Archive for the 'Comics' Category

This comic…

eh…

whatever.

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Quite a wordy one here, which I suppose is fairly appropriate, considering the subject matter. All joking aside, though, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 is a true must-read if you’re interested at all in American politics. Whatever else he was, Hunter Thompson was a keen observer, and the election he’s reporting on is a very interesting one from a historical perspective. The shadow of the 1968 election–the assination of RFK, the police riot in Chicago, lies heavy on the ‘72 election. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that so explodes my unconscious idea of the inevitability of history. Reading the book, I get the feeling that the last 40-some odd years didn’t have to go the way that they did, that it’s all been a collection of events rather than a coherent narrative.

Anyway, it’s a good read, I think especially for people like me for whom this period of time is firmly the domain of the history books. Because where else are you going to find such a drug-addled history book.

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Man, I’m surprised that I didn’t get to this one until this late in the run. This is a quote that I remember discussing in high school Western Civ class. As with many of the half-remembered quotations I later mined for this comic, I seem to recall having a little bit of trouble running this one down to source. The fact that I actually said “Epicurus said…” the quote suggests that I did manage to track it down. A surprising number of famous quotes are actually paraphrases, and ones that I discovered that that is either the case or is possibly the case I tended to have the rice cooker hedge and say that the person is “supposed to” or “reported to” have said something. But then again, this was a time when I was hurrying on these and it’s possible that I just didn’t do that due diligance I sometimes do. Whatever.

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One of the crappiest things about the job I was working at the time that these comics came out was that my bus commute took about an hour each way counting time spent sitting and waiting for the bus. But the good side of that was that I was able to do a lot more reading than usual. One of the things that I finally got around to then was reading “The Divinci Code.” The thing I found strangest about the book was that it’s a book about, among other things, symbolism in art. And yet the book itself is utterly devoid of symbolism. I don’t think I’ve read anything where the form of the book and its content have been less well matched. Very strange.

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I’m not very clear on how well this particular comic works. I tried to mash up two beliefs that tend to be espoused by the same people, and that, to me, are kind of contradictory. In all honesty, I might have killed this one if I’d written it an another time, but at the point that this one was posted I was working a ton and wasn’t about to write a totally new comic once I’d gotten a halfway decent one. I’m afraid that that might be a theme of the next few comics or so.

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Well, here’s a Director’s Cut post that went up late because I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted to say. I’m sure that there’s points I could be making about “skeptics” and science and my own complicated feelings about the whole issue. But for once I honestly feel that this comic would be better standing on its own. I feel it does work, although it might skate a little closer to revealing my views on a subject than I really prefer in comics It happens sometime. I guess part of the key for me was not to let it happen so often that people got the impression that every comic expresses myviewpoint–either directly or by mocking views I disagree with. I think I managed to keep to that line most of the time. There are a few examples where I didn’t, but I think this one kept just this side of the line. Mostly because I don’t think you could come up with a coherent idea of what I actually believe from the comic–just a vague sense of things I don’t respect. You Be The Judge:

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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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