Category: Rad Stuff

Rad news only

Only 3 people are allowed to read this

New section alert! New section alert! Be aware of the new section!

I’m kidding, no one’s going to read this. At least I knocked out an overdue Wet Hot American Summer reference out in the title. This site was sorely lacking in those.

The Hero’s Gurnal (as I have so bravely titled it) will be a collection of one-off writing projects that I’ve worked on before and never quite fleshed out into anything more substantial.

Originally I had planned to debut a different writing sample here first, but formatting issues nearly made that other piece completely lost to the world. Unfortunately for all of us, I found it elsewhere and it’s somewhat readable- so in a few months time that will also be going up here. There’s countless bits and pieces and projects I’ve gotten into over time, so I’m not quite sure what treasures we’ll see here. Maybe some never-before-shared stuff. We’ll see.

I’m going to start with No Strings Attached– (possibly also With Strings Attached– I never quite decided.) Either way it’s not as sexy as it sounds, because this is a screenplay for a TV show about puppets.

The idea was that the show takes place in a world where a child’s birthday wish made all the puppets in the world come to full sentient life, and our main character absolutely hates them all. The rest of the world has been a lot more accepting of this phenomenon for whatever reason.

The idea was that over time, he would be forced to become friends with one of his puppet coworkers, and that we would slowly watch him come around while being forced to cooperate in every aspect of his life. Think Perfect Strangers but Balki is a sentient ventriloquist’s dummy.

We start with a cold open that goes to greater distances than other scenes to show that the puppets can be annoying to be around. They tend to be a lot more calm and collected than Marty is in any given scene elsewhere.

This is but one of the legends of which the people speak…

In 2002 I was wrapping up an ill-advised four year run through high school and I was looking to see what I could accomplish next. Having no artistic skill whatsoever and a contrarian world view it quickly became clear to do the up and coming (yet already fading into irrelevancy) thing. I published a webcomic with my friend to keep track of our own very unfunny inside jokes.

Meanwhile, exactly 20 years later…

Rather than having already deleted every copy out of existence like I should have, the entire final version of that site sits in a folder on my iCloud drive, effectively reproducing itself every time I log in to a new device. With that easily breakable curse following me around, I’m doing the second most obvious thing to address it, and that is to just give up and share it with everyone.

Flatliner was the title of this atrocity. Harvest, my co-creator and I, settled on this name having originally thought we’d create a comic for our school newspaper- The Heart Beat. About two to three letters into the first word of the first strip, you’ll understand why that never materialized.

The art style is all Harvest- he could draw and do visually creative things, something that I’ve never been able to do even slightly to this day. Eventually I’d find a way to manipulate his style so I could create a strip from start to finish, but his work in the realm of MS Paint was unparalleled at the time.

Presented in this post are the first three strips. I’ll put up a few every week or so with a little context. Oh, and if you don’t find them funny? It’s a 2002 web comic. It was NEVER going to be funny.

This conversation happened nearly verbatim. Many of the early strips occur at Brigham’s– a Massachusetts-based family restaurant chain that in many ways was the Hydrox to Friendly’s Oreos.
I find it hilarious that I felt the need to censor literally the SECOND strip. (I removed the R word- despite the fact that the word will probably never be completely stripped from the MA cultural lexicon.)
There’s an ongoing thing where Harvest eats a child’s teddy bear, and while the dialog is again probably a verbatim conversation, it was not worth sharing with the world in a comic. There will be many of these.