Posts Tagged ‘storyline’
7 items.
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.
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The rest of the Swine Flu storyline begins on Friday, along with previews of the bits and pieces that I’m working on and have worked on for my next printed issue. Don’t miss it! Yup.
So, like I was saying, I’m working on my next printed issue, and I really want this one to be big. I was racking my brain, trying to think of what I can do to just make this the biggest comic possible, and it hit me: Who can make any book huge? Who has that magic touch that can get millions of people reading something mediocre that they wouldn’t otherwise have an interest in? Oprah, of course! I need to get this next issue to be an Oprah book club book, and I’ll be set! Just as long as I don’t cross her and she doesn’t decide to James Frey me, that is. So, in the interest of maximizing the book club potential for the next issue, I’ve decided to include backmatter, consisting of an interview with me and a Readers’ Group Guide. This is page one of the interview that I’ve given. Fame and fortune are almost here, I can feel it. Taste it. Thank you in advance, Oprah.
Page Four of FIFteen (sorry, was typo’ing for days about it being sixteen). Next page coming Wednesday.
Page Two of Sixteen. Page Three Coming Friday.
Here we go. Page one of the story I’ve been talking about. I’ll post more commentary on it as it goes, but for now I think I’ll let it remain a little mysterious. I will say, though, that I liked the reaction it received when I read it at Space Galley on Polk. The first read-through went fine, but the crowd was a little bit smaller, mostly just the other artists.
After we finished, the venue decided to bring in some people to liven the place up, I don’t know if it was some sort of rent-a-crowd or what, but this group of 20-ish 20-somethings all poured in at about the same time, so the bar was much busier and Dylan thought it would be a good idea if we started the readings again. Drunk as I was, I thought it just might be a good idea, too. It wasn’t. They asked us to stop part way through my sencond reading of the story because, they said, it was interfering with the music they were playing. OK then.
My roommate, Ignacio, was upset that they told us to stop, so he decided to flip ahead to one of the most pornographic panels in this story (And there are lots to choose from, if you’d like a little tease about where this particular misadventure is headed) and he left it up there, projected on the wall about six feet tall, bright on a white wall in a dark room. I had no idea what was up there until I started hearing some or the random guys around me muttering.
“What the fuck is that?” “The fuck?!” And so on.
A few of them really seemed like they were starting to get pissed by the time I went up there and changed the panel. So, there you go, I have the ability to offend people at a relatively trendy San Francisco bar in a pretty young, progressive neighborhood. I take that as a pretty big compliment.
