Scrapbook page 25

fbd-healing-arts

This is one of the many “secondary” illustrations from the Fudebakudo book. It’s one panel of four (fig. 3b, page 24) from what turned out to be a popular joke: the suggestion that some martial arts experts are really failed traditional healers who pivot.

I tried to keep a lot of this “diagrammed” style in Fudebakudo, because it suited much of the technical bullshitting agenda of the project; specifically this means drawing figures without faces. As a cartoonist, this shifted my focus from expression to gesture and posture (which worked for Fudebakudo because posture is a characterstic aspect of martial arts). So I think that part of the humour here is conveyed by the sole of the fallen foot, which presumably is the sort of thing you have to reach for when you’ve disallowed yourself the option of simply plonking funny googly eyes on all your figures.

In practice, especially for the “kata” cartoons, which were also perhaps the most popular ones, this diagram style became characteristic of the Fudebakdo project, and I had a lot of fun with it.