Dealing With SCUMM

Guybrush's klepto ways finally gets him nabbed in the latest Babylon Sticks cartoon.

The latest BS cartoon for JIG is up, featuring a character from one of my favourite games series - Monkey Island. It came to being with the release of the recent Monkey Island 2 Special Edition, the second time Lucasarts revamped one of its classic adventure games for a new audience.

The joke itself is rooted in the oft-surfacing thought you get when watching these characters: where do they put all the stuff they take? MI2 even has a joke about it, when Guybrush stuffs a dog down his pants and then gives the player a fourth-wall-breaking look of absurdity. But that is a bit too technical to translate as a one-panel punchline. So it evolved into that these characters just walk in and stuff things into their pockets. If anything, adventure games are exercises in taking other people's stuff. Soon the image of Guybrush pinned on the hood of a cop car surfaced and the rest did itself!

Even the colours, which are usually pains to balance, gave little issue. The biggest culprits were green and blue - and I am a bit annoyed that I used different blues for the cop hats and car. The bushes in the back also posed a problem - should I use different greens or just repeat the same colours? I opted for the latter and it worked - mainly because the background should be flatter with less variation.

Speaking of the background, this is the first cartoon where I removed lines. A typical JIGBS has three layers: Black & White, Grayscale and Colour. After doing the inks, I scan and store the lines as grayscale, then colour the original. This is because in the colour scan the black lines become less pronounced, so I overlay the grayscale to highlight them. In this image I removed those lines for the background, giving it a sense of depth.

Now, being a Lucasarts-based strip, I couldn't help but fill it with references to most of the company's adventure game series. In fact, all of them except Labyrinth. Inside the car is the mask from Indiana Jones & The Fate Of Atlantis; the newspaper headline is a reference to Full Throttle; the mailbox has a flyer for Sam & Max; inside the window you can see characters from Day Of The Tentacle and Loom; the two-headed squirrel on the roof is from Zak McKracken & The Alien Mindbenders; the guy in the space suit is The Dig and on the wood fence you can see the face of Manny from Grim Fandango.