#16 - avoiding your friends (03-97) 



back in the city, and back at otto's. i still miss otto's. the burger o' the day was a tradition; i came up with a number of these myself, including the vladimir ilyich lenin. otto's burgers had crazy names, such as the astroburger, or the hawaii 5-0. damned fine place, whose menus, in their later expression, i designed. i eat there in my dreams.

at this time a number of people had begun to figure out that i was responsible for sparrow's fall, either through observation or deduction, and were having trouble, for obvious reasons, figuring out what these animals were. chirp in particular got the shaft: most people believed that he was a ferret, not an otter. i suppose this is understandable; there's not much logic to choosing an otter for an urban environment, when a cat and even a possum made sense: so i had to explain several times that he indeed wasn't a ferret at all, and decided to make a quick note of the fact in this comic. as i've said before, i'm not fond of the editorial voiceover, but i decided that i needed to use it somewhere, or no one would ever understand. chirp also moans about proving his otterness; someone suggested he carry a fish, and i have him say that as well.

and 'avoiding your friends'? 'round about now i was pretty isolated. i had a few friends, but it was not easy to get ahold of them. they didn't like to answer their phones, and sure as hell didn't like to return messages. at the same time, i was aware that they were having rather whirlwind social lives that i was totally excluded from. piling mount ossa upon pelion, i became even more depressed than i already was, and thus even more unpopular, and groused despairingly about it here.

not uncoincidentally, note that even here in episode sixteen i'm still paving the way for the planned suicide denouement: the animals are implied to be figments of his imagination. i really wish i hadn't done that, but as with many things in indy comics--and even Big Two comics--it's been quietly swept under the rug. a neat twist i enjoyed writing, when christopher says, 'now, i'm not implying anything, but i know people who'd consider the three of you symptoms of mental illness,' chirp responds, 'oh, and like we don't say the same thing about you.' i have the feeling that the thought in my head as i did that was this was a sort of escape hatch, that i might deny the insanity, or even dismiss christopher himself as imaginary. i'm not sure how i would have accomplished that, but i recall thinking it at one point.

this comic, notable mainly for a layout that i am still proud of, also has the first of mortimer easter's fun facts. the fun facts were beloved by a few, ignored by everyone else. i made them up to make other editorial comments, in this case calling into doubt the expressed suspicion that my friends actually hated me. a few, a very few, continue to ask for the resurrection of the fun fact. i just don't see how it can play a part in the modern comic.

the writing is so minute and spidery in this comic that it's almost illegible as a web graphic. these of course were never designed for the purpose of web comics; they could hardly be said to be designed to be legible at all. i suppose it might be considered by some to be a hint that a computer font might be superior, but someone once told me that my lettering had in fact become a character in my own comic, and i agree: i have to hand letter. there's no other way around it. i just have to do it better.





 

Posted: Mon - April 12, 2004 at 07:41 AM             |

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