The person I’m talking to in this comic is a guy I worked with at one time, but we worked at a pretty nice place. Having someone talk all the time about how good his job is doesn’t make for a very funny comic strip, so I made my fictional workplace a dysfunctional dump.
I only used use the drawings of my work friend a few times, but one of those times, I had him ask if he could “put on a Speedo and ride me to Thailand,” so I think he suffered enough.
Here, in panel two of this comic, you can see the larval beginnings of the Knifeketeer.
Oh man, I can’t wait until the super hero comics really kick in. Just sayin’.
Note from Missy: The chain mail gloves are the only fictitious garment in the last panel. Scott does, in fact, own multiple fezzes, more than one luchador mask, and a smoking jacket.
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When I was a child, my father was a bit of a pipe smoker. He had a wooden pipe rack, and a selection of a few pipes. His favorite was a Calabash, the kind of pipe Sherlock Holmes smoked (in the old black and white movies, at least).
Then, we were burglarized. They didn't take much (we weren't exactly wealthy) but they did take Dad's Sherlock Holmes pipe, mostly for the irony, I have to assume.
Hey, if you’re interested in a supernatural, and comedic interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, an old friend of mine wrote a book you might enjoy.
Note from Missy: Also, the second book in the Warlock Holmes series is coming out May 16, 2017. 😊
Our experience has been that some cats just reach an age where they start throwing up occasionally. One of our cats fell into that category.
Even though I consider myself to be tremendously lazy, I eventually decided that it was better to clean the mess immediately. Waiting only allowed it to dry into the carpet, or increased the chances that I would forget where it was and step in it. Both of those outcomes were worth avoiding.
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The phone I had that broke was an early HTC model that was terrible from day one. The older phone I went back to was my trusty Palm Treo.
My Treo was made in 2003. It had a touch screen and a web browser. It could handle e-mails, and text messages. It played MP3s, and video files. I read books on it, and could open and edit PDFs, Word, and Excel files.
It did all of this years before the iPhone was introduced.
That’s why I’ve always said that what made the iPhone special wasn’t anything that it could do. It was the fact that it did many of those things well. The Treo didn’t. It was a fine e-mail machine, but almost everything else it did was severely compromised.
Also, when you held it up next to a first-generation iPhone, the Treo looked like an import from the 1960s Soviet Union. If I still had it, all I’d have to do is spray it with copper metallic paint and it would be steampunk.
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This comic has what is possibly the best first panel of any comic I ever wrote.
A few weeks after this comic ran, a nationally syndicated comic did a strip based on the same idea. A few readers pointed it out, but I chose not to make a big deal out of it. I’ve been in the “trying desperately to think of something funny to say” business long enough to know that this stuff happens.
Right now, all around the world, there are thousands of comedians, writers, and cartoonists trying their hardest to come up with an original funny idea. It’s inevitable that two people will get a similar idea around the same time occasionally. Plagiarism is, of course, completely unacceptable, but the syndicated cartoonist in this case does original work, and their execution of the idea was different enough that I was happy to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I may seem overly trusting to you, but I’ve been on the opposite side of this problem more than once. A couple of times when I was a comedian, I had people (one of whom I had never heard of, and another whose writing I had ZERO respect for) accuse me of stealing from them. I also once did a comic about the fact that my middle name is Oscar, and I ended up doing a joke that was very similar to a preexisting comic from the excellent webcomic Perry Bible Fellowship.
Heck, just a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a commentary on this very website where I discussed my attitude toward Millennials, and a couple of days later, after I’d written it but before it posted, the author John Scalzi wrote a very similar opinion on his blog.
These things happen. You just have to make sure they aren’t happening deliberately.
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I wrote the “his mistress fell on him” joke for a private gig, back when I was a comedian.
This guy hired me to do twenty minutes at his wife’s 50th birthday party, then, after everything was set, he requested that instead of my normal act I pretend to be a private investigator, there digging for dirt on his wife and her friends. It seemed particularly important to him that I go on and on about what awful, nefarious people they all were. He repeatedly told me to “really let them have it.”
I told him repeatedly that it was a bad idea, that it was not what I agreed to when I took the job, and that it would not work, but he was insistent. I ended up doing what I always did in those situations (it came up more than once). I wrote a quick, funny intro making a glancing attempt to fit the client’s wishes, then transitioned into my usual act. The theory was that if I was a comedian, and if I made the audience laugh, the client wouldn’t be able to justify not paying me.
So, I went up, pretended to be a detective for a couple of minutes, (because that’s how detectives do it, they crash parties and address the whole group at once without asking any questions) then admitted that I was a comedian, and did my usual act. The dialog in the second panel is adapted from the only detective joke I came up with that I liked.
Audience enjoyed it. The client paid me, reluctantly. But, I’m delighted to report that his money spent the same despite his lack of enthusiasm.
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By this point, I had lived in Florida for a couple of years. I went back to Seattle to visit. I had come to realize that I needed more Rick poses for the comic. He agreed to pose for more photographs (I drew the images from photographs), but I was shocked to discover that he had completely changed his look.
Of course, by this time the comic had been running Seattle Weekly for a couple of years. I don’t know that the comic was a factor in his decision to change his appearance, but I like to think it was.
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This comic is partially adapted from an idea I had a long time ago: a pitch for a sitcom called “Nerthus and Ned.” It was a sort of a modern twist on I Dream of Jeannie or Bewitched.
Ned was a normal, modern guy who discovers that he’s reincarnated, and that in a former life, during the bronze age, he was drowned in a peat bog as a sacrificed to the goddess Nerthus. Nerthus, a beautiful woman with a German accent, who wears a sexy dress made of dirty burlap, comes to claim him, and ends up living with him in his apartment. She uses her magical powers to change every aspect of his life.
She has two powers: she can read his mind, and cause him excruciating pain.
I never pitched it to any networks, though it might have been a good fit for Fox.
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My favorite line in the comic is “Mint juleps.”
At one time, Ric was married to a woman who liked the idea of living on an old-fashioned farm. I mean no offense to her. She was, and is, a great person. She once helped me get a job when I badly needed one. In the end, she simply wasn’t able to withstand the incredible pressures of life with Ric.
Anyway, she watched a show called Frontier House, where modern families tried to live as people in Montana did in the 1880s. I’ve always been interested in how, thanks to distance and cultural differences, time is strangely non-uniform. For instance: in my home town, the Great Depression seems to have lasted well into the ’50s. So, Ric and I would joke about how funny it would be for Ric to ruin Frontier House by showing up claiming to be one of the participants’ visiting cousin, the white suit-wearing southern dandy who refuses to help with chores and sits on the porch all day demanding mint juleps.
Once they got used to him, I would then show up as another cousin, the Saville Row tailor from Victorian London, who’s constantly measuring people’s inseams and offering to make them suits that cost more than their entire farm is worth.
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