A lesser cartoonist would have continued this story in many later comics. A better cartoonist would have too. Really, almost any cartoonist who isn’t me would have, but my approach was different. Let's be honest; when you reuse the same artwork every week, it doesn’t speak to an interest in character development.
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When I moved to Florida, I had a couple of people refer to Missy as my “lady.” I figure it’s an east coast thing. It makes our relationship sound like something out of an R and B slow jam, which is really cool, but, if you know us, you’ll admit, completely at odds with our image in every way.
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If I were the boss of an office somewhere, I’d have an employee of the month, but it would be sarcastic. They’d get a tiny little plaque, their picture hung in one of the bathroom stalls, and the exclusive use of the parking spot farthest from the front door.
Nobody works for me, so I am my own employee of the month, every month. And, yes, I do still mean that sarcastically.
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The Princess Bride is full of great band names! Shrieking Eels, Montoya, Too Many Spaniards, Fezzik, Iocane, The More Deadly Poisons, R.O.U.S., Fire Swamp, Lightning Sand, Count Rugen, Six-Fingered Man, Pirate Ship Revenge, The Sound of Ultimate Suffering, Humiliations Galore, To Blathe, Mostly Dead, A Little Alive, That Blessed Arrangement, To the Pain. These are just the ones I’m coming up with off the top of my head.
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I could have set up the me-my boss-our client relationship like a game of rock-paper-scissors, where each of us could hurt one other person while being vulnerable to the other. Instead, I set it up more like the three-way gunfight at the end of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, with everyone being hostile to everyone else.
With the first set up, any time two of the three people involved met, there would be a clear winner. In the second setup, nobody ever truly wins, which fits the tone of Basic Instructions perfectly, and better reflects real life.
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It’s absolutely true. I’ve been driving since I was 16. For many years, I was a stand-up comedian in the western United States, which means I was essentially a long-haul trucker driving around in a hatchback, and whose only cargo was my setlist and two decent outfits. Even with all of that driving, I have no moving violations and no at-fault accidents. Still, nobody wants to ride in a car that I’m driving.
The reason I give in the comic is also accurate. There’s something about the way I manipulate the gas pedal that doesn’t affect me, but other people’s stomachs react as if they’re riding a tilt-a-whirl.
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I love Tillamook Medium Cheddar. It is the Cadillac of cheese. My father and I see eye to eye on this issue, and almost nothing else.
We visited the Tillamook Cheese Factory (In Tillamook, Oregon) at least four times when I was a kid. They had fantastic ice cream as well! We’d get a campsite in nearby Netarts, Oregon and go crabbing. If you’ve never been crabbing on the Oregon coast, it involves renting a terrifying little boat and going out into the terrifying, choppy, lead-gray water, and hauling up cages full of terrifying live crabs, which you take back to the shore and cook in a terrifying giant cauldron of boiling water and seaweed.
To a child with my temperament, the cheese factory was a welcome relief.
When this comic ran the first time, I got a nice gift basket from the Tillamook Cheese Factory. It was one of the proudest days of my life. That is not an exaggeration, and no, I don’t see anything wrong with that.
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I remember having a protracted giggle fit when I came up with the idea for panel three, which didn’t often happen when I was writing the comic. My usual response when I come up with an idea I believe is funny is to nod and smirk, as if I’m thinking, “Ah yes, the master strikes again.” Of course, what I’m really thinking is “Whew! I came up with something!”
The fact that panel three made me laugh out loud might be because it’s probably the silliest thing I ever wrote.
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It’s funny how, once I went to the trouble to draw an entire Monopoly game, I found multiple excuses to use it in the comic.
I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I enjoy a good game of Monopoly. By “good,” I mean “one where I win.”
Once when I was in high school, I played Monopoly with a friend, and he got so frustrated that he hid the deed to Boardwalk, then insisted that I couldn’t buy it because the deed wasn’t available. He declared the game a draw, but I claimed the moral victory, which in Monopoly, more so than most games, counts for NOTHING! It and Risk are two games designed to demonstrate the futility of winning the moral victory.
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This was one of those times where I made the comic, then realized like a day later that it was factually inaccurate, but I felt it was too funny, (and, let's be honest, I had put too much work into it,) to let it go. So I just slapped a disclaimer on the bottom of the comic and ran that puppy.
Also, I figured that the “fact” I had gotten wrong was about imaginary car robots, so how much sleep was I going to lose over that, really?
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