2012-05-03-boatgirl

Prophecy of the Daughter of Triton

2012-05-03-boatgirl

This is the last of the older Boat Girl strips. I am trying to figure out new things to do with her. It’s really tough because she kind of can’t have a regular cast at all! WHO HAS IDEAS FOR BOAT GIRL STRIPS? What sorts of adventures would you like to see Boat Girl have? Post comments below, and let’s spend the weekend with our THINKING CAPS ON.

TUESDAY: Another adventure of Rhodabelle Lett, who has GOT WHAT YOU NEED.

2012-04-24-mwhf

Bullets, Bury Yourselves in Me

2012-04-24-mwhf

RIP Leonard.

I should do more honor to this character in the blog post than I did in the comic. Basically this character was initially supposed to be a stupid joke for this strip. I still love that strip, mostly because it has no real punchline — it’s just this kind of stupid escalating situation based on the hilarious idea that Brian Eno made some kind of computer called the OBLIQUE STRATEGIST, that for some reason outputs to ticker tape, and that’s as gnomic as real Oblique Strategies are. Yet while real Oblique Strategies are fun ways to generate new kinds of thinking about whatever it is you do, they are not really a good method for DETERMINING THE COURSE OF A MULTINATIONAL EMPIRE, hence the joke. Because it would ruin it to have a coherent “summary” kind of punchline, I decided that the last panel should just be this arbitrary hunk of “webcomics drama” where one totally negligible minor character confesses this like undying passion for another character.

But THERE ARE NO MINOR CHARACTERS! There never can be.

So later, when I knew that the plot had to involve bringing back Dascha Rand as a kind of fun ersatz gay Uncle Scrooge figure, it made total sense to reintroduce Leonard as a source of wacky exposition, potential drama, and arbitrary pathos. The fact that he has this secret love for Dascha Rand has pretty much absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the plot — like, he sees the Main Character as this Serious Rival and the Main Character really has no interest in Dascha whatsoever. He is really sad and embittered, and he gets, like, beaten up by children.

The end “joke” of course is what you see above: that Leonard makes this grand heroic confession and gesture in an effort to truly prove himself worthy of his one undying passion, and there is no effectiveness in it whatsoever. I don’t even know what he was thinking. That he’d jump in front of these bullets that were fired what, a full minute ago? That he’d like land harmlessly on the dock and confront the shooter? They’re not even near Manhattan Island anymore. I really have no idea what his idea was here. And yet there is a crazy kind of glory in it, maybe.

But I am done torturing him now. He has been most notoriously abused. The whole point was to have a heterogeneous character who typified like, Scott Summers/Jean Grey comic book torrid passion, who was essentially there for the other characters to kick around. Charitably you could call it some kind of sophisticated parody of Ayn Rand books, I guess, but really it’s just mean, and I feel pretty low down about doing this now. But what else do you do with a character like this? What else do you do.

Um, so TUNE IN THURSDAY to see what effects this gesture may have had, everyone, in the FINAL PAGE OF OUR CURRENT CHAPTER

(Other notes: He is named after this guy, who I actually met once in 2004 at an event related to a college philosophy class I took that his wife taught! I remember that he was kind of obnoxious during the actual event — I asked a question that made mention of copyright law as “arbitrary,” meaning “decided by an arbiter of some kind,” and he flipped out and said REALITY IS NOT ARBITRARY! But then I talked to him after the event and he was the nicest guy in the world, and told me that it had taken him years and years of dedicated study of philosophy to understand why nothing is “arbitrary,” and that I shouldn’t be hard on myself. He seemed legitimately concerned about this in a way that I, um, hadn’t altogether come to expect from philosophy professors, so I guess I saw fit to pay him the extremely dubious honor of being the inspiration for this character who I’ve just coldly dispatched.)

Six Shots, Big Money

At a certain point I just gave up trying to make all the Noam panels look exactly alike and tried to make each expression slightly different, yet somehow corresponding to a real emotion that Noam might be feeling. This was necessary for sanity.

FOR THOSE OF YOU JUST COMING IN: Noam is Elvira’s younger brother, with whom she and Our Hero used to live. (link) At some point in the past he became an ANARCHIST COP. After the GREAT SWITCHEROO, the ghost Elvira attempted to contact her brother (link), but merely ended up making him suspect FOUL PLAY. Thus he came to New York seeking her (link) and via a series of GENIUS DEDUCTIONS (link) managed to figure out that a FLYING BOAT was involved, which of course indicates the SINISTER RAND CORPORATION.

Part of the fun is that this is in no way a logical process of reasoning! But, um, this story has been going on for so long that I blame no one for forgetting the handful of strips that POWER UP this narrative moment.

There are only three panels left in this part of the storyline, but they are ACTION PACKED ONES, so please check back Thursday for the next update!

Dreams of the Everyday Housewife

Who knows what, exactly, the titular character means by the statement in the last panel? I don’t!

Next update will be TUESDAY, and will feature Dascha Rand talking about EXECUTIVE THINKING.

I’m also almost done with the penciled pages for this whole chunk of the storyline. It will wrap up on April 26, a Thursday, assuming everything goes okay as far as getting pages inked (which is never a safe assumption.) The comic BAD MOTHER will start on May 13 (or Mother’s Day, ha ha) — I haven’t figured out what the update schedule on that ought to be yet. I’m working on the script for the Last Big MWHF story, which will start running once or twice a week or something like that concurrently with Bad Mother in May, and I’ll probably end up doing one off MWHF strips like, until I die, beyond that. These are my plans as of right now. Maybe they will change! Who can say?