Posts Tagged ‘Rick Worley’
38 items.
Things get a little bit more ominous at this point…
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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.
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.
Memo to old guys:Me being too polite to start screaming, “Rape!” in a crowded bar and being in a stationary position for a few minutes does not entitle you to conversation. Seriously. I like to do sketches like this just to keep my hand moving, more or less, and especially when I’m at bars alone. I haven’t done many in the past few months. For some reason, fate has conspired to keep me in the company of other guys during most of my recent visits to San Francisco’s dens of evening debauch… But I think a lot of the stories about those guy companions might make decent comix at some point, so I don’t want to shoot my wad with them just yet… In comix form… Get it? hahahahhahaha.. I shot my wad with the guys in non-comix form. Get it? yeah? Oh, right, it just wasn’t funny. Well, regardless, the above sketch is from last Saturday, when I decided that I needed a bar night by myself for a change, and made my lonesome way down to Castro. I was iffy on what I’d do, and whether I’d draw, and I was making it up as I went, so I didn’t bring a sketchbook or pens. As soon as I got there, though, a fairly cute brown-haired boy started checking me out, I liked the music (As much as I can in a Castro bar), and I decided tonight was gonna be a good, good night. So, I ran to the nearest Walgreens, which never seems more than two blocks away in this city, (Don’t get me wrong, I love this city with all my heart), and I grabbed the pad of paper that seemed like it would fit in my pocket.
As douche bag positioned himself next to me and started telling me he liked my drawings and wanted to know where I was from and what was I doing in Castro all by myself, (Must mean I wanna fuck old guys in red baseball caps with accents of vague European origins, right?) I tried to put the pad of paper back into my pocket and excuse myself but then discovered that it did not, in fact, fit. As a coyote in a trap’ll chew it’s foot off, I tore the paper out of the pad and folded the stack in half so that I could fit it in my back pocket, and I left. I hadn’t sat in my new position long when he arrived again. “Oh, you’re over here now. Haha. So, how do you like the city? It’s cold, yeah?” Haha. Anyway, I drew this cartoon as he was sitting next to me and thoughts of unsavory natures flooded my mind. Cute brown-haired guy left while douche bag was going on with stories of which I understood maybe every fifth word. Would anybody have blamed me?
I very rarely do drawings like this of people from life; I usually use photographs instead. When I have done guys from life before, their reaction usually hasn’t been all that enthusiastic. This time, though, the guy in question liked the drawing a lot, and I have to say that it wasn’t the worst time I’ve ever had drawing somebody. What happened after might have even been more fun, but I guess there’s little or no artistic purpose to me elaborating on it in this post.
To round out the week of sketchbook-mes, this seemed appropriate. Next Monday, the next Swine Flu installment.
This kinda makes me want to gaybash him:
If only Justin Timberlake hadn’t done the same joke, and done it better, and with Beyonce actually there… It still wouldn’t be that funny. Which is why I prefer pictures of Joe Jonas to him actually talking or moving or singing or doing things. The whole thing of him doing things… eh. But the whole looking at him thing… mm.
I’ll just say, when I was little, watching this at Disneyland in 3D, it was pretty much the coolest thing ever:
