Revenge.
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Beets.
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Why is it such a big deal that Jay Leno is talking/has talked with The President this evening? Can’t Mr. Obama come on television anytime he wants and say anything he wants anyway he wants? It’s not Deal or no Deal, after all. That is both a unique privilege and responsibility.
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The first four pages (akadaka: the first “six” pages’ frames arranged into the actual number of pieces of paper they would fill in the unlikely as ever event I printed them out) of Aw Beans presents Energy Zone starring Nemitz who has Not Yet Appeared and Doesn’t do Much When it Shows Up reconfigured to be, it was my initial intention, less unsightly.
The writing isn’t any better, and it’s possibly worse in a couple places. Otherwise it just seems worse because it’s easier to accept that sort of thing when the pictures match. Also, as might be expected, I spent a month doing what a normal person would get done in a week, so I think I should do another page of the “real” story before returning to this.
Excuses below, comprised of the raving psychotic nuttiness I wish I was capable of actually working into a story. Aw naw!
Progress was fast enough at first that I thought it prudent to post a notice of my intent, on the side of the page there, a thing I would not normally do. I hate when people hype junk in advance. I, however, wasn’t hyping so much as trying to buy myself imaginary time from my imaginary need to provide regular page updates, and merely stating a willingness to do something does not, for me, constitute an “update,” even though by dictionary definition it does. And now, the boring part.
However, very soon afterward I ran into difficulties, one of which being my inability to stop myself from exerting effort for very long, and the other being a baffling momentary rise in demand for dopey pictures made by me unrelated to this. So much of what I do exists for no reason that when somebody specifically requests something, especially with dollars, any amount, I cannot ignore it.
Unfortunately, as a result of some pseudo-artistic “phase” (evidently I’m so cynical I can’t even use my own language without irony) I am going through, many of the images resemble opening cutscenes from gameboy advance games.
I have no idea what’s going on in the “are you keilphix kumquat?” frame. I wanted it to be interesting or odd but then realized the first interior picture should not be too odd, and everything is a mess. All I was sure of was that I did not want chess pieces in it. I meant to just make some quick temporary solution that i wouldn’t be annoyed to have wasted time on once I thought of something better.
One of the shamefully major obstacles, the reason i put the project out of my mind for two years was that the very first page included a chess board, with tiny little pieces drawn on it, in half the frames. So then I needed to trace that board, trace all the little pieces, figure out which pieces they are, and think of what they should be changed to since… even if this was about normal dopey american earth people I wouldn’t want them to be playing chess because I think chess is boring, but certainly it’s hard to have even the minimal “otherworldlyness” I am capable of if the fools play chess and on the very first page. alas. Adding a new first page before it only slightly reduces the trouble total.
And then on the third or fourth page, with the exchange between pog and the dopey lizard, I didn’t like that all. Both characters exhibited attitudes entirely inconsistent with what I have them doing later. My effort to soften that only further convoluted things.
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A honkey-tonk woman sez:
I’m glad you’ve finally settled on a title for your comic.
As regards the writing–it’s good to see that the Kumquat-kontraction discrepancy has finally been dealt with (though an L is missing on “I hope you have found this educational”). I must admit, though, I actually sort of preferred Pog’s “courage and wit have served thee well” speech to the new one; while it admittedly wasn’t that Pog-like of a thing to say, the subsequent “I didn’t get that one either” caused me to assume the Pog was merely repeating verbatim something Kumquat had said earlier (perhaps even to one of Treco’s previous couriers), possibly with the hope that our lizard friend’s reaction might give some hint as to what it might have actually meant (see “Try to answer it in a way that reminds me what it was“). I also sort of liked the “Stop saying ‘cuz'” line in the earlier version (it’s what we all were thinking). I think the added temper comment is a good explantion for the Moofinator’s behavior, though–annoyance is, after all, a perfectly ordinary reaction to a battle of wits with a witless opponent. That said, such a realization might actually work better with Pog’s original non-comprehending berating–P’s drawing attention to M’s behavior would serve quite nicely to remind biv that zuh was behaving in a far saucier many than biv normally deems appropriate, which in turn leaves M wide open for K’s subsequent assault.
Incidentally, just how many additional pages were you planning to digitally remaster?
On a side note, I always rather liked chess, myself. Never was very good at it, though–I could never come up with any good opening strategies, and tended to just flounder about until my opponent attacked, putting me on the defensive for the rest of the game. Such is life.
The same sez:
P.S. “Geese” is probably a better mild oath than “Yeats”, which rhymes with “plates”, not “feets”.
Fleeplezeep sez:
I thought “stop saying cuz” made it clear pog had not walked very far premature to the point where I wished to reveal that. I put it back in, though, because I agree it is a reprimand worth making.
I know what “Yeats” rhymed with, I just thought it was a stranger thing to say than geese. “Geese” being an obvious stand-in for “jeez,” and one anybody could have come up with. “Yeats” is not an obvious stand in for anything, unless it seems plausible that I thought it was pronounced differently, which is not something I want people to think. And so I have compromised and included “sneeze,” again closer to the original but a substitution I suspect less likely to be made by others.
For a while “educational” and friends were floating without an enclosure and it is quite possible I absentmindedly included the L in the construction.
Like most things, the source of so much of my trouble, I did not have an idea of what would constitute the remaking being finished. But most certainly it is worth doing up to the point where the freefloating frames from 2001 abruptly change to slightly more stable frames from 2004. Maybe I should not do them all they way I did these, but I should do something.
Regarding chess, I was inexplicably reminded of an episode of Hey Arnold I had accidentally been near quite some years ago, in which perfect Arnold challenged a character –who I am remembering as the Rat King but that could not possibly have been the case, Rat King being a ninja turtle character, but ehhh– “do you play… chess?” and won many games in three seconds by saying calmly and without emotion “checkmate” without the other character murdering him and I wouldn’t want to remind anyone else of that.
TO BE CONTINUED
Fleeplezeep sez:
THE CONCLUSION
I had always meant “I didn’t get that one either” as a commentary on my joke, just because I did that a lot. Before “courage and wit have served thee well” it had been “good work McCarthy” or something similar, a sentence fragment I had seen people saying on the Rob Kamphausen message board and I didn’t know what it meant, and pog knew it. Three years later its ousting was one of numerous inadequate touchups that helped me postpone this job.
I was reading a lot of Bob & George at the time and must have been inspired by the “dissatisfied characters trapped in void” genre. I began with these dopey comics primarily because I thought I could make a better amateur-looking comic than Super-Ho.
When I wrote the contested line, I had no idea what would happen later and thus had no possibility of referring to characters not yet introduced. I additionally did not know that excusing one’s lack of talent by drawing attention to it was a thing I would come to find unbearable, symptomatic of many bad web-comics in ensuing years, regardless of whether they got started in the same place I did.
I will, alas, continue to consider page 4A’s conclusion. I wasn’t pleased with it before and I am not pleased with it now. The only version I really liked was that one. I think you’re smarter, or at least more perceptive than a lot of people, so I suspect the depth-adder for repeat-viewer interpretation, however fortunate to have brought about accidentally, is not one I can depend in that situation.