Archive for July, 2007

I was torn between two different kinds of jokes for this one: just a joke about the idea of personifying information, or mixing it up with a joke about the unlikeliness of what information “desires.” I decided to mix it up and have two punchlines, starting with a really mundane request and then following that with the joke about the unlikeliness. I picked the pony as the ultimate symbol of the impossible desire. I think this is probably cribbed from The Simpsons, but I’m sure it’s been used other places as well. This is one of only a few times that I will go for a double punchline; usually the brevity I work with doesn’t allow it.

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This comic is inspired by a particular breed of dumb that bugs me a lot. People sometimes describe it as the Nice Guy ™ sensibility. These are people, not to be mistaken for guys who are actually nice, who whine about how women don’t date them and it’s because women always pick bad men who are bad for them. Women are too shallow and dumb to see the Nice Guy, they’re just after cool hot guys who will cheat on them and treat them badly . Never mind that probably a main reason the Nice Guy is interested in a particular woman is that she is physically attractive. Never mind that the fact that the Nice Guy thinks about women this way is a strong indication that he is neither a genuinely nice guy nor a particularly desirable partner.

A related phenomenon is the guy who is under the impression that he deserves a girlfriend because he is smart. Um…no. While intelligence can indeed be totally hot, it is no better or less shallow a reason to date someone than is physical appearance.

Do women sometimes pick bad partners? Obviously. So do men. It’s inevitable. Not everyone is a good match for everyone else, and some people aren’t good matches for anyone. But if you find yourself making judgments about what “all women” do, stop it. That’s sexist and dumb.

And that’s not very “nice,” now is it?

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Not much to say about this one, except that it’s my one of favoritest ones ever, and I made a small animated icon version of it. Here’s the icon, and the original comic is below the cut.

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Every once in a while, I get really into playing Oregon Trail again. It’s a really great game, actually. When you play it with the most difficult starting set-up (Farmer), I find it gets pretty tense. Anyway, playing that had me thinking about the Oregon Trail itself. Then I ganked an old joke from The Onion. The original Onion joke was a list of moving tips, one of which was to consider moving to Portland because they have these parks downtown and shit. The joke stuck with with me for years. (As did the tip “Two weeks before you move, pack a small box full of books and mark it “books.” Do nothing else until the day before you move”) Growing up in Boise, Idaho, Portland always felt like a beautiful, hip, wonderful mecca that someday I would grow up and move to. Unfortunately, every young person in the western hemisphere had more or less the same idea about Portland so now it isn’t terribly practical, at least in the short term.

Anyway, I changed the punchline a little bit, mentioning Portland’s bookstores (a shout-out to Powell’s, of course) and changed the set-up completely. As T. S. Elliot put it: Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

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I wrote the last couple of Director’s cut updates from South Carolina, where I didn’t have access to the original files and was only working from the web archives. Unfortunately, I was in a little too much of a hurry and skipped this one, comic #29, and talked about another one instead. So I’m going to go ahead and talk about this comic right now and then at some point probably edit the posts to make the order make sense.

Thomas Kinkade, for those of you fortunate enough not to be familiar, is an “artist” famous for his mass-produced images of gentle pastoral scenes. “Worthless mush” is actually a pretty good description. This mass production system includes artists who add bits of actual painting to the collectible prints he produces in an assembly line for sale in special galleries to (often) evangelical Christians. I always thought about the people who do these jobs, many of whom I assume went to art school. I’m guessing at least some of those people went through their early years with the same disdain for Kinkade and everything he stands for that any self-respecting artist has. My thoughts about their plight suggested a similarity to that of our heroic rice cooker, and so this comic was born.

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