I worked in a standard office environment for about three years, and got over a thousand comics’ worth of material. I take that to mean that either I was not cut out for office work, my office was particularly dysfunctional, or most likely, both.
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In panel three, one of the Meyers is cringing left-handed. ROOKIE MISTAKE! That’s how you can tell the real Meyer from the impostor! Unless, of course, the perpetrators of this conspiracy have employed a complex scheme involving hypnotism, drugs, and an electrified apparatus used to condition the subject to favor his less dominant hand, as seen in the episode of The Prisoner titled “The Schizoid Man.”
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I’ve never given an enemy the “we are not so different” speech. Nor have I received it. Any time I’ve been confronted by someone I’d call an enemy, they’ve made it very clear that they thought we were very, very different. Giving the “we’re not so different” speech is one of those things that TV led me to believe I would have done by this point in my life.
I’ve never given anyone the “we are not so different” speech.
I’ve never used my dive knife to pry my leg free from a giant clam.
I’ve never fought anyone with a trident and one of those tiny shields.
Maybe I should order a dive knife, a trident, and a tiny shield from Amazon, just to be prepared when an opportunity arises. When the delivery comes and Missy confronts me about it I can give her the “we are not so different” speech! She’ll disagree vehemently, but I’m used to that.
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Some tablet maker should create a feature where whenever a movie or game has a lot of black on the screen, it superimposes a dim reflection of Paul Rudd.
Question from Missy: Is this the only time you used that image of yourself in panel 4?
Reply from Scott: Yes. Hard as it is to believe, another occasion to use that particular unflattering image just never came up.
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In the previous commentary I mentioned my love of Borderlands 3. As fate would have it, this comic was written about the game Borderlands 2, which had only recently come out when it originally ran.
Note from Missy: I remember back when I played the first Borderlands, I found a legendary gun in a dumpster. (I can even tell you where. Arid Hills, just after you get past the first sets of skags, behind the building full of dudes on the right.) I don’t know if my habit of checking every single box existed before that time, but it was definitely my M.O. afterward.
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As I have mentioned before, I LOVE the Borderlands games. They are great addictive shooters, but my favorite part of the games is the dialog. (In every game from Borderlands 2 on, that is. The first game was more grim and minimalistic.)
Anyway, Borderlands 3 came out recently and there’s one line that for some reason just kills me. A character tells a story about a paranoid relative who counted a every strand of spaghetti in a plate because he was suspicious the chef was “short-noodling him.”
Why do I bring this up? Because the phrase “Another man’s noodles” reminded me of it.
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I had a situation where, for work, I spent an entire week with the most unreasonable person I ever met. She was training me for a job, and I told people at the time that if she were a running coach she would have trained people to sprint faster by running along behind them and shoving them.
One day, during lunch, the TV in the cafeteria was showing a rerun of Beverly Hills 90210.
My trainer asked, “What show is this?”
I said, “Beverly Hills 90210.”
My trainer said, “No it’s not.”
I said, “Pretty sure it is.”
She said, “No, it’s something else. That’s Tori Spelling. What other shows was she on?”
“At that age, none. That’s 90210. See, that’s Shannen Doherty with her.”
The show went to commercial as I said that, allowing my trainer to say, “No it wasn’t.”
“Yes it was. It was Shannen Doherty.”
“No, it was some Chinese girl.”
“It was Shannen Doherty.”
She rolled her eyes. “No, Scott, it can’t be. Shannen Doherty isn’t Chinese.”
I may have said this before, but most kids watch Star Trek and think they’ll grow up to be like either Kirk or Spock. I’ve grown up to be like the computer Kirk destroyed by feeding it illogical nonsense until it blew up.
(That same trainer, during a different lunch, complained that she’d had a headache for a long time. I asked how long. She said a few days. I told her to go to a doctor. She said no need. She knew what caused the headache. She had fallen down earlier that week and hit her head, causing this days-long headache. I told her she needed to see a doctor. She said it wasn’t a big deal and she wished she’d never brought it up. The headache wasn’t that bad. She was bothered much more by the fact that the spot on her head where she had hit it was still soft and hurt when she poked it.
She demonstrated by poking it a couple times and saying “Ow.”)
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I’ve made no secret of the fact that I traced over photographs to create the art for Basic Instructions. I thought it might be fun to explain what images I used to create the rare, more ambitious images, like the one in panels two and three of this strip.
The image is a composite of several different traced elements. Adobe Illustrator made it easy to hand-trace the part of an image I wanted and have that tracing isolated as a single element, which I could then easily combine with others in a sort of image sandwich.
Working from the back forward, this image consists of: a black rectangle, a tracing of NASA’s “Earthrise” photo, a crude drawing of rolling, gray hills, the screen of an antique Philco Predicta television which I stretched at the middle to make the screen and the base pedestal wider, The Emperor of the moon cut to fit the screen, and on top, a rough tracing of Fremen warriors taken from a screengrab of a single frame from the film DUNE.
It’s my understanding that this constitutes a “transformative work,” and is perfectly legal. Luckily, even if that’s not the case, my limited art skills renders all of the elements unrecognizable enough to not infringe copyrights.
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