The Draw Play

Hello there old friend, it’s been a while.

You may be wondering why Sean Payton hasn’t made an appearance for so long. Basically, he’s not as much fun now that he’s back in football. The idea of a man obsessed with football being forced to sit out of football for a year was a wonderful place to mine ideas from. It gave me two of my very favorite comics, the very first Sean Payton comic, and the one with him sitting on the bench in the park.  The first one was just a perfectly executed joke, but I can’t really say why I like the second one so much. I just do. That look of utter powerlessness at the end slays me whenever I go back and read it. He’s just so defeated.

But there are only so many jokes to get out of that fish out of water situation, and many of them just felt samey in the end. I ended up taking Payton into weirder territory, giving him a weird relationship with Drew Brees, and again it just ended up getting tougher to write the ideas. This is basically why I never intended this comic to have recurring characters or a storyline. You can come up with a great set up, but it’s so much more effort to see it through and it gets harder and harder to write. You write yourself into corners, you come up with weak ideas to escape them, you get writers block…It’s hard. I have a lot of respect for those who do it. I chose the format I use so that I can play fast and loose with my ideas, and the challenge then becomes setting up and executing an entire joke within just a few panels. It also becomes choosing the right joke, and the right angle to take on it, because the huge multitude of material the NFL gives me always means tons of ideas are getting left in my brain’s dumpster. I think it gives the comic a larger Hit-or-Miss quality then I’d prefer, but it’s way more fun to do and keeps me on my toes trying to make sure I get it right.

Basically Sean Payton was quickly going into a dead end and the funny was drying up. There’s still material there, if I try, but I’m not going to go out of my way to make Payton comics from here out. Everything I’ve come up with for him in the past few months has been over-wordy and needlessly complicated for a 5 panel (average) gag strip. If the comics happen they happen. There is so much more football to mock, I don’t want to spend too much time with this weird  pseudo-character I have created. Lets just keep Sean Payton as a running gag, similar to Philip Rivers killing himself every once in a while. I should make a new one of those soon, too.