How to Give the People What They Want

I was lucky enough to get to make some joke-a-day calendars of my comic a few years back. The company that gave me a shot was Gladstone Media, and I will always be grateful to them, and to Leonard Phillips, the specific person who took a chance on me. Seeing my calendars on sale in Barnes and Noble was a real boost to my confidence. Would have been even more so if they had sold better.

Here’s an Amazon search that will give you a nice overview of Gladstone’s more popular calendars. I leave it to you to decide how well Meow-serschmitts would have fit into their lineup.

(Also, here’s a link to their website.)

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How to Treat Your Adversary with Respect

It could be argued that the “double fishhook” at the end of this comic is a sort of a callback to the two kids stretching each other’s mouths, about whom I’d written a comic a week or two before. Clearly, they made an impression.

Really, if two kids stretching out each other’s mouths hadn’t gotten my attention I’d have to wonder just how numb to the world I’d become.

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How to Appear Far More Knowledgeable Than You Are

I used to work the front desk at a hotel in Florida. As you may suspect, it got hot. There were a few small fans supplied for all of us at the front desk to use, which helped a bit. It would have helped more, but two of the most senior front desk employees claimed two of the fans as their personal equipment, would set the fans up so that only they benefited from the breeze the fans generated, and eventually went so far as to hide the fans when they left for the day so that nobody would “steal” their fans to use in their absence.

The rest of us complained to management, who agreed that it was asinine, but did nothing.

This might seem like a case of evil (or at least stubbornness) triumphing over good but think about this: while those two knuckleheads didn’t get fired, they also damn well never got promoted. Knowing how that place works, most of the rest of the staff has probably turned over four or five times by now, but those two are still there, behind that same oven of a desk, feeling like they won because they’ve got those same two fans pointed at their faces. And, because management didn’t deal with the problem decisively at first, they’re still putting up with it to this day.

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How to Speak an Unpopular Truth

As I write this, I just finished watching a documentary about the first ten years of David Bowie’s career. It focused on the long string of failed bands, low-selling albums, and unsuccessful singles he had to persevere through before he finally got some real traction with Ziggy Stardust. It’s tempting to think of him as this towering pop-culture colossus, but he was just as fallible as the rest of us. The documentary really did a great job of humanizing him.

In fact, it could be argued that the photos from the period when he was working as a mime might have humanized him too much.

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How to Explain Why Star Wars Is Much Better Than Star Trek

If the analogy in the third panel had held, The Last Jedi would have ended with Luke selling the force texts in the tree to Rey for a hefty profit. Some of the fanboys might have preferred that.

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How to Explain Why Star Trek Is Much Better Than Star Wars

“Good enough is good enough” would be a great first needlepoint or cross-stitch project, because any imperfections in the workmanship would support the idea being expressed.

Note from Missy: is it weird that this is giving me the urge to try out needlepoint?

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How to Find Hope for the Future of Humanity

All true. I witnessed two young boys engaged in the described epic-mouth-stretching-duel at the entrance of a Disney resort where I was working at the time. Their mother saw me watching them and apologized for their behavior. I told her it was one of the best things I’d ever seen.

She looked at me like I was insane.

Me!

Who’s she to judge? She’s the mother of two mouth stretchers!

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How to Figure Out Your Next Move

We like to pretend that the cats have some idea what we’re saying, but if we’re being honest, at most, they recognize their names. Like most cat owners, we get around this by calling the cats by a rotating selection of cutsey nicknames, ensuring that they will understand no part of anything we say.

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How to Answer a Hypothetical Question

When I was a kid, my brothers and I would make spaceships out of LEGO and then have pretend battles. I was always coming up with new, powerful weapons, like a laser that used only visible wavelengths so it could go through any forcefield people could see through, or a souped-up Starfleet transporter that just transported parts of the other ship’s engine or hull away, causing massive damage. It was great. I could give my spaceship any weapon just by imagining it and saying that I had used it.

Sadly, I learned that my brothers could neutralize any weapon I imagined, simply by saying, “It didn’t work!”

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How to Play the Field

So, you know how sometimes you have a situation where you have to remember something and there’s only two choices, like whether you turn left or right, or a switch needs to be either up or down for something to work, and you will remember with 100% certainty that one of the two choices is correct, and then later you find out you were wrong?

Yeah.

I knew the difference between the male and female symbols. I had used them before in the comic when I made the logo on the Moon-Minion’s uniform. Yet somehow, when I made Man-Crush’s logo, the first version used the female symbol instead of male. The only way I can explain it is that my brain was sabotaging me.

In my brain’s defense, the version with the female symbol was a better logo.

Note from Missy: For some reason, “Girl-illa” is just slaying me right now.

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