While You Were Out

Between the sky falling over Russia (or so they WANT you to believe), the Pope resigning (or so they WANT you to believe) and a cruise ship running out of gas and overflowing with poops (or so… no that shit totally legit happened), I’m sort of getting the impression that the loose band of Internet weirdos that set sale from Orlando for JoCo Cruise Crazy 3 might have been the only thing holding this stupid world together. We leave for a week and vigilante cops starts murdering people, Olympic cyborgs start murdering people and North Korea gets reruns of Dharma and Greg! How are they going to get any of the cultural references in that show? Dharma is SUCH a free spirit and poor Greg just isn’t used to her “live for the moment” attitude what with being a straight laced, buttoned down guy. I bet they get four episodes in and ignite a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere out of frustration.

Emerald City Comicon is NEXT WEEKEND in Seattle. It is my favorite show of the year and I will be at the Blind Ferret Booth all weekend (#1106-1108).

Did you know you can get a really nice looking print of any comic I’ve ever done? YOU INDEED TOTALLY CAN

hijinks ensue buy a print

COMMENTERS: Have you ever been away, unreachable or somehow otherwise totally uninformed when MAJOR NEWS went down? 

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25 Comments

  1. When I moved back to college this year, it was on the day Neil Armstrong died. I was completely ignorant for like three days.

  2. I went away for several days to return home with an answering machine filled with panicked family members and friends saying I need to contact them.
    Turns out I have gone missing and everyone was starting a search party.

  3. I was at my Grandma's lakeside hut with no TV, radio or newspapers with my parents for two weeks in 1986 (this was East Germany, by the way). We had fun gathering and eating wild mushrooms and fruit and herbs from the forest, sunbathing and playing in the lake… then we got back home and found out Chernobyl had gone kaboom on our first day there, and some of the radiation clouds had come as far as Germany.
    Whoops.

  4. i was asleep when the first plane hit the WTC on 9/11. a friend called me and told us to turn on the tv, i was reluctant because i was still groggy from being woke up. got over that real fast when i realized what was happening.

    • That's actually exactly what happened to me, except I was at my parents' house and my father woke me up. I was arguing with him about getting up since he kept saying "just get up and come downstairs." Finally, after a few rounds of me saying "but I'm tired" etc. he shouted through the door "A plane just hit the World Trade Center!" Fastest I've ever gotten out of bed and in front of a TV.

      • I was on holiday in Gran Canaria and was watching the TV, when me and my mates saw the first plane hit. I remember turning to my friend and saying "That looks like a good movie!". Everything was in Spanish so i had no idea what the feck (I'm Irish) was going on. We got up the next morning ant the all the papers just said 50,000 people dead and showing pictures… Man it was crazy!!

        • Oh and i forgot my friend started a new collage course the exact day, Industrial Design, and there first project was to design a way to show people you were still alive in a destroyed building using just paper and paper clips! It was flipping mental!

    • I was walking to school. Outside first period, I heard people talking about crashing planes into buildings. Initially, I thought they were talking about some new music video. The teacher had his radio on, and let us seat ourselves in silence as we listened to the details.

    • I had gotten up that morning and my room-mate told me a plane had hit the WTC. Neither of us though much of it. I went to work early and was the first one there. I'm oblivious and just working on repairing computers for about 2 hours, and at about 10AM, the next person walks in in a panic and screaming about "OH MY GOD WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO?!?!?!?! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!" I thought she had lost her mind until she told me to turn on the radio.

  5. I spent the summer of 2001 in a hospital bed with a broken back, in a children’s hospital so no newspapers or internet for the patients. My sole link to the outside world was a tv strapped above the bed, which required two things: A remote control and someone to bring it to you.
    The entire ward had one remote, which the nurses guarded with their lives but often ended up under a pillow somewhere on the ward. The nurses also assumed as I was a teenager, I only wanted to watch Big Brother rather than actual news.
    I felt like a fucking time traveler when I eventually escaped.

  6. When Wen Ho Lee (accused of spying at Los Alamos) was arrested my family was out of town at a reunion. Since my dad worked with the guy all our relatives kept asking him what was going on, when he was just as out-of-the-loop and curious. Insider knowledge only works if you're inside when the event occurs.

  7. in 2003, most of my extended family and I went ona cruise to celebrate my paternal grandparent's 5-th wedding anniversary. To set this up, they lived in New York, so you can guess where this will go. Our ship pulled into port on the Hudson River, JUST after the Blackout began and a heat wave was happening. I forget how long it exactly lasted, but the blackout was still going when we went to JFK Airport to head back to California, so you can guess how THAT went down!

  8. Well, apparently I was completely out of reach when Russia got bombarded by meteors and a cop shot someone? The hell? Internet, you have failed me.

    This is kind of depressing I'm afraid, but there was that one time a friend called us up to tell us another friend had just died. Seems he'd been on life support in intensive care for almost two months and we'd had no idea that he was dying, because we'd moved out of town and no one remembered to tell us because they automatically assumed all his friends knew already.

    "Oh yeah, you guys aren't on FaceBook, are you?" *Facepalm*

    The worst part? He died while my husband was on his way home from a business trip to his city, and he could have stopped in to see him if we'd known. So, yeah, there was that. Otherwise, we tend to have our ears to the ground, except for Russian meteors. Think I'll automatically assume Tesla was involved somehow.

  9. I'm an archaeologist, and a colleague of mine was working in a cave in South Africa during the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. He emerged from the cave about 3 days into the disaster, drove back from the cave and into Johannesburg and straight to the airport, where he expected to catch his (scheduled months in advance) flight home to the UK. It apparently took quite a lot of convincing him before he believed that he really couldn't fly home because of a volcanic eruption shutting down all European air travel. Meanwhile I was stuck at a conference in St Louis, Missouri, where I actually had given a talk about using volcanic ash to date sediment layers. I got some great photographs for my talk from news websites, but the novelty wore off when it took me an additional five days to get back to London and I had to fly on a combination of four different flights to do so.

    • On the other hand, at least when people asked your colleague if he'd been living under a rock the previous few days, he could have said yes!

  10. One day I was calling several businesses and placing orders for jewelry supplies. I was talking to a store in Vancouver (Canada), when the guy casually mentioned, "Isn't it crazy, what's going on in New York" "What?" "A plane flew into a building in downtown NY". So I got off the phone, immediately turned on the tv, and starting calling my friend who lives there. After two hours, I got through and he told me he was ok. His didn't start work until 10 so was just getting ready to leave when he saw the second plane hit.

    The day that it was announced that Kurt Cobain's body was found, I was working a 5 hour shift by myself at a small gift store. My friend came in to take over, "Did you hear, Kurt Cobain died?" And then for some bizarre reason she laughed.

    I'm usually the last to hear when personal tragedy strikes, perhaps because I don't have a network of friends, but just many individual friendships. So when I haven't heard from them in awhile, and run into their other friends, I finally learn the major news.
    "Didn't you hear? John was knocked from his bike by a drunk driver. Went into a coma for a week, and had to have plastic surgery to rebuild his face."
    "Ken thought the devil was telling him to kill his girlfriend, and had a breakdown. He quit school, his girlfriend broke up with him, he's on meds for schizophrenia, and is living in his grandma's basement."

  11. i didn't wake up on 9/11 till all three planes had hit and we were getting the first reports of flight 93

    swore i was watching a movie at first (cause at the time HBO had been showing a film that took the form of a newscast durring a major event )

  12. I was at my Grandma's lakeside hut with no TV, radio or newspapers with my parents for two weeks in 1986 (this was East Germany, by the way). We had fun gathering and eating wild mushrooms and fruit and herbs from the forest, sunbathing and playing in the lake… then we got back home and found out Chernobyl had gone kaboom on our first day there, and some of the radiation clouds had come as far as Germany.
    Whoops.
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