Angriest Rice Cooker Director’s Cut 15–On the poet in exile
For a three line comic, this one is really packed with fairly obscure references. The most obvious, and the only part you need to get the joke, is the first two lines. These are from the spoken bridge of The Doors’ song Peace Frog. Now, I don’t want to give off the impression that I don’t like The Doors. I actually quite enjoy their music, and Peace Frog is one of my favorite songs. But there’s no getting around the fact that their lyrics are extraordinarily pretentious, and this spoken interlude is one of the most pretentious examples. I can’t help but laugh at those “Jim Morrison–Poet” t-shirts. If someone tries to convince me that Jim Morrison is a great poet, I’m going to take that as prima facie evidence that they have never actually read a poem.
The second reference is the title of the comic, “On the poet in exile.” This is a reference to the book The Poet in Exile, a “novel” by Ray Manzarek, keyboardist for The Doors and accomplished music producer. I have the utmost respect for him as a musician, but his foray into novel writing just comes off as pathetic. I’ll let the book’s jacket flap speak for itself:
Years after the Poet’s apparent death, his long-time musical collaborator and friend Roy recieves the first of several mysterious postcards bearing cryptic verse, signed only “J.” Trusting his instinct that this is not a hoax, Roy traces the cards to their apparent source–a remote island in the Indian Ocean. There, to his amazement, he is reunited with the man once known as “the snake man,” and hears the remarkable story of his faked death–and the re-birth it made possible.
“Roy?” “The Snake Man?” C’mon, Ray Manzarek, you can come up with better Mary Sue names than that. The whole thing makes me feel bad for the guy–but it absolutely typifies the “Jim Morrison is amazing” mindset that I’m mocking with this comic.
The third and perhaps most obscure reference is to a old Foxtrot comic that was in a Foxtrot book I got when I was in 6th grade. Jason shoots a suction cup gun and says “I shoot an arrow in the air. It falls to earth–and I know where.” The last panel is him running away from Paige, who has a suction cup stuck to her face as he says “Poetry for physicists.” I just about memorized that book when I was a kid, so it wouldn’t suprise me if this isn’t the only punchline I more or less cribbed from decades-old Foxtrot comics. Other books I devoured as a kid include Calvin and Hobbes (of course) and early Doonesbury. I basically learned the history of the quarter-century before my birth from Doonesbury. Sometimes I forget how into newspaper strips I was as a kid. I didn’t get into webcomics or comic books/graphic novels until I was in high school, but I think I was destined to be on Team Comics
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