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Mulberry was originally going to do something different this month, but those plans fell through and I had to illustrate one of my backup ideas instead. This is also what I said about the last issue, and it's becoming clear it's what I'm going to say about every issue. In case you're wondering, this was going to be the issue where she found out Barack Obama was spying on her. Then the government shutdown happened and Obama couldn't smell more like a rose next to the insane, suicidal Tea Party, so I had to drop any ideas of mocking him because they wouldn't be as funny. THEN, when it was too late to revert back to the original comic, Obamacare laid a rotten egg and everybody's back to hating Prez. Sometimes you can't win for losing.
I could surrender to a South Park schedule of writing every wraparound script at the last minute, to avoid this sort of topical tangle, but I already tried that approach (with Superstorm Sandy) and it resulted in my least favorite issue to date (#3). So that doesn't work either. My best option is to have a bunch of alternate storylines ready, like this one, which I was hesitant to do because.....there's no real plot in it. It's just a bunch of ad parodies. I think they're funny, sure, but I guess we'll see how it tests. You'd tell me if you didn't like it, right?
It was at least therapeutic to make; I got to take public shots at a lot of dumb things about television I can't stand. Writing ad parodies is easy when you realize every ad ever made can be distilled down to one simple formula: "Someone is obsessed with a product to the point of insanity." I know some people are going to ask me if there's a Taco Bell ad they missed. I made that one up, but it's extremely close to something they'd actually do.
This issue marks the first time BANG is publicly available on street corners, in bright red boxes, with Marty McFly on one of the side stickers. Some people are going to be picking up their first issue this month, and if they don't watch Legend of Korra (for shame), they're likely to think the paper is centered around the character that appears on the first page, then get confused when they reach the second. To lower the likelihood of this, I rewrote the "Hey You!" box to introduce Mulberry as well as the paper. I'm fully aware I picked a bad time to pull this stunt, but a "right time" probably doesn't exist.
If you don't watch Korra....what you see here is pretty much the first half of the second season summed up in a few panels. |
| It's pretty obvious here, but in the Comic-Con spread and several other instances, Mulberry is just a stand-in for myself -- me in the body of a teenage rich girl. (Why? Because Mulberry is cooler than me.) This conversion doesn't work completely -- for example, I can't use Mulberry to complain about the cost of something. Here, the events of Comic-Con are largely true except for the phone at the center of the controversy. Putting every cent I can toward running the paper, I use a $30 flip phone. Mulberry would not. I still don't know what the "phone guy" was really doing, and a bit of me is nervous he might read this issue and try to find me again. At least, I have better odds running into him once more than I would the blind dominatrix.
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| Most people loved Meen Comics when it appeared in BANG #2, so I made plans for a second batch this year. Let me say this about Terri Nelson, aka "Trixie Biltmore": not only are her cartoons a great fit for the paper, she has been the easiest and most pleasant person to work with. She's always been up for any of my suggestions and has been a true friend. Get used to her, is what I'm saying.
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| Justin Zimmerman's "Ground Control" is just gorgeous. I hesitate to really give any specifics about it because it's best served cold. So I won't. If you like his work, keep an eye out for Other Worlds, the compilation book that contains Ground Control, The Robot Library and other stories BANG has yet to print.
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| As his bio says, Bryan Warner's been around for a while, but his cartooning career has just begun. I told Bryan if I published an issue in November, I'd print one of the cartoons he sent me, "The Experiment." I was true to my word.
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| Vess is supposed to be rendered in a retro 1950's art style and look completely different from any other character I draw, almost like she was drawn by someone else. That has never been the case because somehow, no matter how I want to change this habit, the material with Vess always ends up being created at the very last minute. This one was SO last minute that you can see the pencil lines on Vess when she's standing outside the building, because I merged the layers accidentally and had no time to redraw the scene. I thought I wasn't going to put her into this issue because I couldn't think of anything for her to do this time, but then this popped up in the Yahoo News feed right before deadline. I didn't have to change much.
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| Skittles ads haven't been watchable for some time, but lately they've become grosser and grosser. We haven't gotten a guy vomiting candy into another guy's mouth yet, but they're almost there. The drawing is nonspecific and the text could have been swapped out for something else -- right before deadline I considered making it say "MACLOUGHLIN, OOOOooooOOOOO", but that campaign, while annoying, had begun two days ago and it was too early to tell how frequently it would show up. This week, that ad has been shrieking at me all the time, and I wish I'd trashed it.
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