A friend noticed that this extra in the climactic scene of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog bears a suspicious resemblance to a certain high-profile member of the cast of another Joss Whedon production in a wig and glasses:
Aha!
Although I published the first Angriest Rice Cooker comic in April of 2005, I wrote it a couple of months earlier. I designed the comic template and wrote the first comic the night after I got laid off from my job delivering Winchell’s Donuts to convenience stores. It was an awesome job, but so it goes. The idea for The Angriest Rice Cooker was a combination of a few things. Since high school, my friends and I had talked and joked about the seeming excessiveness of a fuzzy logic rice cooker. We talked about how we would always feel like it was trying to destroy us.
We were kind of geeky.
Because my donut job was only late at night, I found that I had quite a lot of free time, so I had been reading a lot more webcomics than I had before or since. So I had the idea of repeating-image and other constrained type comics in my head, although I wasn’t directly influenced by any of them. I’ve always loved PartiallyClips by Rob Balder, and that probably informed my style more than, for example, Daily Dinosaur Comics although Daily Dinosaur has perhaps more obvious similarities. It was even in imitation of PartiallyClips that I made the comics so gigantic, something I regretted as I was designing this new version of the site.
Somehow, as part of a conversation, these two ideas merged. I was still used to staying up all night, and I didn’t have anything to do, so I found an image of a rice cooker in the internet, screwed with the contrast to make it look like something that has been run through a photocopier a hundred times. The first gag came pretty directly out of the original premise for the comic. Using “the invasion of Normandy” as the ultimate in a complicated plan is cribbed from (at least one) Buffy episode. Riley Finn says that their plan to hang out was “not the invasion of Normandy,” but a plan nonetheless. I always thought that was funny. I like Riley, even if nobody else does.
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