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I never would have known it back when I was a kid, but I was destined to become a dance dad, the guy who drives his kid to dance lessons, recitals, competitions, and performances. It was a big part of our life, and I wrote and drew a lot of comics waiting in the lobby of a dance studio. Inspiration is sometimes just looking up from where you’re waiting for the kid’s class to be over, huh?
The four-panel format was my first and most used comic style, and it belies that fact that most of my audience was on Insta which (at the time) relied on square images. It was a great format and four squares is sometimes just the right amount to play around with a particular gag.
And while I often drew a lot of gags that revolved around running, we never shied away from an active lifestyle in any climate. We dabbled in biking, skiing and more, and the kid’s frequent reluctance to step away from her gadgets usually rubbed up against her equally strong desire to explore the world through these kinds of crazy adventures.
So much of what I drew fell into the category of “parenting” because at it’s core the strip was about being a dad. What you may not have noticed (or maybe you did) was two things. My wife was never in the strip (by design) and she was and still is fine (prefers) that. And two, the kid character always spoke in lower case. It made me happy the first time a reader pointed that out because, yeah, it was on purpose.
If anything, since stopping my artistic work on this comic I have gotten more and more into music. But even back then the Kid was learning the piano and I was learning the violin, so there was a lot of musical learning going on at our house. It made for endless comedic stories.
You may have noticed some redundancy in the written content in these posts, particularly if you’ve been reading more than one or two of them. A couple years ago the original piday.ca site was hacked and lost… and I have had to rebuild it all from scratch. I had all the comics and art, but I have taken some shortcuts with a bulk content editor to try and give those comic strips as much context as I can.