HypoCOMICONdriac

I guess I was only mostly dead. Far be it from me to complain about having the best job in the world, but sometimes the constant travel and convention weirdness does start to take its toll. Angela and I were in a pretty sad state last weekend at Emerald City Comicon, what with each of us having a cold, a cough, a soar throat and various headachings. She had some sweet Canadian cold meds that kept my corpse mostly ambulatory all weekend. I asked a guy at a Seattle pharmacy if we had them in the US and he got real wide eyed and backed away, all the while speaking in hushed, panicked tones into his sleeve. Seattle is a weird place.

COMMENTERS: Have you ever had a job that was pretty great except for one shady, questionable, morally grey, disgusting or totally illegal aspect? What about a great job that was ruined by one not-great person?

With A Little Help From My Friends

Alternate Title: Weekend At Joely’s

In reality, it was David who should have died last weekend, because Angela and I spent nearly every night coughing on him in stereo. We had grown up beds and David was on the air mattress between us just being blanketed by our expelled phlegmy horribleness. His immune system must have been fortified against attack by the constant regimen of Taco Bell and boxed macaroni he crams into his crambox. His body is so used to being force fed disgusting poison bullshit, that a few germs and viri must seem like a packet of mild sauce.

I never been as sick during a convention as I was during Emerald City Comicon last weekend. I lost my voice immediately and spent the entire weekend trying to interact with fans and fellow cartoonists alike in garbled, mangled cough-whispers and hack-spasmed Tuvan throat singing. I almost broke down during dinner one night when the frustration of noting being able to be heard or understood, constantly having to repeat myself and more often that not just NOT saying anything when I had something to say started to get to me. I hadn’t really thought about how much of my identity was hinged on my voice. Take away my ability to command a room with my voice, tell stories, make jokes, sing, etc. and there isn’t much of ME left. It was pretty depressing, but my friends certainly helped me make the best of it.

COMMENTERS: Have you (or anyone close to you) ever lost an ability and had to relearn it, or otherwise compensate for it? When I was a kid I broke my right thumb and had to learn how to eat with my left hand. Doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, but it took a lot of practice and I can still use silverware ambidextrously.

Seat Fillers

Forgive me, dear Fancy Twitter Bastards, if you have already read 2/3 of these jokes. I decided to borrow from my time-shifted Oscar’s live tweets from Monday night to fill in the gaps above (hence the secret double meaning pun title in which I reveal that I am a monster). I started watching the Academy Awards about 90 minutes into the broadcast. I figured that would give me enough time to skip all the boring parts and just barely catch up with the end. I tweeted as I watched, which must have been jarring for anyone following both me and everyone tweeting the show in real time. Afterwards, I went back and read the previous 3 hours of my twitter feed and realized something odd. The jokes in my feed, provided for free by professional funny-makers and my friends (many of whom themselves are pros at funny-making) was 1000% more entertaining than the awards themselves. But… those highly entertaining tweets (containing no less than 5 L actual OL moments) would not have been possible if not for the incredibly boring Oscar telecast. And they wouldn’t have been as funny had the Oscars not been so dry, flat and humorless. So does that leave me actually grateful for a miserably unfunny Oscars? I certainly don’t regret the jokes that I made which led to this comic, and the ones I read on my phone last night. I know this is a common occurrence in the age of constant connection and commentary but I started to wonder if there would be a tipping point where people gather around the water cooler to discuss NOT the Oscars or whatever communal viewing experience happened the night before, but rather the tweets that experience inspired.

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

I saw someone post something along the lines of “Why do you watch the Oscars? Why not just read a list of winners at the end?” I thought about it and came to the conclusion that awards shows, season finales, elections and other MUST SEE televised events provide us (the country, if not the entire world) with the rare chance to all be focused on the same thing at the same time. It’s so much easier to land a solid joke when you are experiencing something right along with your audience. You can get away with “This guy is all like…” instead of “Right now I’m watching Top Chef and this guy is all like…”. It lends an additional element of familiarity and brevity, a shorthand, to the experience. For pro-time funny-doers, I think it also allows them (us?) to experience something akin to laughter at a live show. The audience is right there with you, watching the awards and their RT’s and Fav’s and such can take the place of the instant approval a comedian seeks from a live audience.

I think about this stuff a lot.

COMMENTERS: Have you ever enjoyed someone making fun of a thing more than the actual thing? I think the Red Letter Media reviews of the Star Wars prequels certainly qualify here. To expand on that thought, have you ever enjoyed a commentary, remix, tell all book, cover band or making of documentary more than the subject on which it focused?

If I Had Glass

I have a bunch of clearance shirts in my store. Please buy them.

Josh IRL brought up a good point in this tweet. The possible proliferation of Google Glass won’t lead to people doing a lot more sky diving and hot air balloon racing. It’s going to lead to everyone walking directly into oncoming traffic and getting hit by a bus because both you and the bus driver were watching some hot heads up (and heads down, and back up and back down) sexytime action on your future glasses. What’s that Clarke quote? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from porn? Maybe Larry Flynt said that. Either way it’s the most true statement anyone has ever made.

Nearly every leap in technology going back over the last 100 years has been driven by a desire to look at naked people while sexing oneself. Video compression? Porn. Credit cards over the Internet? Porn. Gutenberg press? Obviously porn. Powered flight? The Wright brothers assumed there was better porn two towns over and didn’t want to make the long drive. Porn is the engine around which society and technology gyrate. To deny this is to deny our nature, is to deny our future, is to deny our boners [and lady boners].

COMMENTERS: What applications, both legitimate and legitimately sexy, do you see people REALLY using Google Glass for? Will this tech be the next iPod or the next Google Wave?

The Neverending Backstory

I made a bunch of shirts and put them on the internet for to you buy. Wil Wheaton helped.

I am not 100% opposed to Han Solo or Boba Fett origin stories, but of the Star Wars EU (novels, video games, comics, etc) has taught us anything, it’s that theirs quite literally AN ENTIRE GALAXY of stories to tell without rehashing old tropes and characters. I’d love to see an original character, set in the Star Wars universe that just has, oh I don’t know, a great story. I feel like the entire purpose of the prequels was to answer questions that no one was really asking. Sure, we wanted to know what exactly turned Vader evil and how he got in the robot suit, but that was about it. One prequel movie (written by ANYONE but George Lucas) could have handled that story expertly and done it as a subplot of a much larger original story. I don’t care to see 20 minutes of how Han and Chewie met or how Han had previous encounters with characters we already know. That’s garbage story telling. Where’s the Kyle Katarn movie? Where’s the KOTOR movie? Disney, let’s move in that direction before we find out how young Boba Fett dealt with the death of his father and eventually bought a defective jetpack from PROBABLY WATTO (you monsters).

Big thanks to my buddy Stepto for inspiring this comic with his tweetings. You should go buy his new comedy album “A Geekster’s Paradise.” That is, if you enjoy laughing. Otherwise go buy a bunch of rocks and jam them into your face or whatever people that don’t enjoy laughing do.

COMMENTERS: What area of the Star Wars universe would you most like to see explored in new stand alone movies? Since it’s going to happen anyway, who would you cast in the young Han Solo movie?