image, which at a base level is just a ball rolling in a direction, and so zeroing down on this opens up even more possibilities.

I particularly like how the above comic requires no speech bubbles or captions, which as far as drawing comics goes, always feels like an achievement.

From here, we can just get more and more surreal…

There are of course, happy accidents that come about only through the process itself. For instance, while drawing a black circle that I intended to use as a guide to trace my boulder, I ended up with the following comic which has way too long of a caption, but which I quite like regardless.

There were of course a lot more drawings that came to mind that didn’t make the cut (The Boulder starting a band and insisting on playing rock and roll felt a just little too dad-jokey for instance).

But for now, that’s it!

That’s my little window into a drawing process I’ve found to be fairly useful and quite productive: Just keep changing the perspective.

I guess if you were to reduce it down to a single comic though, it would be something like this…