I have this theory that the most fundamental ways to abuse power is to make other people pay for your mistakes.
I developed this theory after a conversation with a comedy booker who had accidentally scheduled two comedians to do one show, and was calling to tell me that I would be getting paid half what I was promised, because that seemed fair to her.
I was sure it did.
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Actually, Douglas Adams and Hunter S. Thompson make good mismatched travelers in a road movie. Hunter insists on driving with the top down, but it makes Douglas’s tea cold, and the direct sunlight washes out the screen of his 16lb portable Macintosh. Douglas starts talking about time travel paradoxes after Hunter took mescaline and causes Hunter to have a bad trip. After several days of squabbling they find common ground and team up against their common enemy: deadlines.
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I fully expected to own a sword cane by the time I reached this age, and I’m more offended by the lack of a sword cane in my life than I am by the lack of jet-packs and flying cars. I know, I could just go buy myself a sword cane, but that feels like bad form. A sword cane seems like the kind of thing you either inherit or take from a corpse. Specifically, a corpse wearing a top hat.
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The only thing I’m more tired of than zombies, is people taking zombies, making minor changes, calling them something else and pretending they aren’t zombies. Any time the dead are reanimated, and bent on attacking the living, you’ve got yourself a zombie, no matter what you call it.
Deadites are zombies. Shouting threats and wanting to “swallow your soul” instead of eating your brains makes no difference.
White Walkers are also zombies. Yeah, I know, they’re organized, but that just makes them zombies with a boss.
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For a few years my Dad lived in a houseboat on the Willamette River in Oregon. It is a time my brothers and I remember fondly, as many of our stories from that period end with the phrase, “And then he fell in the river.”
The reason I bring this up is that while he was living on the river, a museum in Oregon bought the Spruce Goose. They partially disassembled the plane and moved it to its new home. The wings were transported via barge, and parked for the night across the river from my father’s home.
I wasn’t there at the time, and Dad took one picture. It looks like a white wall on a barge. It’s not a particularly impressive picture, but it proves that it happened, and that’s what mattered to him.
Note from Missy: Where do you think the dead link at the bottom of the comic led to, lo these long 8 years ago?
Note from Scott: I’ve wracked my brains, and I have no idea.
Another Note from Scott: It turns out, the link we couldn’t remember was to this website. Thanks to all of the readers who reminded me.
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I really like the drawing of me in panel one. It’s a shame I never came up with another use for it. Sitting here looking at it, the several ideas for comics that might have worked are suggesting themselves.
How to pretend to be a party DJ.
How to sneak up behind somebody on a chilly fall day.
How to play keyboards for a band called The Unabombers.
Note from Missy: It occurs to me that every guy in this comic (besides Mustache Boss) is wearing a gray hoodie. Dear Scott, did you choose which coworkers to highlight in this tale for that reason?
Note from Scott: It was not deliberate. Now that I think about it, most of the people who allowed me to use their images for characters in the first couple of years of the strip, except you and me, were sporting the layered look. That’s because the pictures of you and me were taken in our nice, warm home, and everybody else’s were taken in various locations around Seattle.
Later, when we moved to Florida, new characters tended toward t-shirts.
As for the color, one way or the other, every garment everyone in the strip wears is either black or gray.
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I think it’s pretty clear that I was feeling down about my artistic abilities that week.
I will point out that you can tell this is Mirror Universe Rick because the usual colors of his shirt and undershirt are transposed here. I might not be able to draw all that well, but I know my way around a bucket-fill!
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I don’t think the Invisible Naked Man ever appeared in Basic Instructions again. I guess, technically, he might have appeared in all of the strips. I can’t prove he didn’t.
If I did use him again, I could have maintained the lazy-artist joke by having him attack the Knifeketeer with easily drawn weapons.
“Now I’m going to bludgeon you with this perfect sphere!”
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I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to come up with a commentary for this comic. It’s a comic about insulting Rick. What can I say about insulting Rick that I haven’t already said in the commentaries for the hundreds of earlier comics about insulting Rick?
Part of the reason I stopped the comic was I ran out of new, interesting ways to insult Rick. Now I’m running out of new, interesting things to say about insulting Rick. That, my friends, is not good.
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I used to share a breakroom with two older men who would play dominoes every day during my lunch. They’d slam the dominoes down as hard as they could and shout at each other when they thought their moves were particularly good, or their opponent’s moves were particularly bad. I used to marvel at how the game would inflame their emotions. The only time in my life dominoes ever got me worked up enough to shout was in that same break room, watching them play, wanting to shout at them to shut up.
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