Hi patrons,
Introducing: Dame Dynamite! She's supposed to be an old-fashioned, well-established superhero in Turtle City. Usually when I create a new character, I visualize a real human face and simplify/exaggerate the details. In this case, I modeled Dame Dynamite's face on classic Superman drawings:
2020-03-24 01:30:19 +0000 UTC
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Becky here! I love doing watercolor postcards from Turtle City, but am usually short on time and ideas. For...reasons, I was thinking about Turtle City during pandemic flu-times, especially with Lillian's father being a doctor. I pictured kid-Lillian barricading herself behind stacks of books while her parents worried in the ...
2020-03-21 19:31:50 +0000 UTC View Post
I absolutely love Barry's dialogue here! It's so snappy and smooth, you'd never know that some of the lines were written a month apart. We knew that in this page, Lillian notices Ruth's discomfort at the anti-Semitic tirade, breaks out of "impartial reporter mode," and insults the protester to her face. But it took ages to de...
2020-02-29 19:52:16 +0000 UTC View Post
I looove drawing quirky faces and interesting lettering. Thanks for the script, Barry!
If you're curious, here's a video of a real anti-war protest from July 1941. You'll probably recognize some of the outfits and signs. :) Maybe don't r...
2020-02-18 07:04:32 +0000 UTC View Post
Ta-daa! I frickin love libraries.
I based this building on a former Carnegie library in Olympia, WA:
I loved the unique way that the entrance faces the corner, rather than one side of the street. Also, I thought the patch of gra...
2020-02-12 02:26:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons,
Last Saturday was the annual Hourly Comic Day, where a sliver of artists on the internet document their waking hours with goofy journal comics and post them on social media. I'm usually working at the theater on Hourly Comic Day, so this seemed like a good chance to give it a whirl. It was also a nice break ...
2020-02-05 21:29:16 +0000 UTC View Post
It feels so good to be able to show you this page!!! Panel 4 involved Google street view, streetcar research, and basically making a collage in Photoshop, so it took awhile. Every day this week has been a cycle of "I just have to do X and Y, and THEN I'll be done... ok it's taking longer than I thought, but TOMORROW I just ha...
2020-02-03 20:30:38 +0000 UTC View Post
Welcome back to weekly updates!
Credit goes to Barry for this cool page layout. The script had a few suggestions. I liked his idea of using Gladys Bentley's silhouette as a panel border, and I wanted to include both a panel of the four friends watching the concert, and a close-up of Lillian. I also didn't want the page ...
2020-01-22 21:51:00 +0000 UTC View Post
We're baaaaack! Thanks for your patience over the holidays. I hope it's not too late to say Happy New Year!
2020-01-13 22:23:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons,
I don't have the next page done yet, so I hope you like process posts! :)
Becky
2019-12-10 04:40:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons! Becky here. In lieu of a new SuperButch page this week, please enjoy these cartoons and photos from GeekGirlCon:
GeekGirlCon is one of my favorite conventions to go to! The energy is always really positive and sweet...
2019-11-27 06:39:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Barry added this page to the script pretty recently, after realizing that Alicia, Tammy, and perhaps some readers would scratch their heads when Lillian mentions Gladys Bentley's wife. I really like the dialogue on this page--Everyone is so cute! One of Barry's notes on my first draft was that EVERYONE was smiling in EVERY PA...
2019-11-15 08:13:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons! Becky here. I had so much fun drawing Mona being unabashedly excited about Gladys Bentley! She deserves some fun.
Naomi and I recently got back from a 9-day trip to visit the relatives in Brooklyn. This is the view from the ...
2019-11-06 06:30:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons! Becky here. The theme for this page was rabbit holes. We're back at the Rabbit Hole; my coworker got me hooked (don't judge) on a flawed-but-cool Alice in Wonderland-themed musical called Alice By Heart; and I fell into a fun research rabbit-hole while choosing everyone's outfits.
I was looking for ...
2019-10-17 22:57:55 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi Patrons! Becky here.
It's been a hectic weekend, including biking in a sunny afternoon hailstorm to set up for an amateur comedy contest that was renting performance space from the theater:
BUT, here we are with a page up...
2019-10-01 06:17:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi Patrons! Becky here.
Barry and I are back in the swing of things after last weekend, which was 3 days of Rose City Comic Con!
I didn't get a picture of our Artist Alley table, but if you want photographic evidence of the convention, here ya go:
2019-09-20 17:34:25 +0000 UTC
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I am having so much fun drawing Lillian in a wildly out-of-character outfit! I originally drew her in button-down pinstriped PJs--maybe Kansas had "borrowed" them from a hotel guest--but I realized it would be easier and less suspicious for Kansas to dip into her own wardrobe. This is a simplified version of a nightgown in "f...
2019-09-10 06:04:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons! Becky here.
Thanks for your patience. This page was a blast to draw, but it seemed to take forever! ...Now that I think about it, this page involved research/discussions/phone calls to my mother about head mirrors and otoscopes. Barry and I also decided to make the font for the comic a little smaller, so tha...
2019-08-20 05:29:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi Patrons! Becky here.
I first read about the Japanese hotels in the Pacific Northwest in Street Roots, a local newspaper that focuses on homelessness, but covers a lot of interesting local history, too.
Thanks again for supporting this project!
2019-07-30 16:54:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, I thoroughly enjoyed drawing 4 pages of dogs and babies, but I guess it's time for Lillian's story to pick up again. :)
Shout-out to my 4th grade classmate who said that my basset hound drawings were too "cute" for the comic book club! Drawing a ton of basset hounds in like 1994 came in handy after all.
<... 2019-07-23 05:55:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Becky here! It’s true: SuperButch just won the 2019 Prism Award for best webcomic!
(This picture was photobombed by my historical lesbian coffee mug from someplace called Feminist Horizons, which feels very appropriate.)
The Prism Awards for excellence in LGBTQ+ comics are given out by a publisher called Prism C...
2019-07-19 05:51:29 +0000 UTC View Post
Becky here!
Turtle City is in the Pacific Northwest (off I-5, if you noticed the highway sign on page 107). So a lot of Portland and Seattle details end up in my drawings.
Soon after I moved to Portland, I took a biking tour of the Northwest quadrant of the city, and was struck by this sight:
2019-07-17 09:02:28 +0000 UTC
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Becky here! This was a really fun page to research. (Hats off to Barry for finding a bunch of old houses on Google satellite to help with the perspective in panel 3!)
It took awhile to choose outfits and hair for everyone for this scene. (There's an extra pressure with webcomics, knowing you'll be looking at these chara...
2019-07-08 16:50:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Annnd we're back to weekly updates! This week's drawing soundtrack was Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Jessica Jones on Netflix, plus the You're Wrong About podcast.
Since we got back from Chicago, Naomi and I tabled at a small one-day comic [swa...
2019-06-25 22:51:59 +0000 UTC View Post
After a weekend behind the convention table, I’m sitting in First Slice—a delicious, cute Chicago cafe that also feeds people in need!—and wanted to give you an update.
2019-06-03 20:28:02 +0000 UTC
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Hi Patrons,
Believe it or not, we've reached the end of Issue 4, and the beginning of convention season! Barry and I have had a couple of story meetings, and the next segment of the script is in progress, and (especially after this conference!) I'm excited to start drawing the next segment of Lillian's story when I get hom...
I laughed SO hard while I was drawing this page! Poor Tammy.
I just looked at some earlier drafts, and wow, I'd forgotten how many tries it took to nail down everyone's poses and iron out the pacing! The Photoshop layers all have names like "panel 1 Lillian pose version 3."
Here are two earlier drafts of the page....
2019-05-13 20:30:42 +0000 UTC View Post
It took awhile to legibly draw a broken stack of wooden pallets. After this page, I'd spent so much time thinking about them, I started noticing every wooden pallet in every alley in Portland during my bike commute!
I can't find any reference photos of those in particular, but please enjoy the view from the Hawthorne br...
2019-04-30 06:31:49 +0000 UTC View Post
