Candy Is Dandy, But Liquor Is Quicker

Despite Joel being the actual culprit in this comic, in real life whenever the issue of, “Who will drink this ridiculous nonsense liquid?” comes up, David Willis can generally be called on to do the job. Birthday cake vodka and Mountain Dew, whipped cream vodka and Rootbeer, fan-donated Courvoisier and a few Cadburry eggs… you get the idea. He’s like a garbage disposal for… liquid garbage. Is that a thing? Oh, right. A toilet. He’s a toilet.

I used to pride myself on my ability to haggle. I was quite good at it. I was in sales for 10 years (thus the penchant for finding the best “deal”) and many of those years were spent on the phone doing various kinds of product and service support. This experience afforded me the fortunate burden of “being on the other side” of calls with people like me, looking to get something for nothing (or, more accurately, “Something for less than other people typically pay.”). The upside to this was the knowledge that the people “on the other side” can usually sweeten deals, give freebies and remove fees if they feel like. I had those options in my jobs, so I knew they did as well. The downside was dealing with the me’s of the world that KNEW I could sweeten the deal, and instead of just being pleasant or engaging or interesting, thus AFFORDING them whatever special treatment I was able to provide, they called me out on it and DEMANDED special treatment just because it was possible within the realm of human experience. Well, if every confident dickhead got special treatment, it wouldn’t be very special would it? My time in sales and on the phones follows a very close bell curve of the increase and decline in my interest in haggling. It’s dirty business and a horrific amount of unnecessary effort and frustration in the grand scheme. I prefer to look for good deals online rather than cause other humans the distress of having to deal with people who are “in the know.”

I can still turn on my phone skills when the need arrises. Those who have “served time” with a headset in a cubicle know what I mean. My daughter heard me recently on the phone with some company that we pay for some sort of service or other, and she commented, “Daddy! You sound like a TV guy!”

COMMENTERS: Have you ever talked your way out of being charged for something that you TOTALLY should have been charged for?

ALTERNATELY: Do you have any useful skills that you acquired from a job or experience that you hated?

One Is Glad To Be Of Service

I haven’t felt much like being funny since I heard of Robin Williams’ passing. Beyond his massive talent as an actor and comedian, he was a mainstay of the world I have always lived in. Until this week, I have never been a resident of a planet that wasn’t blessed with his frenetic, insightful and joyous energy. He was a constant, and now that he’s gone I feel his absence in a way that I had not anticipated. Robin Williams was like a song that everyone you’ve ever met knew and loved. He was a unifying force for happiness in an all too often harsh and confusing world. The fact that he was unable to find his own happiness in the very world he made so much brighter is so fantastically unfair.

There are only a handful of movies that honestly changed my life; that made me a different person than I was before I saw them. When I read about Robin’s death, I started to list them off and realized, of that handful, four were his films. I posted this list and these quick, gut reaction thoughts on Twitter and Facebook within moments of reading the news, and I want to share it with you here now.

Dead Poet’s Society, Bicentennial Man, What Dreams May Come, & The Birdcage were all films that changed my life forever, for the better.

Dead Poets Society was the first time I thought about being true to yourself over doing what was expected of you.

Bicentennial Man was the 1st time I thought about what makes a person a person. The parts we’re born with or the impact we have on the world?

What Dreams May Come was the 1st time I questioned the concept of an afterlife that I had been raised to believe in. It took on a far more profound meaning for me after I became a father. Reduces me to a sniveling mess every time.

Seeing The Birdcage at 15 was the very first time I even considered that gay people were… people, and not monsters like I’d been taught. It was the first time I’d been presented with a positive view of homosexual love and saw how similar/same it was to what I knew.

There are maybe 12 movies that make me cry EVERY SINGLE TIME and these are 4 of them. Thank you, Robin Williams.

Our lives are ours to do with as we choose. Robin chose to do a great deal of good with his. He made the entire world smile, he made much of the world think and he was notoriously generous with his time. He gave and gave until he gave in to the depression that was assaulting his mind and the Parkinson’s that had begun to assault his body, and then he chose to stop being alive. That’s one choice I wish he had made differently.

I almost changed the title of this comic at the last minute for two reasons. One: The original quote from Bicentennial Man was last said by Andrew Martin (played by Williams) when he felt defeated and reduced to something less than human by the world he lived in. I thought this might mirror the circumstances of Robin’s death too closely. And, Two: I did not want to imply that Robin was, indeed, glad at the end of his life. I don’t know how he felt. Then I rethought what, “One is glad to be of service,” meant throughout the film, not just at the end. At the beginning of the film, Andrew said this to the Martins because he was programmed to. Later, after becoming self aware, he said this because he loved his family and he genuinely was glad to serve them; to make their lives better. From everything I’ve read from Robin’s family, his loved ones, and those that knew him professionally, he was happiest when he was making us laugh. The world was his family, and he loved us and, at least when he was performing, he WAS glad to be of service. I thank you for that service, Robin. Now I’m going to go make sure I have Hook and Jumanji to show my daughter, because she isn’t quite old enough for the existential explorations of the films illustrated above. Rest assured that, when the time comes, I will share those with her as well. Robin Williams’ light may be extinguished, but his service to all of us continues.

The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)

Last month the HijiNKS ENSUE Patreon went over $1500, which means 4 new comics a week is in full effect! This is the 1st new HE comic for this week. Here’s hoping I can keep it going. At $2000/mo we hit 5 new comics a week, and that’s when I flee to the desert and hug a cactus until a family of rattlesnakes makes a home in my skull.

I’ve been planning to draw the final panel of this comic for several months now. It is my favorite image of David Willis that I have ever drawn. I cannot say that this has really happened 100% as depicted above, but I also cannot say that we’re totally doing this the next time we see each other. I expect our money will get mixed up, and then we’ll have to sort out which money belongs to whom the way our founding fathers did: By adding up who has the most Transformers and giving all the money to the other guy.

Conventions are a weird thing. They cost a ton, they drain you physically and mentally and they usually destroy whatever productivity or momentum you had going on with your regular work, but we (cartoonists) are compelled to keep doing them. I can honestly say that 80-90% of the drive for doing conventions is getting to see my comic-friends. Sometimes the money is good and it comes just when I’m not sure how I’m going to pay the mortgage, and getting to interact with readers face to face is a real treat, but the friendships are the thing I would feel like I was missing out on the most if I stopped going.

Being a traveling Internet cartoonist is like carrying on a dozen or so long distance relationships. Sure, you can text and skype and stay in touch via Twitter and Facebook, but you don’t really get to build new memories or new shared experiences until you’re getting kicked out of a hotel lobby together because that particular hotel doesn’t allow drunken pizza parties at the coat check desk at 4am and WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU ANYWAY TO TELL ME WHERE I CAM… WHERE I CAM… WHERE I CAN AND CAN’T HAVE A PIZZA PARTY DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO I DRAW BRO ARE YOU EVEN A INTERNET?!

Anyway, it’s a fun time more often than not and a necessary recharge for the relationships in my life that happen one weekend at a time, four to five times a year. I have to pack a lot of living into that single weekend in order to feel like my con-friends aren’t so far away once I get home. Hotel lobby or not, we ARE having that drunken pizza party, dammit.

Comicon Uber All Us

Last month the HijiNKS ENSUE Patreon went over $1500, which means 4 new comics a week is in full effect! This is the 4th new HE comic for this week. Here’s hoping I can keep it going. At $2000/mo we hit 5 new comics a week, and that’s when I flee to the desert and hug a cactus until a family of rattlesnakes makes a home in my skull.

I’ve enjoyed being able to share some of the weirdness of traveling to comic conventions with you Fancy Bastards via this story line. The sideways, backwards, wrong way Uber icon thing actually happened to me and Rob Denbleyker from Cyanide and Happiness at SDCC. We just stood on the street corner watching the icon twist and turn, go through buildings and circle back the wrong way. The part about the lady attendant in the men’s room was actually a thing I freaked out about at SDCC, though I did manage to keep my composure. It didn’t care that it was a lady in the men’s room. I paused for a second, thinking I was in the wrong place, but it certainly wasn’t the idea of a strange lady looking at my back while I pee that worried me. I simply cannot come to terms with the concept of bathroom attendants in general.

So many questions come to mind. Are they just standing there silent staring at urinals when no one is in there? Are they relieved or annoyed when someone does arrive? How do they feel about doing a completely unnecessary job that actually ads multiple levels of complexity and confusion to a very simple process? Washing your own hands and grabbing a paper towel out of a dispenser is an uncomplicated process. It’s also the culmination of what is, for most, a PRIVATE activity. Introducing an addition human being between you and the hand washing apparatus is orders of magnitude more convoluted than NOT doing that for everyone involved. I want to tell them to let me do it myself, but that somehow seems rude. What if you ran into the bathroom to have a horrific emergency type toilet experience and then came out and had to face a pretty, smiling women who knows EVERYTHING you just went through? Should she pat you on the back and offer condolences? Should she avert her eyes and shame you for your misdeeds? What about the ones that try to sell you things? Candy, cologne and condoms: The 3 C’s of bathroom attending. Who in their right mind would buy toilet candy from a bathroom lady? What if she was in no way identified as an employee of the establishment? Would you buy food from a strange women who was hanging out in the men’s room? EVERYTHING about bathroom attendants give me cause for alarm and distress.

[UPDATE 8/26/14]
I won’t be using Uber again until they publicly disavow their anti-competitive practices and apologize for “Project SLOG.”

Uber, on the other hand, is a fucking magical dream (despite the app glitch depicted in this silly comic). Traveling from city to city and con to con for the last 7 years has taught be a lot about the misery of public transportation. I’ve stood in the rain for 30+ minutes, frantically trying to hail a NYC cab only to have it snatched out from under me by some cab-sniper ranting and raving about how he saw it first, from his vantage point around the corner and behind a bush. With Uber, you set up your account (takes about 3 minutes), then press THE button, the ONLY button in the app. The button that says, “Send a driver to my current GPS location (or the location of my choosing if I want to move the little location dot over to the street corner or whatever), and have them be in a clean and newish car, and show me on a map exactly how far away they are and every turn they make along the way, and text me when they get here. Also make them have my number to call me in case they have a hard time locating me, or if I’m drunk and I tell them I’m at 4th and B, when I’m actually at 4th and E (which is a thing I did). And just for grins, let me rate their performance when they’re done to weed out the shitty drivers from the system.” Like I said, It’s a god damn “We live in the glorious future” amazing miracle service. We used it exclusively in San Diego this year and it made EVERYTHING about a normally untenable situation (getting to and from the Convention Center each day) a delight.

Uber is a disruptive technology that is clearly superior to traditional cab companies in every way, which is why traditional cab companies are so scared of them. I say to the cab companies, Improve your service, compete instead of shut out, or watch me laugh as you are BURNED TO THE GROUND. This year at SDCC, me and Dave from Cyanide & Happiness had this one driver who played us “Funkytown” and The Gap Band and told us stories about riding around in his custom van, listening to The Gap Band and smoking weed when he was a young man. He was our angel and I’ve missed him every day since.

Man It’s So Loud In Here

Last month the HijiNKS ENSUE Patreon went over $1500, which means starting right now there will be 4 new comics a week! Thank you all so much for the support!

This is me at the end of every comic convention, but especially at the end of SDCC. There’s nothing like being in a VIP room (that you somehow got into because you know a guy who know’s a girl who worked on that one show with that other girl…), with an open bar, packed to the rafters with celebrities both legitimate, internet and otherwise and wanting NOTHING more than to hug your family and crawl into your own bed. The best party is almost ALWAYS on the last night and the last night is almost ALWAYS when you’ve lost all enthusiasm for partying.

This is certainly a charmed problem to have, but my goal is to share some honest truths about my weird life while also being somewhat entertaining. Hence my relating the mostly entirely true story of trying to convince my friends to leave the VIP Mythbusters party (in which Guillermo Del Toro and the Korean dude from LOST were in attendance… so was Skrillex, but that’s a different story all together.) and catch an Uber back to our hotel so we get could a good night’s sleep before our flight home the next morning. Home is where the heart is, and home is where the butt goes. Put that butt at your home. It goes there. It wants to be there. Put it there.

TARDIS Necklace from Science & Fiction