Why stop at axebeak? [OC]

Good, I'm not the only one who immediately remembered that movie

I know you're joking, but let's give it a serious answer. Why not! let's talk about comic flow and joke writing!

When I draw a comic like this, there's a bunch of factors that go into deciding what to include and what not to include.

The most important thing here is to have a bunch of similar-ish entries, then one silly one to serve as the punchline (in this case the punchline is mostly a visual gag.) - The first part of comic gives you one joke "haha "axebeak" is silly, and if you replace the word "axe" it's also funny" - then the last part gives a different gag "what if we take this too far? Look at the poor bird faceplanting"

For this format of comic, I need to be able to make the double-gag for it to be worth drawing, it's not really "funny" enough with just the first part. It's funny, but it's not funny enough to warrant the time it takes to pencil it out and ink it and colour it - my art is all traditional media, so it's a time sink to make. (I'll post a comic here tomorrow with some medusa variants, you'll see how I use exactly the same flow to make the jokes there.)

Once I've decided that I've a good enough punchline that I can make the joke, I need to pick a bunch of entries for the first part. You want enough to establish the gag, but not so many that a reader gets bored. 3 is a bare minimum and 6 is pushing it.

In this case I'm picking "weapons" or things like weapons as my entries. My first priority is "how easy is this to draw?" - I don't want to do something like "crossbow-beak" because it's real hard to sketch out and adds needless timework to the comic without actually improving on the joke. My secondary consideration is "how easy is it for a casual reader to understand what I'm drawing here" - so a word like "dagger" or "sword" is better than a word like "glaive guisarme" or "yklwa".

I could include obscure stuff, but if a reader gets hung up on something because they don't immediately understand it, it slows down the pace they proceed through the visual flow, and that blunts the impact of the punchline. You want the audience to immediately grasp everything so it's fast and punchy to follow along.

Those are the main factors that go into selecting entries for something like this. The punchline would work as "bec-de-corbinbeak" or "bohemian-earspoonbeak" and there's the added silliness of what I did with a silly sounding name - that's potentially funnier, but also potentially confusing, so I went with mass appeal over a slightly sillier option here.