Author: Bowie

Troubling times. Except for the grassy hill comic, which combines the new setting with the running gag. It’s perfect.

Ryan did and I can’t emphasize this enough – in real life- ask a woman if she was a prostitute once. Like, he asked. He used the direct words. He did not get slapped, for some reason.

Then we get two peripheral characters battling it out. If you don’t know who three of them are, that makes sense. The fact that I don’t remember who one of them is, that makes it weird. The *azn thrust* Harvest guy is a representation of a dude-bro that Harvest was very close with, and he was a real homophobe. The guy in the white shirt is a redrawing of Fetus from a previous strip. The girl with the cat ears… who is that? I don’t know!

If you think you’re missing some narrative arc here, it’s because you are. It’s that this guy read the comic that insinuated he was gay (skipped, because trademark 19-year-old-male homophobia) and then attacked and fought Lanny for making the strip.

Oddly, the awareness of these characters that they are in a comic strip came together all at once, and the fragility of this reality plays into Chapter 4, when the strip tries to reinvent itself after being “cancelled.” Chapter 4 is titled “The Cancelled Years” and it’s set in outer space for some reason!

When we weren’t mis-spelling ignorant jokes, we were putting this poor fictional cat through the ringer. Also, did we beat the popular meme? We might have.

The grassy hill comics are wonderful, and I’m glad to see them starting to pop up here. Rather than abuse the four panel structure with too many words, Zelda just used it to make a statement slightly more uncomfortable. I love it.

Lastly. We get another Harvest long rant. I don’t remember how many of these were based on his actual ravings and how many were just “in character” for how this guy operated at the age of 19. He tended to do some deep dives on his own but showed us all the treasure he found while he was down there.

Well, that about wraps up June, and the week in Flatliner. See you on Tuesday the 5th!

It doesn’t get explained anywhere why this guy’s name is Fetus. It’s unrelated to Flatliner and we never touch it. Fetus’ actual first name is Paul and as far as interacting with the old high school crowd, he and I are pretty high up there, in that we like each other’s tweets about once per year.

I tried looking for the web series that Fetus actually appeared in as himself, but twelve seconds of looking didn’t give me the results I was hoping for. Fun that there’s more gun violence and that the bear appears in all three comics!

I believe the steal-the-mayflower story is all Ryan’s work and it’s gorgeous- an improvement over the art that I did for this strip for sure. In real life, every teenager tries to the steal the Mayflower. It’s a rite of passage for those of us with roots in America’s hometown. They don’t even jail you if you get caught- you just have to act as a colonist at the living museum for a while. Try it sometime!

These are… bad. The first nearly passes for something that can be comprehended. The second gives us an encore of Sarah, who I think I had long broken up with and hadn’t spoken to for months at the time. Then there’s Mitch running over ninjas, which is a payoff for maybe three people, or 100% of Flatliner’s regular audience at the time.

Yeah, move onward. I write these in advance, so hopefully I performed well on my morning SSBU stream when this post gets published over two weeks from now. (I’ve had a day. Well, half day. Long story, it doesn’t matter.)

It must have been a week of non-stop Toystore working back in May of ’03. Actually most of ’03 was pretty much nothing but working at the toy store and playing Warcraft III, so there’s that.

There’s more messing around with Image Composer backgrounds- an unfortunate thing that I have– thanks to archive.org– enabled myself to start doing again. We’re treading on some dangerous ground, here. Fortunately there’s probably several months before I run out of Flatliner strips and decide on what the next thing to commit to could be.

The phone with the word *slam* is prescient of my favorite Ikea art that I hung up in my place for many years. I never made the connection between that art and this panel, which is encouraging to think that I had forgotten Flatliner so quickly.

The background for the employee restroom would also be famously used in Act III, for perhaps our grossest panel. Don’t worry, it’s as of this writing going to be the cover art for the chapter, as it was last in 2004-05 when I divided these chapters up to begin with. It’s… offensive. And gross. Just you wait.

My mastery of the obvious built-in WordPress feature of the “scheduled post” will be my undoing. Well, it will get Flatliner essentially automated months before it runs its course. It also won’t help to fill in the gap with all the projects I’d like to do. Since it offers no benefit to anyone, might as well do it! With that in mind, the gap between the current state of the world and my blogging here will only widen.

Perhaps I should go to the point of just guessing some future events and seeing what happens? I’m currently 8 days ahead. What do we think will be happening in 8 days? I’m hoping another C-list celebrity gets scammed out of their cryptocurrency. That would be great!

So, it was May of 2003 that Ian and I created a primitive flash animation. It was the capper for our trilogy that started out as two animated GIFs (I am not kidding) that served as Tetris: The Movie. Hear my words, I’m going to dig these out and upload them as bonus content in the near future. I think I have fonder memories of these animations than I do in general for Flatliner, but that may be because I’m fairly sure there’s nothing ignorant in them, just absurdity.

I love that the followup to the whole Pumpkinseed thing is really nothing, but does set the stage to put someone back at Brigham’s, and of course it’s Becky. Becky is Flatliner’s eternal punching bag, outlasting even Dana- though she does not outlast the series. (Spoiler alert.)

Skipped another one! When it’s nothing but homophobic jokes I don’t need to spend time and energy updating them. The ones that went there were never really precious, whatever “precious” amounts to in the Flatliner universe.

Erin had quite a menagerie of woodland critters that she adopted over a very short course of time. The de facto leader of these animal avengers was Captain Bun Buns the bunny. The strip perfectly nails down the tone of Flatliner. Characters who are yet to be defined, inspired by real whole people, and violence committed upon Dana when it needed a turn for the hilarious.

The devil in the butcher shop was unavoidable. I find it great that we kept using this sprite, this person who we had not seen or interacted with for years at this point as the devil to be great. There is an arc, likely in Chapter 3, where the devil is dethroned. Possibly forever! (I don’t remember.)

I could go on forever about Plymouth Rock. The stories I could tell you would be the same as the stories you might hear from anyone who had spent more than a few minutes in Plymouth, MA. The stories would be about disappointment and overreactions people have in expressing their anger at this frustratingly bad monument/tourist attraction. It just can not live up to the hype- and I didn’t think the hype had ever existed.

A whole bunch of mythology and continuity is brought here and put to its absolute best possible use: throwing it out immediately. I can’t say for sure which other web comic we were sniping at now was. I’ll rattle my brain and try to find out what one it was and what happened to them. Or I won’t. Tough to say.

The fire drill thing was meant to be a running joke and it really wasn’t. But fire drills are weird, right? Like shouldn’t you continue to practice fire safety as an adult? The average workplace is probably as likely or maybe even more likely burst into flame as much as a school could, and I trust adults to behave safely in an emergency situation far less than I do children.

These strips had to be a huge collaboration. I see my signature messing around with Image Composer in a few panels and a flair for the violent and gruesome that only Zelda could master appropriately in this art style. I see this color scheme again in the thumbnails for tomorrow, but that’s as far ahead as I’m choosing to look. So, maybe there was more followup to this?

Just a pair of strips today because, well, look at the second one- if you can. I actually am not sure how the blog is going to handle an image that large.

We start off with something that could have been just a throwaway single strip, but it evolved into this weird continuity-laden mess. The yellow background strip goes on and on. The followup strip is more of the same, so it will likely be two strips again on Monday.

Since I was so far ahead on these, I’ve been looking at pre-writing and scheduling many posts in advance. Soon I may be completely forced to actually work on something new. If I get stuck with a couple of hours and nothing better to do, I could end up an entire chapter ahead of myself.

One thing that’s great about these three strips is that I have no memory of any single one of them, so it’s all new to me!

I am like 95% sure Ian and Harvest never actually met each other, except for one time when we ran into Harvest in the street in maybe 2018 and I tried to get him to go drinking with us but he had “a job” and “a family” or some other bullshit he was up to.

The number bear guy did vaguely come back to me after looking at the comic. I think he responded even. Starting shit with other webcomics, those were certainly the days. Also, with the X-Men thing- just thinking that X2 was new and somehow remotely exciting at the time… wow.