Archive for May, 2007

Although I published the first Angriest Rice Cooker comic in April of 2005, I wrote it a couple of months earlier. I designed the comic template and wrote the first comic the night after I got laid off from my job delivering Winchell’s Donuts to convenience stores. It was an awesome job, but so it goes. The idea for The Angriest Rice Cooker was a combination of a few things. Since high school, my friends and I had talked and joked about the seeming excessiveness of a fuzzy logic rice cooker. We talked about how we would always feel like it was trying to destroy us.

We were kind of geeky.

Because my donut job was only late at night, I found that I had quite a lot of free time, so I had been reading a lot more webcomics than I had before or since. So I had the idea of repeating-image and other constrained type comics in my head, although I wasn’t directly influenced by any of them. I’ve always loved PartiallyClips by Rob Balder, and that probably informed my style more than, for example, Daily Dinosaur Comics although Daily Dinosaur has perhaps more obvious similarities. It was even in imitation of PartiallyClips that I made the comics so gigantic, something I regretted as I was designing this new version of the site.

Somehow, as part of a conversation, these two ideas merged. I was still used to staying up all night, and I didn’t have anything to do, so I found an image of a rice cooker in the internet, screwed with the contrast to make it look like something that has been run through a photocopier a hundred times. The first gag came pretty directly out of the original premise for the comic. Using “the invasion of Normandy” as the ultimate in a complicated plan is cribbed from (at least one) Buffy episode. Riley Finn says that their plan to hang out was “not the invasion of Normandy,” but a plan nonetheless. I always thought that was funny. I like Riley, even if nobody else does.

Ok, it isn’t new comics. But as I was going through all the old comics when I made this new layout, I realized just how many of them either need commentary to make them make sense to a lot of people or have somewhat interesting things about them. At the same time, I noticed a lot of typos, spelling errors, and just plain bad phrasings that I missed in the hurry to get them out the door. So I’m going to go back through them all and produce new editions, complete with commentary. This isn’t mutually exclusive with doing new comics, although I doubt I’ll want to do both things five days a week. For now, that’s the schedule I have–new Director’s Cut comics will appear every weekday on www.angriestricecooker.com. I haven’t decided if I’m going to also patch it through to the LiveJournal or not. I’m leaning towards not, but I could probably be convinced otherwise. Anyway, the first one should go live midnight tonight, with others following at 24 hour intervals.

I think it will be fun.

Ok, I don’t mean this to be piling on Scott Kurtz. He does a lot of stuff that isn’t very classy, and he always has. Anyone who spends any time in our webcomicverse probably knows that. And the most recent controversy actually seemed kind of silly to me, really.

He posted a comic in which two of his characters salute the “side boob shot” in film. Some people got mad. Now this is a time when he can totally walk away. Some of his comics really do bug me, but this one is pretty low key. For one thing, it’s kind of playfully mocking this convention, not genuinely supporting it. And usually when he responds in his comics, it’s lame and makes things worse. But this comic’s sin is more just being boring and hackneyed than being offensive. Again, it doesn’t seem like the point of the comic is to respond to his critics, it seems to be to make a joke about his dad. At this point, I’m willing to just write it off as Kurtz is a bit dried up in the humor department, but not particularly offensive.

And then I read this. And it was in reading this that I finally got it. I know who Scott Kurtz is now. He’s David Brent/Michael Scott from The Office. These are the characters played by Ricky Gervais (British) and Steve Carell (American), the bosses. They think they’re funnier than they are, and they tend to say very offensive things. But they don’t realize it, because they’re not jerks. They’re just ignorant. I can almost imagine Kurtz saying, as Michael Scott does once, “Did you know that ‘gay’ used to mean happy? When I was growing up it meant ‘lame’. And now it means a man who makes love to other men.” Except he’d spell it “ghey”.

I believe that Scott Kurtz is at heart a nice guy. And I feel bad for him. So I’ve got a new slogan for you, Scott. Maybe it’ll help.

Ok, it’s been a looooooong time, I know. I don’t have any excuses worth mentioning. I guess I was just ready to move onto other writing projects. Which I did–although it was mostly a big independent project for school. You may hear more about that later. Now that project is done, and I’ve started back into perhaps my greatest reading and writing love–short fiction. I started to think that I ought to have some kind of a web page. Then I remembered that I did have a poor abandoned page sitting here on the web, and that I was even paying the bills for it.

So I got WordPress, imported all the old comics into it, and here we are. I don’t have any definitive plans for it. I’m not ruling out more Angriest Rice Cooker comics, although that’s not the main reason that I did this. I expect to use it for some fiction, probably some random observations. Y’know, blog stuff. Plus maybe some comics. So check out the new and improved Angriest Rice Cooker archives, drop me a comment and lemme know what you think on the layout or any of the comics. I hope to see you all again soon. I’m still working out the kinks, and would appreciate whatever comments you can give.