Author: Bowie

It’s shit on Harvest day, I guess. I actually skipped one more, couldn’t decide if it was offensive or not. Odd, because I kept the one about Harvest punching his girlfriend in the face. That, however is simply about these two people. It doesn’t condone abuse.

The ones I’ve skipped have all condemned homosexuality. I don’t think there was actual hate so much as a vocabulary defined by homophobia, as children of the 90’s were subjected to– constantly– and for reasons that never seemed to make any sense at all.

I don’t remember Ryan’s challenge and I definitely didn’t do the novella. I one hundred percent could crank one of those out these days, even if I only have 10% of the free time I did back then. What stopped me? Surely I could have dropped some genius work. Also this is the only mention of one of the three domains Flatliner lived on before being resurrected here at RIS.

At one point Flatliner simultaneously existed on Gold-Team.net and Rated-Arr.net (My domains are always deep cut inside jokes or lame non-jokes.) I had some idea to do a story that branched off and had two completely directions, then reconnect with the same ending. I was never going to mention it, just put it up differently on each site. I got overly ambitious and it became the weird, meandering space arc of The Cancelled Years and there was no split path.

Anyway, meet Gina. She came into our lives at approximately this point in time and had a profound impact. She probably only came in second to Zelda on number of guest comics throughout Flatliner’s run. Impressive considering she started a year and a half behind everyone.

We could probably figure out how many lives a Becky starts with at the title screen of life if we look carefully. She may be the most murdered character in all of Flatliner. She’s definitely the most thoroughly murdered character, where even after she is killed for good there’s two post-mortem insults that I can recall.

It’s absolutely astounding that homophobic language wasn’t used in the second strip. Astounding.

I’m not sure if Harvest and Zelda interacted more in their limited AIM chat in the early oughts or the one time we very briefly ran into him in 2018. Hm, maybe he should be aware I’m doing this? Well, it’s a little late to worry about it now, all these months into the endeavor. Vroom vroom bring on the space story! (That’s not til November-ish.)

A healthy double dose of guest strips from Ryan, followed by a self aware standard Flatliner strip. Ryan’s comics always pop out visually in that they are almost a completely different style. Plus he always gives us little science lessons.

Just using a cartoon bubble and having a car say “beep” is amazing. 10/10.

If you look closely in the last strip, you can see Harvest has a little tear in his eye. I love it.

I called it on the early death, thing. I probably would have called it on the masturbation joke. I should have called it on the third one being a big old pile of racism and sexism and me removing it from this run. That’s strip #4 to be skipped entirely. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than I thought.

Instead, you get two strips featuring the same art in every panel about the same D&D encounter! We bring you nothing but the best here at rad internet site dot com. The character Brad only appears a couple of times, and only in a D&D context. I seem to recall him not wanting to be featured in the strip.

It was one of these D&D comics that put a match to the fuse to start doing this whole thing after I ran into Mitch on a conference call back in March. Feel free to blame him!

We did adopt a Kitten and name it Grom Hellscream and another one name Asuka. However, the living situation didn’t pan out and the cats had to go. I am reasonably sure that I know exactly who adopted them and they lived great lives, though.

Dave was my boss at my terrible job. I had a nightmare of a dorm life so living off campus seemed like a good idea. It was not. Some good D&D was played, but that’s really the extent of it.

I assume my predictions appear in the next strip. I also assume I re-hashed the dying prematurely joke. We won’t know til it gets posted, which for you is Monday and for me is like six weeks ago. Can’t wait to see how wrong I was.

Focusing in on the Ayumi Hamasaki photos. Harvest was in love with her and I ran with it. I get it- to this day we don’t have any American pop stars wearing dresses made up of photos of themselves. It’s actually pretty disappointing for our cultural landscape. We need to bring back the early 00’s narcissism that made the world what it was. Or not, I don’t care.

I’m pretty happy with the art of the plastic bag. Young people might not remember them, but it was a bad idea people had for a while.

The typeface and the reasonable confidence that I did not make the third strip are in conflict. I have to assume this was a guest strip, but that would involve opening a single one of the files from the original run of Flatliner, and that is a line I’m not willing to cross. Let’s say Lanny did it.

Did Harvest use the Hitler sprite in the Bandai comic, and now only 20 years later am I noticing? Yes. That is what happened.

I hate things. I hate owning things. The number of purely decorative, status-declaring crap I have is minimal. This is because I was married to hoarder for a bit. Let me tell you this- hoarding does not make you a bad person. Hoarding is something you do because you are a bad person. Go with that and live your lives.

This stupid convention went on for five strips. It didn’t even go on for five days, and it’s not the only convention story!

They did the versus thing in movies while we were making Flatliner, so there it is- noted. I enjoy knowing about slasher movies in a very minimal sense. Throw a versus up on the screen and you can drag me in. This probably explains a bit about why I play Smash Bros every day even as an adult approaching 40.

I did not care for Godzilla vs. Kong, though. That was a boring-ass movie.