Author: Bowie

Oh, the blackest of Fridays. How many years in retail hell did I work hocking the crap that made each Black Friday the darkest yet? It would go on long after Flatliner. The Black Fridays, the Christmas Day shifts, the endless abuse for an amount of dollars with no survivability.

It is this country’s worst industry even at this time when our lowest paid workers are shifting away from “being able to talk to people about a product” to “Amazon warehouse pre-corpses.” Do your poorest neighbors a favor and don’t buy anything tangible for anyone you know between Thanksgiving and the 23rd century. Give those poor workers a break.

I don’t know/remember who Nicki is/was, other than Mitch harassed her to vote for Flatliner in an online poll. As our presumable sole voter, and also a lapsed voter, it was up to Mitch to rectify that. She appears in a strip, and Mitch gets to kill his old sprite and take on a better looking form. It’s beautiful.

I’d wager a guess and say “Mandela effect for Flatliner” was never going to be on my bingo card for this ride. I guess it was “Tooled!” and not “Fooled!” though I suppose they both work in that one didn’t happen and one isn’t a thing. Tooled. Tooled? Were people saying that? Was it some kind of slang at the time? Lost to the ages, is what it is.

Keeping with the running theme, goodbye to the most homophobic strip of the entire run so far, but come-on-through for the most “Harvest abuses his girlfriend” strip thus far. How I drew this line I’m not entirely sure but here I am.

Did Ryan do a lot of drugs? Was I missing out on some good pills or something? I’m not great with subtlety and I’m starting to think he lived in a much-blessed altered state, seeing his strips in the rapid fire way which I am now doing.

Haha, Flatliner post #69! This is where all the hilarity lies, just you wait and see.

To celebrate, let’s give you Becky’s sad existential crisis, the bear killing Jake again, and a bit we did both in the strip and real life that fooled no one. One more skip today, putting us close to double digits. In fact, may be double digits, I’ve lost count. The good news is that the collective we has lost nothing.

Actually, the strip in question is salvageable. Maybe there’s room for some edited apocrypha after the run here ends. I’d like to think I’ll move on to the some new projects, and anticipate that words will make their way into documents sooner, rather than later. For now, Flatliner remains a safe haven where I can do very little work and still feel like I’ve made some progress.

I don’t think there’s anything racially charged in the last strip, though with Harvest’s affluent white teen world-view, you never know. Todd wasn’t a real person, and I wasn’t replaced. I believe we told people that Flatliner worked like Menudo, replacing the principal characters as they aged out. No one bought it.

What a dump (of strips)!

The Magic: The Gathering thing did go on for one more strip, only to emphasize the complete lack of payoff. It goes so far as to remind you, the reader that you are wasting your time here. It’s not as bad now at the three-strips-a-day pace, but back then those six days Dave mentions are real days. This is the content that seemed reasonable to make at the time.

We also reach a complete apex. Harvest’s absolute best strip, and Flatliner’s most iconic sits in the middle. The Ugly Room lives and exists forever in my heart, having made its way as a placeholder graphic on so very many projects and message board avatars. I certainly hope he wasn’t ripping something else off that I never knew about. I was too afraid to ask.

Then there’s a strip that I’m assuming is about the 2003 film Daredevil. While the film was bad when it came out you also can’t say it aged well, either. You might say it fermented well and went from bad to laughably bad. It did leave its own forever marks on pop culture, even if we don’t think about them all the time (stupid MCU, helping us forget this train wreck.)

Where did the cigarette go? Someone has to hold the artist accountable for the small details, here. Jason was clearly smoking a cigarette the last time he was depicted wearing a lab coat, and I won’t stand for him to be wearing a lab coat while not smoking a cigarette.

I, thankfully all these years later still have no idea how babies are made. I believe Harvest does. Should we ever reunite, maybe I will ask him.

Even though there’s a setup, and a flashback justifying the setup, I don’t think there is a punchline, making the whole story that much better and even more pointless. The commitment to the Neopets card game was largely a snap-back against the constant whirl of information I was receiving about Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards.

I later (many years later) would learn how to play Magic: The Gathering. But, I don’t remember how now, and that’s what’s important. I think I liked mill decks, if you were wondering what kind of player I was. I think I played the blue guys. Are there blue guys?

Good to know that within the span of a week I was watching all of Sailor Moon and going out to a god damned rave. Sometimes when I’m looking back from here, I’m like “I wasn’t so terrible” and then other, most times I’m like “wow I hate my past self.”

There is no story to the rave, though. I didn’t do any cool drugs or meet any interesting people. In fact I did zero drugs and met incredibly uninteresting people. There was no appeal at all for me and I went because two people I barely knew wanted a ride. I probably missed something cool and it was like an all-time great one that people still talk about. I wouldn’t know.

Fortunately, Flatliner is very much like real life and isn’t does a nosedive straight back into dick jokes and all is washed over with the passing of time.

Did I get a week off for good behavior or something? Gina showed up and made two strips right away. Her crew doesn’t make a a lot more appearances. Harvest’s face appears in photo form as well. The poor cats in these strips can’t catch a break, either.

I don’t understand why Ryan isn’t a YouTuber to this day. This seems like a mistake. Maybe he is and I’m unaware. Also his art style is super distinct (better) and he should have been publishing his own strip regularly. Not me. Definitely not me on a week where I was letting others do all the heavy lifting anyway.