Issue 47 Commentary

I went back and forth for days on whether I wanted to put "cunt" in red text. I finally decided that, unless there was some other word in black, then there was no clear idea what Jimmy had heard. And god damn is Jimmy oblivious. It's almost like he's working at it.

I'm never happy with whatever type of blue I use to indicate that someone is watching TV. Makes me wish I knew my way around Photoshop or Illustrator. Or had any real knowledge about doing color art.

And, just so you know, THUF is a major deal, almost on the order of Butt-Numb-A-Thon. Seriously, we're talking 10 or 11 movies here.

Issue 46 Commentary

Ah, Priscilla and Stuart. Young love. Furtive glances across the lab. Arcs of electricity between their moist, conducive lips.

I sometimes wonder what's going on in Ron's mind. Only he could be making a banner for a Sex Room and somehow let his mind drift to Lucky Charms.

And why is Jimmy going with the Chernobyl story? I thought he thought that Hapford needed the cash? Or, wait, I thought he knew what was really going on? Now I'm confused.

Sheila? You remember Sheila, right? Okay, fine, go back and read Issues 1 and 2 (if you can bear to look at the art).

Issue 45 Commentary

Oh my. Angry Assholes™. How crude. Basically, this game is "Don't Wake Daddy" or "Crocodile Dentist". Remember that? It was one of those tension games where you basically had to do something as many times as you could before the game turns on you. You pull as many croc teeth as you can before the thing chomps at you. In this game, once there's too many foreign objects in Angry Aston™'s Asshole, his "rectum will reject'um", spring them back on the unlucky player. Probably one of the grossest things you'll ever see in the comic.

The name of the cafe is the Coffee Pun Cafe. You'll be seeing it again later.

Like I said before, Stuart usually only has his glasses off during emotional times. Dude is blind as a bat without them.

Oh, and so you know what I'm even talking about there in the cafe:

Issue 44 Commentary

Oh yeah, this thing. Where I put the posts.

Priscilla puts me in mind a little bit of Oliver from Jon Rosenberg's Goats. Not in the sense that she's an evil young chicken. But you start with a character (in the case of my comic, Stuart, in the case of Goats, Diablo the Satanic Chicken). That character has a particular set of personality traits, which may shift over the course of the story. Then you bring in a character that is, essentially, a distillation/amplification of one aspect of the earlier character. That's how I think of Priscilla. Stuart has started to get with it. He knows he's got a good future self ahead of him, he's learned to start making choices for himself. He's still off in his own world, but it's more a world of video games. The mad science thing is really just something that he grew up around. Dad would make the occasional robot, or death ray; he'd mainly use his mad science skills to play tricks on the neighborhood cats (like sending them through a wormhole into a dog pound). But Priscilla...science has been her life for a long time. There's probably some childhood trauma she's using science to escape from. There could be a whole concept album along the lines of Tommy or The Wall there. Everyone's got emotions. She's obviously not comfortable with hers. (This might be a good time to point out that the opaque eyeglasses are meant as a visual metaphor for emotional detachment in these two characters. Stuart typically loses his when he's going through something tough.)

Hey, and Roundtree's back again! Always good to have Roundtree around. I had to bring her back at some point.

Any guesses as to what the original use of that monitor Priscilla is holding was?

Issue 43 commentary

This is one of the rare issues written almost entirely by me, which results in it being lighter on the jokes. For the most part, I stole the "punchline" of the issue from an episode of The League of Gentlemen, the one where Charlie starts to fall in love with Tony. The original joke was about calamari--I improved upon it by changing it to steak!

I thought it was good to do some actual character development. Sure does look like Sappho's life has sucked so far, doesn't it?

Marlene's lines:
"This ends now, you bitch!"
"I've had it up to here with your evasions, your lies, your shit! Always acting like you can't understand me!"
"Hey! Is that some sort of ethnic slur?"

P.S. Sappho can no longer watch Barney without noticing how the oldest girl on the show hugs Barney a lot more than all the other kids.

Sunkist Wacky Players -- Basketball (1991)

Alright, let's get this one in before basketball season is over.

Okay, here's the last set of Wacky Players cards. The Basketball set was included in boxes of Sunkist Fun Fruits Wacky Players in 1991. The basketball set had special fruit snack pieces in the shape of half of a whistle. You had to put them together, and voila, your own whistle! Be the coach! Lead the team to victory! I was so sure that if I lined them up just right, and didn't smush them, or get too much spit on them, they'd work. But nope.

There were (by all accounts) nine cards total, with characters illustrated by Jack Davis. Let's look at 'em, shall we?


I had this one as a kid. I remember asking kids at school whether they thought this was Michael Jordan or Lanky Frankie. I would cover up the name with my thumb--that way they would guess Michael Jordan. Because--ahaha, you see, I had an ace up my sleeve!--I knew of Lanky Frankie, and they did not! I could make them appear as fools when I removed my thumb!

I was a lame kid.


In the end, the other guys on the team regretted that they gave Joey that stupid nickname. It started with Joey making stupid one-liners on the court like "looks like you're up against a wall!" and "balls to the wall!" The spray-painted brick design was sort of clever, but then Joey started stuffing real vines down his shoes. Half of the Silly Teammates team got poison ivy from him during the playoffs that year.


Ralph...are you... are you enjoying the other team ripping off your outfit? Is this a porno? The basketball goal in obvious disrepair says yes. I'm going to leave before the stompin' and rompin' starts.


I'll admit: I've never watched a basketball game. Do all basketball players hold the ball tight against their crotch whenever they can? Also: yes, ha-ha, look how tiny Bry is, but what about the giant guy dunking him whose hand is almost as big as the hoop? Why doesn't he get a card? I bet he's not a pervert like Bry and Ralph.


What a dick.


I think in the original artwork, he was hanging himself, and they cropped out the rope. (I'm just kidding, kids, basketball-related suicide is never funny.)


What the hell kind of trajectory is that? I was with you until the loop. "Nothin' but" is accurate, excluding even physical limitations of the human body. Or maybe this is only apparent retrograde motion, seen only because of the relative orbits of the earth and Nothin' But Net Nick.



Ah, let's see, making fun of Dave, um... "I'm Dave! My head is disproportionate to my body! I have a bunch of burst capillaries in my nose because I'm alcoholic!" Also: were wrist bands mandatory in the NBA in the early 90s? Also: screw you, Dave, that's not dribblin'.



September 11 would have gone down a lot differently if these guys had been around. The guy on the left would have caught the plane before it crashed, saving thousands of innocent lives. I wouldn't have trusted the guy on the right, though. He looks like he'd just stone cold swat a plane out of the sky.

German Wacky Packages #5 in a series

This might be stretching the boundaries of what you'd consider "packaging", but Golo thinks it's funny.