page 35 of the old part 1 of that

Hopefully this is the last page that needs new drawings, but I have said that before! And extensive panel re-arrangement will still be needed in the ybrik section, where I knew even at the time I drew it that I would have to come back and split it into more pages later. I sure know how to plan ahead.

The cartoon which pog watches on this one I had not thought the slightest bit about in apparently nearly ten years, going by the October 2005 date on the .fla-fla flash file “thingswithproblems.fla”. This would be a great opportunity to put something clever or legitimately satirical there, but I could not think of anything I could put here that would work that I was also comfortable having in my “serious” comic strip. Initially, ten years ago (and it appears as if I only got around to changing it LAST year), I had the right one handing over a vibrator, or the only thing I could turn up in an image search for the word that was not specifically sculpted to resemble a phallus, and it bothered me. It bothered me that I would not put a “real” one there, but if I had that would have bothered me even more! Now see here, I cannot make a sex joke because I have never done any sex deeds and I have no idea how many normal people actually know what a vibrator looks like, and if they would be able to pick one out that was atypical of the pictures I could find of them. Literally my only sight of one prior to then had been a Mad-TV sketch called Sex Toy Story that aired in 1997 or thereabouts, (the period when I thought I was pretty bad for daring to say “go the hell”) in which “Buzz Lighttouch” had a fairly generic rod-shape, so I assumed I could get away with one, but ultimately I had adequate doubt to remove it. My compromise replacement, an electric hair-cutting machine, is still unpleasant to use on one’s teeth, but no longer gross (even assuming the thing is cleaned once in a while), and thus not in line with the sort of gross cartoon I probably thought I was making fun of ten years ago.

Consider that tomorrow/today is April foist, April’s Fool Day, a 47 hour period known for its varied pranks, which run the range all the way from annoying to obnoxious. However, in order for a prank to be effective, there must be a shared level of understanding between the prank-applier and the prank-receiver. When I am kidding, people think I am serious, and when I am serious nobody knows what I am talking about, and just nod and say “yeahhhhh” because I am perceived as too unstable to be told the truth about how foolish I appear (and as such not worth looking for merit in the words of should I not actually be foolish on that occasion). My conception of what is strange about something is often not what somebody else would find strange, and if it relates to something that a normal person does, I probably do not understand how it works to begin with. I don’t even understand how pepper works. Little black dots that you put on your food that make it taste exactly the same, glorious. Therefore pranks, satire and I generally do not get along. I can invent a surrogate object, idea, behavior or structure that has no relation to a real thing, but satire requires reality.

Also I only just realized what day it was.

“Thankfully” actual tv cartoons have not gotten any less cheaply produced in a decade, so that part still goes. I think we can safely agree that pog is watching a terribly-written, awkwardly-paced program regardless of its degree of similarity to one that exists. Unless you think I am kidding.