"A Day at the Races" September 20, 2010

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This one started with the squiggly line on the bird's beak on the far left. It had been a pen test, I'm sure, and I incorporated it into this fellows beak. I drew the bird right behind him on the same day. A couple days later, when I came back into work, Tim had drawn the worms. He figured the birds looked a lot like "Early Birds" and decided they needed some worms to catch. At the Cafe Loup, we don't have an Early Bird Special, although we mights as well. We get a lot of older folks in at the Loup and the majority of them come in early. When I say "older," I really mean senior citizens. It's the nature of the block, really. 13th St. and 6th Avenue seems to be a hot spot for seniors. At any give time of day, you can see them meandering in to the warmth and comfort of the Loup. They come in early and demand pillows because the chairs are too hard. They demand that we turn the music down, or get rid of that rock and roll and put some jazz on, ferchrisakes. Not all of them are grumpy, in fact some of them are dear regulars and interesting people. We've had some of them die, although we did a tribute drawing to our favorite ones, so I will tell you about them at another time. It's funny that early bird specials attract the old folks. You would think in a city like this it would attract all kinds of people who just want to get a meal at a good deal. It doesn't matter that much anyway, since the whole theme of the drawing changed the next Sunday night when I went at it pretty hard in a different direction. I decided to draw a giant monster worm that might actually be capable of eating the early birds. For one reason or another I put a racing hood on him, so then it seemed natural that we were actually watching a giant worm competing in a horse race. Which is what happened, and you are seeing it now. This changes the whole feeling of the drawing. Now the birds seem to be either degenerate gamblers or possibly the owners of the horse or the worm and are watching the performance to see how it goes. Maybe this is a Maiden Race and they don't know how good the worm really is, since it's untested in the race scenario. The worms turn into spectators, enjoying a day at the races in the Infield. This was another great collaboration that came together over a couple days of work and some weird twists of the mind's eye.