Posts Tagged ‘funny’
5 items.
The plot thickens! Well, not really. I guess they’re mostly standing around cracking jokes about Jesus. Still, though. It’s all supposed to go somewhere, I promise.
”Comment
This strip more or less marks the introduction of a new character, but it’s one that’s been on my mind for a long time now. For anybody who’s been reading the comics for a couple of years now, they might remember a storyline I did a couple of years ago featuring a teddy bear sold at a bookstore as a promotional item during Christmas who, after the holiday season, is no longer needed and suffers a crisis of purpose. The storyline ended when the teddy bear, seeking a new vocation and having lived his short, sheltered life in a bookstore watches Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled and, seeing neither the irony nor the tragedy of it, is inspired to embark upon a career as a blackface entertainer. Sadly, there seemed to be no place for his act in our modern world, and the story ended with him being approached by something that looked ominously like a lynch mob.
That wasn’t meant to be the end of the story, though. I had the vague outline of a whole epic adventure for the little bear, and I stopped because I realized that I liked it a little too much to continue with it as I’d started it. The bear was based, none too subtly, on a bear that had been sold at the real-life bookstore where I worked, and I didn’t think that they’d appreciate a version of their possibly copyrighted character becoming a hard-drinking alcoholic, making inappropriate advances toward a small boy, dancing in blackface, and accusing the company of implicit antisemitism for their Christmas-centric winter decorations… among other things that I had the bear doing. Some big corporations are funny about stuff like that. Go figure. So I decided that, if I wanted to continue the storyline, I should come up with my own renamed and redesigned teddy bear character. They can’t copyright the idea of a teddy bear being sold at a bookstore, I’m pretty sure, and that’s all that remains from the original concept. I hope to redo the whole origin story with the elements that I liked from what I did originally, but with this new character, and then I’d like to finally get to the big future plans that I had for the teddy bear. But until I manage to get around to all of that, this second Swine Flu comic is the next in an ongoing storyline, so stick with it and enjoy.
I did start out thinking this wasn’t really worth writing about, but a storyline started to occur to me and now I think it’ll be running through the strip for a while, so stay tuned. I plan to do a couple of storylines running concurrently, so they might take a while to finish, but hopefully they’ll be worth it.
I do like the idea of telling longer stories in this short strip format, because it’s fun to me to take something so rigid and see how far it can bend. Of course, long storylines in daily strips are nothing new. Dick Tracy in the ’30’s was doing massive stories that today would probably be considered “graphic novels” but at the time were doled out a few panels per installment. Today, though, the strip format seems to have gotten so set that you’re a little bit shocked when anything out of the ordinary is done with it. We’re conditioned to a degree to expect an exact rhythm of setup, beat, punchline. If the joke happens in the penultimate panel, you’ll probably go back and reread it to figure out if you missed something. I think that we’re not too far away from two daily cartoonists doing the exact same joke as one another without even realizing it. There are already Zits strips that do Calvin and Hobbes jokes almost panel-for-panel, but I’m not sure how “accidental” that actually is. The difference between the two is that Zits has lolled in its own refuse for years content to repeat in different fashions the basic concept, “Isn’t it funny how teenagers are lazy and say stupid things?” while Bill Watterson is a genius who could be working with a nub of yellow crayon and a discarded cheeseburger wrapper and would still manage to transcend and say something profound and entertaining. Then again, Get Fuzzy is nearly always a few panels of Bucky saying something mean, Satchel saying something stupid, and Rob expressing exasperation over it, and I love Get Fuzzy, so maybe there’s something enjoyable and useful in repetition. The best comics like that are a little bit like watching different artists cover an old blues song. You can hear a million different people sing Stack A Lee, and it gets more interesting the more it’s done, because you want to find out if there’s anyplace new to take it. And then you can be the Dixie Chicks molesting Landslide. It really all depends on how it’s done.
Anyway. I love Satchel. Buck too. Can’t they just all be happy? Maybe in their own way they are.
I started with the idea of the Capitalist Pig character so that I’d have someone for my rabbit to argue with about matters of money and financial success, since I figured my own internal conflicts on the issue might provide some interesting comics. I haven’t really used him as much as I thought I might, but recent economic times have given me some cause to push him toward the front a little more. That, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to throw in an occasional slightly-more topical strip to break up the pornography.
Hey, so, lots of stuff to say.
I guess I’ll just start out with a few words about this particular comic, and then post the more general stuff as a separate blog. I’m posting this on Wednesday, but I’m figuring on cheating a little bit and adjusting the date to Monday and posting something separate for Wednesday. This has the two advantages of creating the illusion that I didn’t miss a day and also of providing two posts on the same day for whoever checks it on Wednesday. I slack off, and everybody wins! It’s a beautiful world, right? Love it.
( Note from Dave the tech guy – about damn time Rick figured that little trick out. It was a pain having to fudge the dates myself all the time! Er…not that he misses many deadline dates. No. Nossir. Not at all. … … *whistles*… )
Let’s see. Why did I not post on Monday? Boy drama, lethargy, forgetfulness, laziness, OCD? Since I’m still feeling my way with how much I want to actually reveal about myself in these posts and how much I want to create a mythology about myself, I’ll say the truth and admit that it was a little of all of those. Just kidding. Or am I? Does it matter? Probably not, since the line of inquiry is even starting to bore me as I drag it out.
The comic. The comic. I love Obama, and something about Obama and comics just seem to go together like me, alcohol, and stupid decisions. Really, you just want to write comics about him. And I mean that because he makes me feel like there’s something worth writing, as opposed to why Marvel and everybody like that has decided they like writing comics about him: an Obama cover sells really well. Maybe it’s just Obama and magazines, even more than Obama and comics. He’s been on the cover of every damn thing that could conceivably stretch its premise out paper-thin and transparent to include him. He was on a wine magazine; the story was about the inauguration wines. He was on a watch magazine, in case you’re curious about Obama’s watches. Fer reals.
But really, I don’t know what it is. It’s just something flitting around in the zeitgeist, and it’s hard to repress. He represents so many things. He isn’t perfect, of course, and he’d be boring otherwise. Real boring. I think me drawing Obama started when I was working on as (Soon-to-be-released-with-any-luck) comic with my roommate, Ignacio Nova. We decided, in the grand tradition of folks ‘n artists trying to justify their chemical dependencies, that we’d get stoned and use it to create something. We’d get a big piece of bristol board, some good pens, and draw absolutely anything that popped into our heads. For me, “anything that pops into your head,” usually leads to a drawing of a boy in some state of undress, but in this particular case, maybe cause of my proximity to Ignacio’s heterosexuality, I decided, “I wanna draw Obama on this! Over and over!” So, now there’s a partially illustrated piece of bristol board in Ignacio’s room with a buncha Obamas on it, and more to come. I plan to keep going until the whole thing is full of Obamas. I think the point is to discover whether the finished effect is creepy, funny, or something else.
So, that got me started up drawing the president, I guess. I started to think about what he would say if I could talk to him one on one, and this comic seemed to be the natural progression. I hope for it to be the first in a series of imaginary interviews conducted by my rabbit, and eventually for Obama just to become a regular character in the comic, kicking it around the apartment with the robot and the pig. Hm. I’m not quite sure where that apartment is, by the way. I think it’s a place in my head. It doesn’t look much like the one I actually live in. So it goes.
