Bananic Attack

As an husband and father, a good 40% of my time is spent throwing away fruit I just paid for, and bananas are the worst offender. Bananas are the avocados of the food world. They’re only ripe and fit for eating for 11 minutes and that’s usually longer than it takes you to get them home from the store. At minute 12, they’re soft. At minute 13, they’re brown. At minute 14, they’re a non-Newtonian liquid with properties similar to human plasma and dark matter. At minute 15 they briefly revert to a solid, but they’re 100% poison. After 16 minutes, it isn’t safe to be in the house with them. Do not even stare at them for too long as you may develop Bananaeye, so named for Professor James Bananaeye, the first scientist to identify and subsequently be molecularly destabilized by the condition.

HEY! Go check out the shirts and prints in my store! When you buy stuff there, I get to keep some of the money! Money I can then use to buy bananas to throw away!

Ripping My Insides Out

Pixar are at their best when they’re reminding you of the frailty of the human condition. Sometimes I think they’re bold for having the guts to tell honest and often deeply sad stories in a way that has one level of significance to a child and a whole different level to an adult. Other times I think they are fucking our emotions for money.

I saw Inside Out this weekend. Ironically enough, the film is about this very subject. It’s about the idea that you can’t really be happy if you never allow yourself to be sad. It’s also about Pixar’s two other favorite ideas: Your kids are going to grow up and leave you, and then you’re going to die. Whether they’re tugging on our collective heart strings to bilk us out of billions or not, they ARE presenting very adult ideas in a format that is typically reserved for children’s entertainment and they’re doing it extremely well. This isn’t to say they’re exposing children to concepts that should be hidden from them. Far from it. I think it’s good for children to have realistic expectations of loss, and death and the concept of people and the world around them constantly changing. They do… it’s just that they SEEM to lean on this mechanism A LOT. I don’t even know if I want them to stop. I honestly don’t know if I thought Inside Out was a great movie. I enjoyed it, but I’d have to see it again (and like ALL Pixar movies, I will be seeing it again and again and again) before I know how I really feel about it. That’s ALSO a theme of the movie. Feeling more than one way about something, that is. This was a new concept to my Kiddo. For those that have seen the movie already, I explained to Kiddo that she’s probably still in the “single color memories” stage of her life, and she had a few more years before the “colors started to swirl.”

SHARKSPLODERS: Rank the Pixar films using any criteria you like. Entertainment value, cultural significance, number of times you’ve seen them, etc.

Orphan Is The New Black

Here’s another resurrected and recolored FANEURYSM comic. As I explained here, there are a few FANEURYSM comics that I don’t want to allow to slip into the void of the Internet’s hazy memory, and that fit in nicely with the aesthetic of Sharkzpode. You can see the original version HERE.

I just finished season 3 of Orange Is The New Black. The shift in tone took a couple of episodes to get used to, but eventually it felt like a nicer balance between heart warming/chilling character development, drama and comedy than previous seasons. I like that Piper is now the least interesting character on the show. I wonder how long we’re going to have to wait for the rest of network and cable TV to catch up to Netflix in terms of them having found the perfect format for releasing serialized video entertainment chunks. I would rather every single show I watch just hold on the entire season until it’s complete, then release it all at once. I would also rather every show that tries to keep itself interesting for 22 episodes to cut that nonsense in half. Brevity is the soul of wit and 18ish hours is hardly brief when you’re really only telling one A story and a couple of B and C stories.

I’ve let Orphan Black pile up on the DVR this season. It’s all there waiting for me, but I haven’t felt motivated to watch it. I think the first seasons was perfect, and the 2nd started to flail a bit in terms of direction. I still think Tatiana Maslany deserves each and every acting accolade and award that we, as a species, are capable of giving out, but I just haven’t felt like spending any time in the clone zone. The fact that I don’t feel like I’m missing out (because I know it’s still on my DVR and will be there waiting for me when I’m ready) falls right in line with my admiration for the “release ’em all when ther’ done!” TV model. For me, a TV show has become a thing like an album. When I get a new one that I like, I listen to it on repeat almost exclusively for days or weeks. When I binge watch a show, I feel the same way. I want to spend time in the world that bit of entertainment allows me entrance to. I want to enter that particular headspace and swim around in it for an extended amount of time. It’s much more immersive for me to enjoy art this way. To just wrap myself up in it day after day for a week or two, then spend a few days decompressing and thinking about what it meant or how it made me feel.

SHARKSPLODERS: What bit of entertainment did you immerse yourself in for days or weeks at a time, and why?

INT. COFFEE SHOP – DAY

Joel and Ethan Cohen? More like Joel and Ethan Goin’… To Put Me To Sleep! FROM BOREDOM! WITH ALL THEIR SMART WORDS! AM I RIGHT!? LADIES?! FELLAS?!

[It’s secretly June 18, 2015, and I am back from a short vacation with my family. We went to a water park and also a cave. Both were wet. Also I nearly sliced off my left thumb the day we left, so doing… things, anything really has been pretty difficult. I’ve never seen that much of my own blood and/or finger meats. It was an ordeal to say the least. Getting caught up on comics for this week now that I have mostly regained use of my thumb and have relocated to my home where there is reliable comic-making technology and Internet service.]

SHARKSPLODERS: What movie dialog cliches are you sick of hearing? They can also be dialog+action cliches like, “I’m not going, there’s no way you can get me on that plane, I’ll never go!” *cut to that dude totally on the plane.

A Danger To Himself and Society

It’s abundantly clear this takes place on Death Row, right? Like, none of you assumed this guy was just in Max, right? Regular Death Row inmates that just wore their mom’s skin as a sun dress and made a trombone out her bones stay on Death Row for years and years, going through multiple appeals and lengthy legal proceedings. This sock-shoe, sock-shoe guy is promptly getting all of his blood replaced with poison Tuesday after next. People need to feel safe in their homes. American citizens need to be able to sleep at night, knowing that everyone they encounter is a sock-sock, shoe-shoe person, be they minister or murderer, doctor or decapitator.

I’m on vacation with my family right now, but I’m still hotel-making you some comics. Please to enjoy, and do tell your friends.

SHARKSPLODERS: Who else belongs in a cell with this sock-shoe, sock-shoe monster?