The Sisyphean Task of Drawing Sisyphus

Or, how to draw comics, again, and again, and again.

“Drawing comics can be an uphill battle” is a cringingly obvious way to start this week’s post, so I’d like to apologise for that before we get things… rolling.

This week we’re looking at Sisyphus and his bestie The Boulder who’ve been a comedic mainstay on the comedy-duo circuit for at least the last 3,000 years or so.

Their enduring popularity is obviously a complete mystery. Just what is it about the plight of a person toiling away at the same task for eternity, only to have to repeat the same thankless task the next day that enamours and fascinates the public to this degree? We’ll never truly know.

What we do know, is that it’s just about as rich a comedic vein as The Desert Island set-up, so let us take the millennia-old fame of Sisyphus and his Boulder and exploit that famous comedy duo for all that they’re worth.

Let’s start with the obvious. The classic setup: our guy Sisyphus and his Boulder (who is capitalised in this post because The Boulder is just as a significant character here as Sisyphus is).

Here they are, doing their thing:

So from this perspective, we already have multiple options. Without even changing the drawing we can caption this with a gag.

“Naturally, it was impossible to calculate the money he’d saved on an eternity’s worth of gym memberships, but Sisyphus figured it ought to be fairly significant by now.”

So, that’s the basics. From here, the trick is to change the perspective.

To tap into how this could look, just shift the myth into a modern-day format. For instance, instead of telling Sisyphus to push a boulder up a mountain endlessly, a 21st-century version might see Hades tasking him with delivering The Boulder to the top of the hill via an endless string of redirections…

Or, we change the perspective of the image itself. Let’s move the camera. The age-old image of this gag is what we’ve drawn so far; left to right, side-on, Sisyphus below, The Boulder above and ahead.

What if we left this scene and took ourselves to the summit…

Or, what about the perspective of each individual in the scene? I mentioned that The Boulder is just as much of a character in all of this, so how do they feel about it all?

Or, instead of therapy, maybe they did the next closest thing and laid it all out in a depressing one-man comedy show…

In this regard, we’re now removing The Boulder from the original setup and putting them in an entirely different situation, which of course is most of the fun. So why not do that to our main man as well, who at this point is probably pretty keen to get rid of The Boulder altogether…

Alternatively, we remove both of them from the mountain. You’ve got to assume The Boulder would be a pretty good nightclub bouncer, and keen to get away from his pushy friend…

To further mine the original setup for material, we can then start looking at the slope itself in the image, and apply a more famous slope by shifting the whole comic to Everest base camp.

At this point, we’re now drifting into the more conceptual aspects of the image, which at a conceptual level is just a ball rolling in a direction, and so zeroing down on this opens up even more possibilities.

I particularly like how the above comic requires no speech bubbles or captions, which as far as drawing comics goes, always feels like an achievement.

From here, we can just get more and more surreal…

There are of course, happy accidents that come about only through the process itself. For instance, while drawing a black circle that I intended to use as a guide to trace my boulder, I ended up with the following comic which has way too long of a caption, but which I quite like regardless.

“It wasn’t the boulder, but rather being chased by the abysmal void of existential dread pushed by the memory of an embarrassing moment that Sisyphus found to be the most torturous part”

There were of course a lot more drawings that came to mind that didn’t make the cut (The Boulder starting a band and insisting on playing rock and roll felt a just little too dad-jokey for instance).

But for now, that’s it!

That’s my little window into a drawing process I’ve found to be fairly useful and quite productive: Just keep changing the perspective.

I guess if you were to reduce it down to a single comic though, it would be something like this…

And that’s it for another week! If you enjoyed this, please do give it a share!

I’ll be back next week with hopefully another take on a classic comic et-up, or failing that… Something completely different! Who knows?! Certainly not me.

And of course, to round this out, the standard plug for the publication to finish off the post:

See you next week!