12 August 04
The other day Dave pointed out to me that my writing style is similar to the autistic main character of the book “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” by Mark Haddon. It was fairly eerie to read since so many things in the book matched my style. Like me, the main character Christopher does things like playing Minesweeper on Expert, doing maths to occupy thought, and disliking France. I think this is a fantastic book and anybody should read it. Unless they are autistic also and dislike books written by fictional autistic people who dislike France and call everything stupid.
I was reminiscing about my poopsmith-like elevator sailor, so here’s (the horribly named) Robert E. l33t! in its entirety.
First, a note on the whole comic. Maybe just a rule of thumb for other people planning to do a comic. Don’t try to come up with a clever comic name, then try to create a comic around it. You’ll end up with a clever first few letters, followed by rubbish, and eventually followed by four nonsensical cartoons. If I make another comic, I’m going to finish ten strips before deciding on the name. That way hopefully I won’t decide on something hopelessly retarded.
Impostor Among Us – September 30, 2001
The first entry in my cartoon marathon. It started with the middle panel sketch. The sketch order was right guy, table, right chair, left guy and chair, clock, dialogue, DyNoMite. You can probably tell that halfway into drawing the table, I decided the whole sketch really sucked. The round table got curvy, the left guy didn’t match the right (conventiently leading to him being “in disguise”, a.k.a. “couldn’t be drawn twice”), I decided to destroy the guy on the right that couldn’t be drawn twice, and finally the clock hastily appeared to end the sketch so I could move on to something else. Beyond the lack of art skill, there are several things very wrong with the finished comic.
- I’ve never had to type ‘run’ in DOS. Maybe on my Apple IIe.
- ‘run aborted’ should have never been there. Once you kill something with ^C in DOS, it’s just done.
- ‘rm’ is clearly a unix-based command. This doesn’t match the obvious DOS environs. (To clarify, I’m pretty
sure I made this cartoon before I learned about Cygwin.) - DOS never had such vivid colors, and I’m sure Steve didn’t have enough mad skills to make so many colors. The purple-green-orangeburst just doesn’t make sense. I think that style went out when Hypercolor shirts stopped costing so much.
Aside from the whole thing being crap, I’m still mostly proud of the cell division and layout. I’m also happy for going with the JJ Walker spelling rather than something boring like ‘TNT’. If I were to label that cannister now, I’d probably go with my recent homstar obsessions and just write “Caution: This can a-splode.”
The Narrator – October 5, 2001
Number two in the series introduces The Narrator. He’s a crab with force powers. He also has a low attention span. This leads him to declare himself King of the Jungle and write poems about Steve. I drew Steve on my computer. That I regret. I can’t draw on my computer as [rehmeyer] and I can by hand. That should have been obvious. The only other thing I could have done better on this one is to put another exclamation point after the maniacal laughter. There should never be 2 exclamation points after anything. Either just use one or go crazy. Two of them says “I’m cautiously trying to express excitement while being to afraid to risk losing an accidental ‘1′ in a long row of ‘!’s.”
The third pane, in which soul-staring occurs, has to be the greatest moment in the history of art. I’m particularly proud of the coloring in the background between the eyes. It makes me so dizzy to look at I hardly notice something is digging into my psyche. Take a moment to soak it in.
Slappy’s Song – October 12, 2001
To this day I am unable to keep a straight face while showing the original sketch of Slappy, the
crap-dispensing elevator sailor. I usually lose it around the hyphen. I never decided how Steve got to the fifth floor without noticing Slappy’s operations. Maybe Steve is really unobservant before his coffee. Maybe Slappy didn’t move in until after Steve got to work. I know he’s at work because there used to be a water cooler where all the text is.
The last stanza — “The last stanza” … reading that out loud in my head while I type it, I hear “The Last Danza”. Tony really would have been a better fit for that Samurai role — only had three lines, and didn’t match the other three paragraphs. When I originally wrote the poem, I thought it sounded right to abruptly stop the song. But now I’m thinking I missed an opportunity for another poop joke. Surely there has to be something eight syllables long that ends in a long E sound. Hmm…
- And help reduce my invent’ry!
- And practice some podiatry.
- I’ll rip one out for you to see!
- I got poo. What’dya have for me?
Maybe not. But I do like the 24-48 hours line. (A good artist always does his homework and isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. Unless he has OCD in which case he probably is.)
Robot v Bunny – December 11, 2001
Ah yes, the Robot versus the Bunny strip. This one was terrible. I think it was so bad it single-handedly killed any remaining motivation to continue with the strip. There’s just so much about this that isn’t funny. The wall art in the stairway is pretty. Here again we see my inability to draw things more twice. Kinda strange that the bunny looks the same in the two frames despite different viewing angles. When I drew this I knew rabbits were three-dimensional. An inability to draw the same thing twice means I shouldn’t have recurring characters. Maybe this realization is how people like Gary Larson got their styles.
My next comic should be called something like ‘Valley of the Squishy-Faces’ or ‘Clipart on Parade’ or ‘Nevermind the Talent, Just Come Back Tomorrow’ or ‘Rectangle and Rhombus’.