L.A.W.L.S. Comics

Changes to Words of Interest

Words of Interest, as some of you know, is my “Word of the Day” comic in which I use royalty free victorian artwork (or my Whale an Squid characters) to not only tell a joke, but hopefully teach the reader a new word they may have never had a chance to learn. Personally, out of all my comics, this concept has always been one of my favorites. I love learning new words and finding fun ways to put them in sentences and/or use them in my daily vernacular! Using clip art (borrowed or made by myself) also provides me with the opportunity to work on better jokes because I can spend less time working on art and challenge myself to write something outside of my box. Though, I will admit sometimes I don’t land every joke, but really that’s the point; This comic is also a writing exercise for me to become a better writer as well.

As much as I love this comic’s concept, it has definitely been my least visited site out of all my comics. This for me has always been a shame. A few of my favorite jokes I’ve ever written are Words of Interest jokes! In the time of my hiatus I’ve brought prints of some of my favorite Words of Interest and ALT. comics to shows and people have liked them both equally. This for me is reaffirming, though raised questions for me as to why it’s not as popular on the internet. After discussing with people here and there I’ve come to find that people don’t even realize that Words of Interest is another L.A.W.L.S. comic. This led me to investigate as to why this may be the case. I began looking through my archives and realized a few things rather quickly. I believe a huge factor in this is that other than the Whale and Squid characters, there really is no L.A.W.L.S. “presence” in them. It dawned on me that I should perhaps add some of my more signature characters, namely Cadence and Autumn.

Researching the Era

Considering how much I enjoy the Victorian esthetic I figured this would be a fantastic opportunity to learn more about it and dabble in drawing my own versions of classic styles! I spent some time researching cool Victorian hats, dresses and other things from the time. I learned though that when you search the word Victorian on Google or any other search engine, you also find a lot of overlap in Elizabethan styles as well. Unfortunately I didn’t realize this when I first drew Autumn. It was a reader on Facebook that call it to my attention. At first I was worried that this would be something that would ruin the concept, but after further consideration I realized that it didn’t really seem to affect what I was going for the art: the essence of class. So, I decided to go ahead and leave Autumn in a more Elizabethan style but made sure to draw Cadence in Victorian garb. This leads to an interesting side note. The style of dress I chose for Autumn ended up giving her a bit more of a Queen-esque feel, which I liked because I’ve called her the Goth Queen before.

One thing I learned from this research is that I really wish women still wore hats. Maybe not the Victorian styled hats, but there are plenty of elegant choices that I think look really pretty. Am I alone in thinking this? Would any of you ladies out there wear them if the modern fashion provided you with choices that fit what you were wearing? I’m sure there are modern hats out there… but when I’ve gone to hat stores looking for top hats and such, it seems like most of the women’s hats are hats that would only look nice if you were wearing fancy dresses. Even then, I feel like you’d have to be going to an era theme party to wear them. I don’t know, maybe I’m weird. Either way, because I liked the way a lot of the hats looked I decided also that I would give Cadence I super flowery and crazy looking one.

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