Archive for May, 2007

Wow, did every punchline I write include an obscenity?

One of my poetry professors mentioned Gnostics a bunch, and that’s where the factoid this comic is based around came from. I don’t really know much about Gnostics, but jokes about things I don’t really know much about is going to be kind of be a theme. Particularly once I started farming random Wikipedia pages for ideas. My understanding is that the Gnostics looked at the two different versions of the creation at the beginning of Genesis and came to the conclusion that the first version of creation was merely an idea that God had. But then this other dude called the Demiurge came along and stole the idea and actually made the universe. The God that shows up in the Adam and Eve story (the second version of the story) is this Demiurge. Actually, when you read that part of the bible from that perspective it makes a certain kind of sense–the portrayal of God in those two parts of the Bible is very different. Anyway, the Demiurge is a real dick, thereby explaining why there’s so much bad in the world. Stuff’s messed up because the creator of the universe is working against the true divine will.

The first draft of this comic tried to explain a lot more of this, and was oriented around a comparison between the botching of God’s plan and something to do with his own manufacture from (presumably) some kind of plan. But there was just no way I would fit all the info I needed into the comic itself. Since I associate any conversation about Gnosticism with pretentiousness, I salvaged the basic idea and put together this joke. It kind of makes the jump between panels one and two a bit of a non sequitur, but I’m not sure how I’d fix it.

Check out the comic itself past the cut:

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Protagoras is one of the most important presocratic thinkers. But like most presocratics, his writings exist only in those fragments that were quoted by Plato and other later philosophers whose works did survive. This is a fragment quoted by Plato. Although we don’t have the rest of the work that this line is the beginning of, the general understanding of it is that it is a statement of moral relativism. That is, Protagoras is saying that there are no external absolutes, only the perceptions of man. But when all you know about a person’s thoughts are what later thinkers who disagree with them said, it’s pretty hard to have a complete picture of what exactly he really meant.

It’s funny to think about how much our intelectual history is shaped by which texts survive and which don’t. Not that the process is totally random, of course. Texts survive that more people are interested in. But I wonder if our relationship to the classical philosophers might have been different if more opposing voices from that age had been available.

One other side note about this comic is that when I made the LiveJournal for The Angriest Rice Cooker in the World, I based the “interests” on all of the things I had written comics about at that point. So one of them was Protagoras. I think this might be the least common interest that I picked. I think there were like 15 other people on LiveJournal with that interest the last time I checked. And probably at least some of those were refering to the work by Plato named after Protagoras rather than the man himself.

This comic also marks the first time that I used a blank “beat panel” as part of a comic. In later strips, I would mess with the concept of the beat panel a lot. At this point, though, I think I was just using it to put some comic timing into a joke that might not otherwise have it. Plus I didn’t really have three panels worth of stuff to say.

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Some of the comics started with a basic idea of what the punchline would be, but a lot of them just started with a famous quote or fact, and then I just added some wiseassery to turn it into a comic. This was one that I remember struggling with a lot as far as the wording went, although I was pretty sure that there was a joke in that quote somewhere.

This comic reminds me of a time when I was in high school debate. We did an exercise where we drew some kind of a quote or saying or other statement out of a hat and had to talk about it for a continuous minute with no pause fillers, repetition, word searching, etc. Our debate teacher let us suggest ideas to go into the hat, and I suggested”Religion is the opiate of the masses”. But when someone pulled it out, our teacher had rendered it as “Religion is the drug of the masses.” He said that he didn’t think that everyone in the class would understand it if he had left it as “opiate.” Now, I will admit that that debate class was a touch…colorful, and that not everyone there was exactly honor roll material. But this was just clueless. For two reasons, in fact. First off, the point of the quote is that religion relaxes and pacifies the masses, like opium. It would mean something totally different to call religion the “PCP of the masses,” although I think you could make a case for that one too.

Second, if that colorful bunch knew one thing, it was drugs.

I made one minor edit to the Director’s Cut version of the comic below the cut–can you see what it was?

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My lovely girlfriend says that this is one of her favorite Angriest Rice Cookers. She says it’s because of the “human” line in the last panel–she imagines that something very similar to this could happen with us and some of our old roommates and friends.

I think she’s right. Our group of friends had several people with an odd combination of being really competitive but without necessarily much interest in “rulesy” competitions. We played regular games too–and could become competitive about them. Also old video games–our Paperboy games could be intense. But they would also get competitive about simpler games, like the old standby “throw the ball around the dorm room.” It was kind of a self-defeating exercise for those competitive souls. “Throw the ball around the dorm room” isn’t a game you can win exactly, although you certainly can lose. And so can your dorm room.

One of the greatest creations of this competitive spirit was a game we liked to call “quiet ball.” There was a ball sitting in the dorm room of two of my best friends freshman year of college. It was like one of those balls you find in a giant bin filled with balls in a supermarket–an all-purpose play ball. But this ball made kind of a strange sound when you caught it. So when my two competitive friends threw it back and forth, they quickly started to compete as to who could make the least noise when catching it. “Quiet ball” was born.

We spent a lot of time playing quiet ball, both with that particular ball and with others. One time, we even grabbed a ball out of a bin in our local Top Foods and started playing right in the aisle. That is, until my aforementioned lovely girlfriend decided to throw the ball really hard at my nose. That was not very fun.

So, anyway, I guess my girlfriend sees something of herself in this comic. Take that as you will.

EDIT: I just was re-watching an episode of Arrested Development and realized that the phrasing of the question in the first panel is a near-verbatim lift from an ethics essay topic that George Michael has in one episode. I’m not entirely sure whether that was subconscious or intentional. Either way seems more or less plausible.

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Want a new comic? Here’s the next best thing: A new punchline. This was the first one that, looking at it now, I just don’t feel like had the kind of punch that I wanted. But don’t worry, I’m not going to go all Lucas on you: both the new one and the old one live beyond the cut, along with an explanation about why I made the change, and some musings on poetics. I’m interested to hear what people think about the difference: is the new one funnier, or should I have left well enough alone?
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A few weeks ago, controversy erupted around the comicnetoverse when an installment of the right-leaning political comic Day by Day depicted Hillary Clinton in blackface. That’s not what I want to talk about. Shaenon Garrity responded by declaring (as she sometimes does) Day by Day to be The Worst Damn Comic in the World based not only on the offending strip by by the comic’s general quality of writing, art, and other elements. This lead to a debate with Dirk Deppey at Journalista. In the ensuing conversation Doonesbury came up several times as a counter-example, from people on both sides. This got me thinking. I think of Doonesbury as something very different than comics like Day by Day, Prickly City, Mallard Filmore, and even the left wing comics of people like Ted Rall . I think of Doonesbury as basically a story comic that occasionally makes political jokes as well, while I think of those comics as more or less just strip versions of political cartoons, with no story other than political propaganda.

But I realized that this could easily be my own bias. Political points I disagree with are perhaps marked more than those I agree with and I could easily be fooled into believing that comics I agree with are “less political” than those I disagree with. So I decided to do a little semi-scientific experiment:

I picked 90 random dates between May 22, 2006 and May 21, 2007 for Doonesbury and 90 random dates for Day by Day. I focused on the past year for both because this is how far back Doonesbury’s free online archive goes, and I didn’t want to bias the study by using a different period of time for the two comics. I then viewed the comics for these dates and recorded whether each comic made a political point or not. I then figured out, with 95% confidence intervals, the percentage of comics that are political is for both strips. I also figured out, with the same 95% confidence interval, what the difference in proportion of political strips to total strips is between the two comics.

My results: Doonesbury was “less political” by the narrow definition of what percentage of strips make a political point, at least over the past year. But not by as much as I would have thought. With 95% confidence, I can say that Doonesbury strips in the past year made political points between 44.16 and 64.73 percent of the time. Day by Day made political points between 65.43 and 83.46 percent of the time. I can also say with 95% confidence that Day by Day is between 6.32 and 33.68 percent more political than Doonesbury for the past year. But I expected virtually no non-political comics in Day by Day, and in fact found more non-political strips in my 90-day sample of Day by Day than I would have expected to find in a year. The confidence interval up there still would suggest that Day by Day has at least one non-political comic every week, on average.

I was also a little suprised by how high the proportion was for Doonesbury strips. Before doing this, I always thought it was a little bit lame that a lot of newspapers now print Doonesbury on the editorial page rather than the normal comic strip page. Now I’m not so sure. Even on the low end of the margin of error, Doonesbury was political over 40% of the time in the past year and it’s more likely than not that it was over 50% political.

Because of the relatively small sample sizes, it is hard to say how big the difference between the two strips is. And it would be interesting to see if these proportions vary if we go back further in time. If anyone would like to help expand our knowledge of the subject, a complete study of the past year or a sample going back further in time by a subscriber to the full Doonesbury archives would be very helpful.

Finally, some warnings. My statistics knowledge comes from an AP Stats class I took in high school and a hurried read through of some relevant portions of my lovely girlfriend’s college stats book. If I did anything wrong with the numbers, I hope someone will correct me (the complete data is available below the cut). Also, the judgment of which comics are “political” is somewhat subjective. Sometimes it’s easy (is it a Bush or Pelosi joke made by a talking building? it’s political). Other times it’s not (A personality joke set in Iraq? A strip about B.D.’s combat trauma support group?). Also beneath the cut I have a complete list of the comics I used and my judgements, with links, so that anyone can go through and dispute my characterizations. Finally, the question of what percentage of strips makes a political point is in some ways a poor substitute for the question of which strip is more political as opposed to story-based. Some strips make a political point while advancing the characters’ story, while others are simply jokes at a politician’s expense. This study does not measure this factor at all.

Read on beyond the cut for the full gory details.

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When I wrote the first comic, I kind of assumed that the comics would get more wordy as I went on and I’d eventually need to reduce the size of the font that I was using. I based this assumption on the examples of Daily Dinosaur; and Partially Clips, both comics which tend to compensate for a lack of action with a lot of words. I only really ever had to do that once, not counting the times that I changed the font to represent quotations (by the way, most of those times look terrible and I plan to fix that when I get to those comics in this director’s cut). I think it was right around here that I realized that the proper style for this comic was going to always be brief. After this my goal was to match the minimalism of the art with minimalistic writing. I certainly didn’t always succeed, and some of the comics are definitely minimal to the point of being more or less incomprehensible, but when it worked minimalism produced some of my favorite Angriest Rice Cookers. This is one of those.

On an almost completely unrelated note, I’ve already made myself look crazy in these posts (see number 2) , so I figure I should sell out a good buddy, too. One time, I was hanging out with a good friend of mine who was very much a part of the conversations that formed The Angriest Rice Cooker. At least one comic (much later) was an almost direct quote from him.  Anyway, we were talking about something that involved Socrates, I don’t even remember what. But instead of saying Socrates, he said Mickey Mouse. We had not been talking about Mickey Mouse, and he had not been thinking about Mickey Mouse. It’s a case for Oliver Sacks, if I ever heard one.

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This is, I believe, the first time this version of this comic has appeared on the internet. I think it showed up in print one or two times, on a handbill I gave out at the Olympia Comics Festival and possibly in the Cooper Point Journal.

The noteworthy feature in this director’s cut edition is the beret in the third panel. I was still working around with the format at the time that I made this comic and I wasn’t sure how religiously I was going to adhere to leaving things the same every time. I did make this version at the time, but I guess I decided it looked better with out the beret. I’ve since changed my mind, and like the beret quite a bit. I guess that’s why we do Director’s Cuts.

I remember that I tried to use a couple of photographs of Che’ to get the beret, but all of them were at too much of an angle to make it work with the way the rice cooker is facing. So I took the beret from a photograph, then edited the star out of an actual photograph of Che’, then put it all together. See–lazily avoiding doing anything remotely resembling actual drawing can be a bunch of work too.

Beret aside, this particular comic was one of my favorites from the first batch I made. The first 40 or so comics were made before I started posting them in April, and so the first few got edited a bunch and shown to a lot of people. These are the ones that I can more or less recite from memory. This one also appeared along side some pretty great poetry and fiction in the introductory issue of Alice Blue Review, an excellent online quarterly literary journal run by some very talented old classmates of mine.

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This is perhaps the most autobiographical of the Angriest Rice Cookers. I totally used to do this all the time, explain to myself how I always talk to myself. I don’t really talk to myself as much as I used to, which I think is a result of having a lovely live-in girlfriend to talk to. Although she will tell you that the habit has persisted in my mumbling. Usually the Rice Cooker’s experiences are not my own, but I thought about his life and it seemed like this would be how he would think, at least at first. At this point he doesn’t have access to the internet, and therefore doesn’t have very much stimulus.

I still find this comic funny, but perhaps that’s just because it’s really true for me. I don’t know if anyone else has this experience. I’ve never asked, because the only time I usually think about it is when I’m talking to myself. Which is kind of what this blog thing is like, only more public. Hopefully.

The one thing I intended this comic to do, and I’m not sure if it suceeded, is establish for the reader what is going on in the comics. The text is supposed to represent ongoing internal monologue. Sometimes he sounds like he’s talking to someone, but to me that’s just what internal monologue sounds like.

Whew. I didn’t intend this Director’s Cut thing to come off so crazy. Ah, well.

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Ok, I know I just posted, but I was going through my referer logs and I just discovered this.

Go to Google and type in “Rotting People,” then hit “I’m feeling lucky.”

You have no idea how happy this makes me.