The Comic Stripper

Eerie makes a 4 panel cartoon while dancing

Last year I started playing around with comparing cartooning and burlesque and exploring the similarities. I knew I wanted to combine them on stage.
I knew this would be hard.

My fear was this act would be boring to watch. I spent the majority of it with my back turned drawing on a whiteboard. Even with my butt out and wiggling, I didn’t think this would be entertaining enough.

I solved this by pre-drawing most of it before the show. AND I sketched out the rest in red expo marker to be my guidelines. I imagined the auidence would throw tomatoes at me and say I’m just tracing. (Tracing my own lines!)
But this was necessary to increase the speed. My act was 5 minutes long and I needed to draw, strip, and most importantly, bring out the word balloons.

In this year of comparing burlesque and cartooning I have consistently compared the punchline to the tassel twirl. The payoff.

It was thrilling to get a live auidence reaction to each word balloon. I was not expecting a laugh at panel 2… but I’ll take all the laughs I can get.

Here’s a trimmed down video of the act.
Warning: This video is intended for an adult auidence. Artistic partial nudity. I added censored bars to the best of my ability.

It’s hard to read the cartoon in the video. Here’s how it went.

Spoiler alert.

Have you seen the stripper’s strip?
Derivative… but classic!

The pacing was questionable.
Messy, yet passionate.

A study in overconfidence.

Oh! You mean the STRIP!