Creative Tides Go In and Out (or Not This Again)

I think it is safe to say that in any creative endeavor there comes a time when one's creative juices do not flow as freely as they might normally. In my experience, it ebbs and flows like the ocean tides. Musicians will go through creative spurts where they write and release their most popular music ever. But then at some point it slows down, and they are either releasing music that doesn't seem to catch on quite as well as their older stuff, or they take a break from writing and concentrate on something else for a while. Hopefully, given enough time and inspiration, that creative spark appears once again.

Previously, I talked about the introduction of the "gallery" strip in Furble, weekly asides from the main storyline that I ended up using when I couldn't come up with a good idea for a particular week. They are not my best work, and if I were to go back and "edit" history, I would likely remove them, or at the very least heavily revise them. Most of the time, the jokes simply didn't land, but they occasionally provided tangentially relevant information. Thus, the existence of the three following strips:

Strip 37/166 - FMoMA

The impetus of the strip is the old joke with a blank piece of white paper actually being a painting of white cows in a snowstorm. Much like other "gallery" strips, I should have used the fourth pane to do another painting joke, instead of trying to wrap the whole thing in a punchline, which did not land. This strip also highlights another aspect of many of these strips: a stunning lack of any drawing (besides the painting frames). When you go less creative, you go all in!

Strip 38/166 - Don't listen to those "Round Furbulia" nuts!

At some point in junior high, I first became aware that, even though I had moved on from the concept of a "flat earth" sometime in elementary school, there were fully functional (I assume) adults out there who held firmly to the belief. I thought it would be fun to turn the idea on its head, and actually make Furbulia a flat planet, a concept that I'm pretty sure doesn't exist in reality in our universe. Why it is rectangle shaped is anyone's guess.

Again, the strip is conveyed using primarily text. Although the concept is tangentially related to the overall story, I still consider it akin to the "gallery" strips. It was much easier to pull off than regular story strips due to the reliance on text as opposed to art. At least the joke worked a bit better here. 

Strip 39/166 - It probably wasn't that funny, anyway

Yeah... it probably wasn't actually that funny. As an aside, Furble laughing looks positively psychotic. I should have redone that.

We can only hope that the creative tides flow sooner than later.