I think I came up with this while digging through my closet and flipped through my old copy of Strunk and White. If you don’t get the joke, look closely at the second panel. If you still don’t get it, read the last line of number 1 here. If you still don’t think it’s funny, well, I guess I can’t fix that. Unless I use my magic laughter gun.
Boy, it sure sounds like the Rice Cooker is actually talking to the audience here and demanding that they don’t assume that they know how he thinks. You can certainly read it this way, but I still hold that he’s still talking to himself. All of that solitude has made him fairly crazy, and this is how pro-machine liberation rice cookers respond to 2001 A Space Odyssey in my mind. This also represents a little bit of me trying to not do an obvious thing about a comic. In a strange way I guess this is both me and the Rice Cooker being strange about our own ideas about ourselves.
Not a whole lot to say about this one. It’s just always struck me as a little bit odd that food grown without chemicals is referred to as “organic.” I mean, hopefully more or less everything we eat is composed of organic material. So I made a silly little joke about it.
Like most people around my age, I have very fond memories of playing “Oregon Trail” in school. Of course, we never got very far, because we spent all our time hunting and killing tens of thousands of pounds worth of bison we couldn’t carry back anyway. Sadly, white people recreationally killing bison is kind of historically accurate. Freshman year of college we started playing the game some hanging out in dorm rooms. Some friends and I re-dubbed the game “Death Race 1850″ in reference to the wonderful film Death Race 2000.
I actually wrote this comic the same day as I wrote this one. But I guess I thought it would be odd to have two comics on such similar themes back-to-back. Later in the comic’s run, I would not worry about this, doing three comics in a row inspired by coin collecting, or two in a row about fencing. Ah, well.
This is one that I started writing without any real sense of what the punchline would end up being. I was just kind of musing on the ideas expressed in the first panel. I don’t think that there’s any one answer to what art or literature is or should be. I think it can reflect elements of the world, but I don’t think it has to. I’m a pretty firm believer in pure aesthetics as a worthwhile goal. I don’t think a piece of art has to look like something or represent something in order to be worthwhile. On the other hand, I don’t believe that pure aesthetics are the only way to view art. I think that “deeper meanings,” whatever those are, can greatly contribute to the enjoyment of art. I don’t think that these things are mutually exclusive. We can have all kinds of art from summer blockbusters to abstract sculpture to imagist poetry to romance novels to opera to abstract expressionism and even repeating-image comics. We can argue mightily over which is better, but I don’t think we need to argue too much about whether each is art. On the other hand, I’m not deaf to the argument that if everything is art, then nothing is art. I guess I see art more as a characteristic of how we look at things rather than an inherent characteristic of the things themselves.
It’s fun to think about these things sometime, although you don’t want to get trapped in an endless loop of conversations about this in, for example, a class. Believe me, I’ve been there. And the results of the argument tend to be a little bit like the rice cooker’s conclusion: unhelpful and self-serving.
In the early days of the Angriest Rice Cooker, I sort of resolved not to get too political with it–or at the very least not use it to express my own views in any obvious way. Since I really like humor based on poking holes in things I think are stupid, it would just be to easy to slip into a dumb political humor phase. I grew up in a place where political views very unlike my own were the absolute norm, and so I developed a sharp distaste for the kind of back-slapping “everyone clearly agrees with me” partisan humor. I did slip away from that a few times, but I don’t think this is one of them. In spite of the title, this isn’t a comic about politics, it’s a comic about humor. In fact, quite the opposite of betraying my distaste for partisan humor of any kind, it is a manifestation of it, making fun of dumb political humor. At least that’s what I was going for.
This also represents my first use of a third panel “beat.” I got really into messing around with stuff like that later in the strip’s run. Lots of comics use the silent panel before the punchline, but only a very few have really explored using silent panels in ways other than the pre-joke pause (The only one I remember off-hand is this PartiallyClips). I think it can have very interesting effects.
The other thing that’s notable about this one is that I’m pretty sure that this was the last one I wrote before I posted the first one. I think I mentioned in the commentary on the first comic that I wrote it the night after I got laid off from a job. Ironically enough, I started the next job the same day I posted that comic, which was probably a few days after I wrote this comic. Considering that I had a 40-comic buffer to start out, it’s pretty sad how fast I fell behind. Oh well.
It probably won’t surprise you that I threw this one together after a viewing of Jurassic Park, which is what I’m parodying here. In the later days of The Angriest Rice Cooker, quite possibly the majority of the comics were inspired by things I found on Wikipedia. I’d never thought about it, but I guess in the early days I was inspired a lot more by movies I was watching around the time. Some of this is obvious, like this comic and the Scream comic a couple of days ago. The one about The Lord of the Rings was inspired by a viewing of the movie (and also a recent reading of P Craig Russel’s excellent comic adaptation of The Ring Cycle). And the superheros as archetypes comic was inspired by a viewing of Spider-man 2. I don’t know if this stopped because of a conscious choice not to or if I just didn’t watch movies as much or what.
This was just a odd little piece that popped into my head while I was at a beach in Hawai’i. Mostly, I liked the ironic line “Have you ever noticed that observational humor sucks?” I don’t think that it worked without the second punchline to point out the irony in the first punchline, and I hadn’t gotten experimental enough yet to try to play around with single-line three panel comics so I came up with this comic in order to make the thing work.
This one’s just a odd, almost surreal parody(?) of Scream. I actually wrote this one in Hawai’i, where my lovely girlfriend and I spent spring break a couple of years ago. The night before we flew to Hawai’i was one of our good friend’s birthdays and also the last night we were going to see my roommate at the time before he went to Spain. So we had a big party thing and watch a bunch of movies, among them the MST3K of Manos: The Hands of Fate and Scream. I’d actually somehow managed to never see scream before that. Sadly, after the (brilliant) opening scene, I don’t think the movie works all that well for me, and that’s what I’m kind of riffing on here. It’s all about talking about these “rules” of horror movies. But really, these are just the genre conventions of 80s slasher films, a very tiny part of the history of horror film. Most horror films do not follow rules anything like that. Basically, Wes Craven is making fun of a set of rules that he helped invent. And then the film perpetuated them by spawning a new little generation of slasher films that follow its lead. It’s just odd and incestuous and kind of spoils the movie for me, even though there are some brilliant parts.
I’ve actually stalked back links to this comic and found people wondering at length whether I was seriously making an argument that Tolkien was just ripping off Wagner, or whether I was mocking that idea. When I wrote this I was more going for the idea that the rice cooker was genuinely confused, but really any reading of it is cool.
That being said, I do think it’s worth remembering that while much of Tolkein’s work are very imaginative and original, he was fundamentally a professor of English and a lot of what happens in the books are crazed mash-ups of older pieces of literature. The ring itself shares components of the Ring of the Nibelung and Plato’s Ring of Gyges. The march of the trees is a literalized reimagining of part of Macbeth. None of this detracts from the books, but I think a lot of this source material gets unfairly overlooked when people look at Lord of the Rings. And people tend to get quite prickly about any kinds of criticism, whether that takes the form of pointing out the source material or referencing some of the books’ unsettling fascist-like undertones. I liked the books and really liked the movies (I wrote this comic after one of my many viewings of them). But they’re not sacred.
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