“The Adventures of Yeehaw Howdy”
Concept art and some pages for a webcomic about a wandering outlaw and the desperate author writing about his adventures in a weird west world.
Various Mediums; 2018 - 2024.
I believe this was the earliest drawing of Yeehaw I ever made. Hanging out with friends, I decided to draw a cartoon cowboy, and the rest spiraled out from there. This was around 2018.
I doodled Yeehaw in margins of papers for a long time, but in a character design college class I took the opportunity to try and flesh this design out more for a project. A lot of the drive for that was to push the character's poses and angles to know him well enough to draw him over and over for a comic.
I latched onto this idea that Yeehaw was a kind of reluctant hero who was given a bounty largely by accident. To accentuate this dynamic, while also making the character feel a little goofy, I gave him this one weird quirk: his hands are permanently glued to his two holstered revolvers. He can't show his hands without pointing a gun at somebody, which makes him seem more dangerous than he actually is. It also felt like a fun way to push crazier poses out of this character by having him try to use his legs more than his arms for everyday tasks.
The name Yeehaw Howdy was a joke name that came out of the first sketch I made, and the name just stuck. It felt like the silliest name to attach to a character that feels like a stereotype of wandering gunslingers, and that name ended up driving a lot of how I designed his character.
Some setting and color exploration sketches.
Some explorations of Yeehaw's facial range. I always drew Yeehaw as a kind of grouchy man, but knew he'd need to be able to do more than that. Some faces just didn't seem to work with Yeehaw as a character, like smiling, which made for an interesting challenge.
Few more facial explorations.
Some color and pose exploration sketches.
This style frame would be the first time I felt like the environment design really matched with Yeehaw's character design. This would also be the point I think I fell in love with trying to give Yeehaw's world more attention to make it feel worthy of exploration.
Simple character turnaround. I think there's a lot here I don't really like for this style anymore, like the strict adherence to solid black lineart, but the overall character colors felt nailed down at this stage.
After college, I only touched Yeehaw in small ways, mostly focusing on writing out his story. The more I wrote, the more I found the other important character to this story: Winifred Pendleton.
Don Quixote has Sancho Panza, while Yeehaw Howdy has Winifred Pendleton. Winifred Pendleton, aka Winnie, is a failing author who latches onto Yeehaw as a sort of muse, documenting his adventures to try and write a book that will make him famous. Winnie is the grounding foil to Yeehaw's bizarre and lonely wandering, and while Yeehaw is largely a mysterious figure Winnie can freely be the character reader's could relate better to, making him a good POV character for these stories.
Since I put way more focus into Yeehaw's character, Winnie felt like he was unfinished as a character. Making art that put the two characters together to show what they were like as a team helped solve those worries for me.
In 2024, I decided to bite the bullet and start drawing the pages for "The Adventures of Yeehaw Howdy" as a way to force myself to just make the thing. I had the thoughts, the designs, and knew where I wanted to go with it, so now I just needed to actually make it.
I started drawing the comic with page layout in mind. I wanted each page to feel coherent as a composition, while each individual panel could feel a little cinematic. This introductory four-panel page also gave me some opportunity to mess around with some natural settings that could potentially show up again as the story went on.
This page felt the most like storyboarding a sequence for an animation, which is a dangerous game to play with comics, but also fun.
We get out first dialogue here, and oddly neither of the characters here are Yeehaw or Winnie. I was very happy with the design of these two horses. There weren't a lot of early elements in the story that pointed to the world of Yeehaw Howdy being fantastical, so I thought having the two horses pulling this wagon being not-quite-horses would be a fun way to handle that early on.
Around the same time, I was getting into messing around with Blender and found it useful as a references builder. I knew I wanted this chapter to feature a wagon that felt like a mix between classical wagon design with sci-fi technology attached to it. To make sure I was keeping the wagon design coherent across panels, I built this model in Blender. A lot of the panels with a wagon visible were often built with this Blender rig as reference first.
This page was really fun to mess around with. I wanted to show visually how these two characters contrast with the driver being a bit noisier than the rider, so having pages where the driver took focus it made some sense to have those pages feel cacophonous.
A big inspiration for this page was the work of Tatsuki Fujimoto, who tends to use repeated panels in his manga work to both comedic and emotional effect. In this case, I used it to try and convey the emotional distance between rider and driver.
Comics lettering is its own artform that I don't know much about. Knowing that I knew nothing, I decided to experiment a lot with different lettering presentations. Not every experiment works, but I liked trying to figure it out as I went.
preeeetty...
After finishing this page, my job starting to take up more and more of my time, and this side project fell to the wayside. Unfortunately, somewhere in the years between this and now (2026) I lost the files for this comic. The rest of this story exists in fragments of written scripts and ideas in my brain, but its sad that the actually pages are lost to me. Because of that, I don't know if or when I'll ever work on Yeehaw again, but the eleven pages I did make were some of the most fun things I ever made.