CulturePulp 53: The David Foster Wallace bootleg


NOTE: There's a larger version of this comic here, at Webcomics Nation.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: I did not actually do or see any of the things described in this particular comic. It will never see print. I will never be paid for it. I didn't even write it.

Let me explain.

Last year, a very cool feature-syndicate editor let me audition a national version of "CulturePulp" for an East Coast newspaper. The idea was that I was going to do my usual comics-reportage schtick -- only about national cultural and political figures.

To show the editors how that might read, I did a comic-strip adaptation of David Foster Wallace's "Up, Simba!" -- in which I inserted my little bug-eyed cartoon avatar as the narrator, riding on John McCain's campaign bus in 2000.

(And yes, I told the editors it was a shameless lift of Wallace's work -- pointing them to my CulturePulp archives for legit examples of my stuff.)

Anyway. The East Coast newspaper didn't bite. (Any other East Coast newspapers liking what they see shouldn't hesitate to drop me a line. Ahem.) But I worked pretty hard on this. And a totally unauthorized cartoon remix of a DFW essay seems like a bit of a conceptual curio. So I'm posting it here. Enjoy. -- MR
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Words & pix by Mike Russell; colors by Chad Essley
Adapted (liberally) from "Up, Simba!" by and © David Foster Wallace
High-rez PDF: 12Monkeys.pdf





Endnotes and Digressions:

1. The Twelve Monkeys never smoke or drink, and always move in a pack, and always cut to the front of every scrum and Press-Avail and line for Continental Breakfast in the hotel lobby before Baggage Call, and whenever any of them are rotated however briefly back onto the press bus following the Straight Talk Express (a.k.a. “Bullshit 1”) they always sit together identically huffy and pigeon-toed with their attaché cases in their laps and always end up discussing incredibly esoteric books on political theory and public policy in voices that are all the exact same languid honk.

2. As you might already have gathered, I dislike the 12M intensely, for all the above reasons, plus the fact that they’re tighter than a duck’s butt when it comes to sharing even very basic general-knowledge political information that might help somebody write a slightly better comic, plus the issue of two separate occasions at late-night hotel check-ins when one or more 12Ms just out of nowhere turned and handed me their suitcases to carry, as if I were a bellboy or gofer instead of a hardworking journalist just like them even if I didn’t have a portable Paul Stuart steamer for my blazer.

Lettering too small? You can download a high-rez PDF of CulturePulp 53 right here: 12Monkeys.pdf

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Posted: Tue - June 27, 2006 at 01:54 PM        

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