Bicycle Race
PaulEberhardt on Jan. 13, 2017
Next update on Friday, 27 January, 2017
Hi again, and thanks for all your friendly comments on last page!
This is now my take on the Bremen Sixdays (for some pictures and facts in English see http://www.bremen-tourism.de/d64ef243-90a5-93aa-0c1c-17e1591f1888 ), because I realised that I haven't done anything really Bremen-specific for a long time, and because they're going on right now, from yesterday to Tuesday, to be precise.
Of the pages in my little buffer this is the one I drew last, and what with all that trouble with Christmas and moving to England for a couple of months again, I had to leave it in black and white. I think it's a pity, as it might have looked a bit more spectacular, but there you go. To tell the truth, I wanted to get on with this elaborate setup hardly warranted by the main gag. I'm not terribly interested in track-cycling myself. I generally don't think it's all that interesting, if you're not into it yourself or have a relative who is - for us outsiders it's just some bicyclists going round and round in an oval. As far as I can tell, most visitors of the Bremen Sixdays come for many the music and show acts and the parties; at least these are the parts that feature prominently in the radio and newspaper reports about it, at most with an incidental note that bicycles may be involved at some point as well. :)
Anyway, the result is that I had to do a lot of reading for this, and I'm not too satisfied with my artwork here. Nevertheless that made this page an interesting challenge, and apologies to all those into track-cycling, who will certainly spot lots of inaccuracies on my part.
Thanks for reading, and have a nice weekend!
Gunwallace at 10:08PM, Jan. 26, 2017
Nice
PaulEberhardt at 10:12AM, Jan. 15, 2017
@artdude: Thank you. It didn't just take days but literally ages, as I couldn't really warm to it at first; if there is anything I'm less keen on doing than crowd scenes it is large crowd scenes - for me they are a pain in the behind to draw with a decidedly meagre reward for the time it takes. I envy artists like, say, Nick Bertozzi who manage to do many of them regularly. In consequence, I'd had that idea lying around for years, always postponing it to another January. Whenever I remembered it in the past few years, January was either a long way off, or it was in mid-December with Christmas coming up and me realising that there'd be no way for me to get it done in time.
PaulEberhardt at 6:57AM, Jan. 15, 2017
@kim: Thank you! I'm glad you like it. You're right that the ending may be kind of obvious - I used that trope of Tiger contributing to the fitness of those around him before, after all ( http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Master_the_Tiger/5467053/ for example ), but it would have been a shame to let this idea go to waste, what with its connection to Bremen and the Sixdays' mascot being an azure blue tiger with vermillion-coloured stripes, called "Speedy", as not really seen on the left of the presentation ceremony panel.
artdude2002 at 5:30AM, Jan. 15, 2017
What a great page. That must have taken days to complete. The last panel made me think of the old song, Hold That Tiger.
KimLuster at 7:34AM, Jan. 13, 2017
Wow this is awesome!! Beautifully done! Incredible work!! And I guessed the ending once they asked him about practicing!!