Archive for the 'Angriest Rice Cooker Director's Cut' Category

Here’s another one that I find funny but I don’t know if it really came through to anyone else. It also represents a slightly more extreme version of my own response to learning the fact that the word “metaphysics” was created simply because of the order in which Aristotle wrote his treatises. I mean, this dude is so influential that the order of his works defines what we call whole categories of thought. How do you not hate that just a little bit? I mean, not only are you and I not going to be that important, nobody alive today could possibly be, no matter how brilliant they are. It’s just not possible anymore.

Yeah, I hate you, Aristotle.

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This one is pretty much a matched pair with the previous comic, and was in fact inspired by an actual spell check that happened while I was writing that comic. There was a time earlier in the comics run when I would have taken the effort to separate two comics so clearly related, but at this point I was working a ton and pretty much took what inspiration I could get to make into comics right away. At this point I was theoretically uploading comics twice a week as opposed to the earlier (and later) 5. Even that didn’t totally happen, and the quality suffered as well.

Still, I like the idea that the rice cooker was working on an essay about the Enlightenment and masturbation. This was just a random fancy–an excuse for him to be using a word processor and writing the word “Voltaire.” It just seemed like the kind of thing that he would be doing. It’s a little bit weird that he describes his interaction with a word processor as “typing,” but I don’t know exactly what else he’d call it. Inputting, I suppose. The whole comic is so strange, though, that I didn’t bother to change it.

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I don’t remember how I initially came across this quote, but I know it was sometime in high school and I know that this joke was pretty much my initial response to it. I guess this was one of the great things about having this comic: it gave me a chance to clear out all the old jokes that were cluttering up my brainspace since high school.

This one also took a while to get up this time because I touched up the layout a little bit and for some reason my newer version of photoshop didn’t want to place nice with the file. But I managed to beat it into shape and so here’s the result

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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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I came up with this basic idea while staring at a huge number of “the Tao of XYZ” books at a Barnes and Noble. I grabbed all of the book titles in the first panel off of an Amazon search for “The Tao of” (all of them are real, by the way). The quote in the second panel is from chapter 56 of the Tao Te Ching as translated by Stephen Mitchell. I may have had to look it up, but I definitely knew the gist–that book is very important to me. This was a rare comic where I had the basic idea mapped out and then did research to fill in the pieces, rather than using research on random topics as a way to stimulate the comedy brain.

It’s also worth pointing out that I have a very severe love/hate relationship with the book The Tao of Pooh. On the one hand, Benjamin Hoff does a pretty good job of explaining the concepts of the Taoist masters. On the other hand, he pushes a lot of his own ideologies that in my mind run counter to the spirit of the Tao Te Ching as if they were a self-evident extension of the words of that book. Parts of his work I read as downright hateful, which is about the last word I’d use to describe the Tao Te Ching

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I’m pretty sure that this one started with me just thinking about what a book review by the Rice Cooker would work like and the comic evolved naturally from that into a joke lifted from an early Dilbert, when Dogbert marketed a newspaper that you can read every day. I like to think my version is a little more character-oriented rather than based on an odd bit of social commentary, but I know I thought of that Dilbert when I was throwing this one together.

In fairness to books, I think that the rice cooker thinks of basically everything as charming (or not-so-charming) distractions from the tedium of everyday life. It’s probably obvious, but this comic is a place where the opinions of myself and my creation diverge considerably. Books were my first love, and they remain a central part of my life.

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This is a basic joke idea that I’d been tooling around with for years in real life and modified to make an Angriest Rice Cooker. When people have suggested that this isn’t really a comic at all, just jokes on a .png, I’ve pointed out that while we can argue whether or not the comics are funny at all, they’re certainly not funny if you try to tell them. Sadly, that was true of the times that I’ve tried to make in person jokes that later became Rice Cooker comics. One particularly rough attempt to make the basic idea funny was the one time that I was talking about it to what I didn’t realize at the time was an actual male college cheerleader. That was kind of awkward.

Let’s just say that there’s a reason that my main humor medium is the internet.

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One of the common modern gripes that I find silly and exasperating to hear are complaints about the supposed lunacy in our court system, supposedly evident from warning labels on products and lawsuits that seem to defy common sense–when they are described in thirty seconds. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of problems with the legal system. But the last one I worry about is large corporations getting hit with lawsuits. Believe me, big corporations have got good defenders. And there’s a reason why we have trials rather than common sense decisions based on thirty second summaries–cases are often a lot more complicated than they appear. That’s not to say that the system is infallible, but it’s less arbitrary than snap judgments based on personal prejudices.

Even the infamous hot coffee spilling lawsuit is a little more complicated, and rational, than you might have heard. And all of this matters far more than simply bugging me–these kinds of things are pointed to by big corporations as a way to promote major changes to our legal system. While there is a case to be made for tort reform (not an entirely convincing one if you ask me, but there you go). Sound bites about “crazy lawsuits” are not a part of that rational case.

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I always hated Hot Topic when I was a young’n, couldn’t stand to even be in one for more than a few minutes at a time when I was accompanying gothier acquaintances. And it certainly bugged me when they picked up stuff that I was actually into to make ironically cool (like a year after the fact, of course). But my friend once made the wonderful point that Hot Topic is a good force, because it shows white kids what it’s like to have their culture appropriated.  I never felt this more than when they started putting in Napoleon Dynamite stuff. Again, this was like six months after everyone kind of got over that movie, but I’m from Idaho, and while I’m not from the small town Eastern Idaho places like Preston, where the movie takes place, I definitely knew people like that. Dorky Idaho kid is my culture and they appropriated the fuck out of it. But in the long run, I guess I’ve come around to the Rice Cooker’s way of thinking about it. Hating Hot Topic is about as passe as, well, Hot Topic.

One other thing about this comic is that you can see me getting a little bit more confident about using the placement of the words in the panels in order to simulate a kind of speech pattern and intonation, even though it’s a rice cooker. You’ll see me play with this a little more a few comics later

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This basic joke had been bouncing around my head for years before I actually made this comic. Sadly, anti-drug messages have moved on from “my anti-drug” so it’s kind of dated. I say sadly because I’m actually really happy with how this comic turned out. I really like how the rice cooker looks on the black background, and I like how the My Anti-drug logo turned out. I made that by going to the “my anti-drug” website, finding a real one with the right number of letter spaces, and then copying and pasting the individual letters from other ones. I think this was the most work I put into the visual aspect of any comic except for the first one–which admittedly wasn’t a lot. Still, I like it.

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