As an online cartoonist, I get a lot of emails. A lot of them come from various African war lords who want me to hold their money for them. But I also get asked "how do you make your comics?" a lot. Well here's the answer.

The process usually begins in one of my university lectures. As the professor drones on and on about interest rates or the Peloponnesian War or God knows what else, I usually doodle in my notebook pages. I think about news events I read in the paper that morning, or stories I read on the Internet, and start sketching some ideas.

On this particular day I was thinking about Canada's big budget surplus that the Martin Administration had recently revealed. I thought it was pretty stupid for a government to be proud of a surplus, since it was essentially an admission that they had overtaxed us for no reason. Martin's comments about his government "debating" what to do with the money I found similarly insulting, since it was not his money in the first place. I liked the idea of drawing Martin as robber, hoarding over a big pile of stolen money, so I started doodling ideas on that theme:

I decided I would draw a robber-Martin holding a big bag of money and bragging about it to a disheveled taxpayer. Once I got home from school I made a pencil sketch based on my doodle:

Once I was satisfied, I traced over the sketch with my ink pens on my light table (which is really just a bent piece of Plexiglas which a desk lamp awkwardly crammed under it):

Then I scanned the thing into my computer, and used Adobe Photoshop to color it. I always scan at super-high resolution so the coloring looks very sharp and good. In this particular cartoon I also did the "thick outline" effect with the computer, even though normally I do that by hand:

Coloring often takes several hours, so I usually watch TV while I do it. I usually do my toons late at night, so I'm usually watching Family Guy, South Park, or Home Movies while I finish up.

Finally the thing is done, and I can resize it and save it as a GIF. Then I upload it! And everyone is happy.