Angriest Rice Cooker Director’s Cut 61–On Rock

This comic is the site of one of the stranger errors that prompted this Director’s Cut doodle. In the original version of this available in our archive, I used the phrase “I’m so indy.” I don’t know how I managed to write that as a way of writing “I’m so indie,” since I have a very distinct memory of standing in the comic shop where I work with one of my awesome former colleagues marveling at a background sight gag in Robert Kirkman’s comic Invincible. The main character goes into a comic shop and the employee is wearing a t-shirt of the cover of Craig Thompson’s Blankets. In another panel we see that the back of the shirt says “I’m sooo indy.” Now this gag struck a little close to home. We’ve had Craig at our comics festival twice, and one of those years our store t-shirt was a Craig Thompson image. So I guess we kind of felt like we were being made fun of in a comic that we actually liked a lot–and ironically I guess being made fun of for being the kind of person who would be “too good” to like the comic in question. Whatever. The main thing we focused on was how strange it was that he (or the artist, and I forget what era of Invincible this is so I can’t say which artist it was) spelled what we would usually always see as “indie” as “indy.” So it was very strange that I did the same thing in my own comic.

It was also strange to me that this seemed so very wrong when I looked at it. I mean, it’s a verbal shortening that is put into writing so it’s not like the orthography is super standard. It wasn’t until I looked at this comic about the seventh time that I finally put my finger on why it bugged me so much: in my mind “indie” is short for independent (although it certainly has it’s own connotations outside of what it’s short for) while “Indy” is Indianapolis. I don’t know why that is, since they’re pronounced the same. It’s just the way my brain’s map has ‘em set up. Go figure.

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 11:13 pm and is filed under Angriest Rice Cooker Director's Cut. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.