A Waste of Time

I kind of agonized over this strip a bit, because it’s something I’ve been planning for a long time, and Dove of Love is gonna be important to my comics.  If you go back a few strips to when they first go into Prester’s room, the Dove of Love poster is hanging there, and of course what Prester was writing on his sign was, “Faggots Burn In Hell,” which is one of their songs they claim as hit singles.  If you go back a bit further still, the other time Prester was writing on a sign, he had written the letters, “AB…” which was him starting the title of, “Abort the Abortionists!”

Making fun of Christian hypocrisy is kind of like aiming at the broad side of a barn, you can pretty much just take actual things that Christians do and say and the jokes start to make themselves.  Christian rock bands are maybe an even broader target, because there are plenty of musicians in “mainstream” music that are some variety of Christian, but the ones who specifically go around advertising themselves as a “Christian” act are usually the ones that are talentless enough that they don’t have another selling point, so they try to use peoples’ piety to get them to buy some CD.  There are reasons, though, that I’ve been setting up Prester’s personality the way I have, and there are a lot of places I want to go with this, and some things I’d like to say.  Dove of Love, specifically, is among other things going to be a plot device that helps introduce another major character that’s coming up soon.

So, sorry for the delay in posting this strip.  I wanted it to come directly after the previous one, since the scene of Rickets and Prester in Prester’s room was, in addition to the Chaplin thing, meant to introduce Dove of Love.  I finished it up to the point that I did for the book I had published last year, because I felt that Prester’s Chaplin speech was something that gave a bit more clarity to his personality and could be a good note to end his part of the book on.  I’ve got some other things coming up that are already ready to go, but I wanted to do this scene all together, and I spent a long time on this one because I was obsessing over the Dove of Love poster.  I wanted it to be pretty much the cheesiest, silliest Christian rock band poster I could come up with, but I wanted it to look like the people who made it weren’t joking.  The type of people that don’t see a contradiction between the statements on the poster wouldn’t get the joke when they made it.

To support the Dove of Love part of the storyline, I’m seriously considering recording an EP with a couple of their songs to sell and maybe give away at conventions and things, or maybe even as a bonus with a future book of mine.  The problem with me making a music EP is that I can’t play any kind of musical instrument.  I’m pretty sure I could write the lyrics, and I have a good idea of what Dove of Love sounds like, but I don’t nearly know enough about recording music to record songs on my own.  Anybody with musical gifts out there interested in collaborating on an EP of Christian rock bigotry?  Heh.  Could be fun.  I’m serious about this part, email me if you think it would be fun.

To get Dove of Love going, I’ve started a Facebook page for them , and also a Twitter account , so follow those, things relating to the band will be part of the world of my comics as things go forward, and should hopefully be interesting :)