Archive for June, 2007

I’m actually kind of disappointed in the punchline for this one. I like the set-up, and kind of saw it as a redemption for my earlier cliche internet porn joke. He sees the porn on the internet, but rather than finding it disgusting, he likes the diversity and interest. It’s a nice thought, but it doesn’t really lend itself to a punchline. The comic’s not called “the happiest rice cooker in the world.” Still, it’s a forerunner of other comics where I played with his very different understanding of sexuality.

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This one started as just an idea for an insult, and I just shoehorned it into a Angriest Rice Cooker. “Douche” is an inherently funny word, and I’ve liked “twice” by itself as a punchline since this old joke:

You’re stuck in a room with a lion, an alligator, and a lawyer. You have a gun, but only two bullets. What do you do?

Shoot the lawyer. Twice.

So I mixed the two with a little hint about lexical ambiguity and had a comic.

I’ve also heard some interesting discussion about “douche” as an insult. I’ve heard complaints that using it as an insult is somewhat derogatory towards women, since it associates a feminine hygiene product with badness. But my friends and I decided that it’s actually good. Doucheing is an unhealthy practice created out of a belief that the female genitalia is disgusting. I happen to disagree rather firmly with the assertion that female genitalia is disgusting, and feel like products that are harmful to women are bad things. I think that the kind of person I would refer to as a “douche” represents exactly the same kind of dumbness as a douche does.

Plus, it’s just a really funny word. Say it a couple of times. Douche douche douche.

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The set-up for this comic was based on a grouphug.us post about the poster’s apparently secret love of Japanese culture, that did mention “honor.” I can’t exactly throw a lot of stones about white people being into Japanese stuff, I took two years of Japanese. But I try to keep the stupid stereotypes and fetishization to a minimum.

The title of this comic, “On My Japan” is a reference to the very disturbing WWII-era propoganda film My Japan. If you’ve never seen it, it’s worth watching. That link up there is to the archive.org page about it. Be warned, though, it has some serious racist imagery and some very disturbing pictures. But it will certainly remind you that Japan wasn’t always all panty shots and Hello Kitty dildos.

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Although I’m certainly not immune to a certain kind of 80s nostalgia, I still think it’s pretty weird. A lot of stuff in the 80s was fun and wacky, but a lot about it was really stupid and bad. But I guess that’s nostalgia for you. Not rational.

This is one comic that I had a little trouble getting to work because of my desire not to use “Americans” as a synonym for “people in the United States,” since America is a lot bigger than the US. But there isn’t really a pithy way to say “people in the United States” that’s not that. So I just went for the metonym and had the United States be nostalgic and vapid.

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This comic was basically an excuse to print that speech from Macbeth, just because I love it so damn much. Macbeth is probably my favorite Shakespeare play, although that may be just because I’ve never read or seen Hamlet (crazy, I know). Part of it is also that I read it fairly young and it had a pretty strong impact. I think the part that really makes me love it is this scene and the scenes after it. Macbeth gives this speech after being informed that his wife has committed suicide, driven by the guilt of the couple’s horrible deeds. Even though Macbeth is a truly bad fucker, I love the way he responds when his world collapses around him. I feel that somehow, even before he learns that Macduff was not “of woman born” and therefore not subject to the prophesy that protects Macbeth, Macbeth knows that the fight doesn’t really matter. He’s beyond tormented by his evil deeds to simply accepting that he is irrevocably damned. When confronted by Macduff, his response is “Of all men else I have avoided thee:/But get thee back; my soul is too much charged/With blood of thine already.” I think you could read that as something of a taunt, “I killed your family, get back or I’ll kill you too.” But coming on the heels of the “sound and fury” speech, it reads to me as a kind of grim numbness. He’s not apologizing for the horrors he’s committed; they’re way too big for that. The only thing he can do is try not to kill the son. Macbeth is past caring what happens to himself, and it’s not just because he believes himself unkillable. When Macduff shows that he is not “of woman born,” Macbeth admits that hearing this “hath cow’d my better part of man!” but fights rather than yields, even though I think he knows he is going to die. There’s something beautiful in his fatalism, and for me it starts with this speech. Anyway, I took the lines and added some rice cooker angst and presto! comic. I actually wanted to put more of the speech in, but that was all that fit and still more or less make sense by itself. Here’s the whole thing:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

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Sometimes Angriest Rice Cooker comics come straight out of my own though processes. This is one of those comics. I’m not sure if the premise of the punchline actually comes through. The idea of it is that by even thinking about this, the rice cooker ensures that he will certainly be pretentious and will never need to fake it. I think I kind of threw the last panel in in order to make it a sort of joke, but the important part of this comic for me is the question in the first two panels. I still don’t actually know the answer. It’s a kind of zen koan.

And by “kind of zen koan” I mean “stupid zen koan.”

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I wrote this one after watching a bunch of the special features on Spider-man 2. Now, I like Spider-man, and I liked Spider-man 2, but I can only handle so much torture of the word “archetype.” I don’t know if I’m alone on this, but I’m extremely fucking tired of people trying to explain everything in fiction based on “archetypes.” You know, I’ve read Hero With A Thousand Faces, too, and I didn’t see anything in there about high school science geeks or hairy dudes with claws or all-powerful flying guys in tights. I also didn’t see any real advice on how to write a story. What I saw was not a prescriptive guide to how things should be written, but rather a descriptive guide to certain similarities in existing myths. While I will admit that some great works have been made that slavishly follow “archetypal”, many more shitty works have been made that follow it just as slavishly. If the theory is true then any story you cook up should have elements of the monomyth, so whether a work has lasting impact or not must be determined by some other factor. And when, as in the case of superhero comics, the stories seem to very definitively not appeal to everyone, the argument that they appeal to something primal in all humans is just ludicrous. I work in a comic book store, so I know that the characterization of superhero comics fans in this comic is an exaggeration. But it’s not a big exaggeration. We sell comics to all kinds of people. But we sell the vast majority of superhero comics to a very narrowly defined group of people.

I think this is part of my general distaste for any theory of art or literature that leaves out pure aesthetics as a consideration. The monomanaical focus on archetypes seems like just another way of making art seem valuable in some phony way. Archibald MacLeish wrote “A poem should not mean but be,” and it’s just a true for other kinds of literature as well. Superhero stories, when they are good, don’t appeal to us because they appeal to some primoridal unconscious. They appeal to us because they’re good, whether that means an entertaining story, a well crafted page of comics, a beautiful frame of film, etc.

Anyway, here’s a comic about it.

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This rather minimalist comic is intended as a parody of the overuse of jazz as a metaphor for…well basically anything, often by people who know almost nothing about jazz. At least the rice cooker owns up to the fact that he doesn’t know anything about jazz. I will admit that I have been guilty of “jazz as metaphor” on several occasions. Other similar cliches include “X is like making a salad” and “X is like making love to a beautiful woman.” Although I have a hard time imagining anyone using that second one outside of dumb fiction.

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If you’re interested in reading one of the stories I’ve been writing, you’ll get your chance sometime around October when Story Number Five, a flash peice entitled “The Football Phase” appears in the anthology Sporty Spec: Tales of the Fantastic from Raven Electrick Ink. Watch this space: I’ll definitely let you guys know when the anthology becomes available.

Now that I’ve gotten my unexpected positive reinforcement, time to go back to the story mine and grind out some more fiction.

This is one that just made me giggle. Sometimes just building a set-up and seeing where it goes comes up with a funny punchline you never would have thought of otherwise. It doesn’t always work, but when it does there can be an organic humor that is hard to get when you begin with the punchline in mind.

This useage of “meta” to mean “one layer abstracted” is a little bit odd. I think it comes out of the history of a couple different academic disciplines, but it’s surprising how much it’s penetrated our culture. Whether it’s “metafiction” or “metagaming” it seems almost hard to avoid these days. I guess this kind of abstraction is just a big part of our world today.

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