I picture a special device, similar to a tricorder, where you’d press an electrode or a lens or something to an object to scientifically measure how brown it is. There’d be a dial on the front with various readings, ranging from “not brown,” to “hardly brown at all,” all the way past “quite brown indeed,” to “absolute brown.”
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THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN!
I’m telling you, if the credits of Ant Man and the Wasp ends with a sequence where the heroes foil some evil-doer’s scheme by throwing the villain a package of Hostess Fruit Pies, it will instantly become my favorite Marvel movie.
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In comic books, movies, and TV shows, teaming up with your greatest enemy is always a big event. It isn’t nearly as glamorous or interesting in real life, as I find that most of my greatest enemies at any given time have been people I worked with. Nobody wants me to entertain them with the thrilling tale of the time I joined forces with my nemesis and we used our combined powers to check a family into the resort hotel where I worked.
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When I was a standup comic I tried to write a joke about how the inhabitants of a distant world would feel to find out that their star was named after a random person whose friend or family paid a small fee. I could never quite get it to work.
Later, as you can see, I used the same idea in panel four of this comic.
Later still, I used it for a throw-away joke in my novel Master of Formalities.
In a sense, my entire career, or series of careers, could be seen as a still uncompleted quest to find a form of expression in which a joke about naming a star after a friend or relative will work.
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Panel two is based on a real conversation.
At the time, I was absolutely convinced that ministers did not, as my coworker believed, “make good money.” Of course, as I write this, there are news stories about a “minister” who is asking his followers to buy him a new, nicer private jet, so I guess when I say that ministers don’t make good money, I have to be specific about what type of minister I’m discussing.
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Having two or more superheroes with similar or identical powers is not uncommon, even within the same company. DC has Captain Marvel and Superman, Plastic Man and Elongated Man. Marvel has the Human Torch and . . . The Human Torch. Both Human Torches have roughly identical powers, the main difference between them being that the first one was an android, not a human, which bothers me to no end.
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At the time I wrote this, the smartphone-scrabble industry was locked in a Pepsi/Coke, VHS/Beta war between two apps, neither of which was called “Scrabble.”
One app was more popular overall, but had only made an iOS app. Missy and I had, and have, Android phones, so we used the other one, and have been happy with it. To this day, we always have a game going. As such, I am constantly in the process of getting trounced. It’s good for me. Keeps my ego in check.
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One reason it’s good that I am nobody’s boss is that I’d almost certainly start meetings by having the staff go around the room, taking turns one by one giving their name, job title, and a brief description of how much they dislike pointless ice-breaking exercises.
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So, long ago, when I first started the comic, I told Ric what I was planning, and asked if he would pose for some photos I could use to draw his character. The very first pose he chose was one where he looked confused.
Years later, Rick changed his hair and glasses, so I needed to take new photos. I again asked him to pose. This time he’d seen a few years’ worth of the comic and how I’d treated the character based on the images he’d posed for. This time, the very first pose he came up with was the one you see in panels one and three, white knuckles, shouting in rage.
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