Author: Bowie

I don’t miss college. I probably watched too many movies about college to properly have the experience for myself. The four years of lying about college that my high school did probably didn’t help either. Of course they were a Catholic school, so college was like a little practice lie they did all the time because the big standard lie they were always professing was just second nature at that point.

I like that in each of these three strips, it’s plain to see not just who wrote it, but also that the same person made each one as well. You can see my “no art at all” style, Harvest’s “this is a fluid world where things can move” style, and Zelda’s “comics actually do tell a sequenced story and I will prove that despite this art style” style.

Of all the details in Zelda’s first No Elf Rape strip I love the 7-up can most. I believe the can continues to appear in additional strips, as will famously Becky. Becky has the distinction of being the longest running character who is based on a real person that I never met. Also she has the most canon in-character demise in Chapter 4.

I think I’ve already covered DDR here, how it was an obsession with us for a while and then just as quickly not. The fact that I went out of my way to create a DDR machine in this art style shows that it was at its absolute peak here. Thank god.

I had forgotten entirely about this. I believe Ian made an animation that he had published elsewhere that included exactly what was described. Actually, I’m here for the idea that there would be a show where the Power Rangers saved the world from all the monsters, but still had their gear and abilities with nothing to do. I would watch the hell out of that.

I genuinely laughed out loud just now when reading the phrase “prance around in their thrift store jean jackets.” Meanwhile, Harvest put in considerable effort coming up with a one time us background. I think it’s one time, anyway. I continue to surprise myself as more and more callbacks became the backbone of this whole thing.

I noted this morning while going through things that this is the 40th entry on this site. Aside from the first time post and two bonus strips, that makes 37 Flatliner entries- or 111 strips. (112 if you count the one that was too bad to edit). I guess I should have paid attention to when we passed the 100 mark. Also I guess I should learn how many comics there were in total so that I know when I need to start getting some other stuff ready. That’s not today’s problem, though.

Genuinely happy with all three of these strips two decades later. The pirate joke got so, so much mileage in Flatliner and in real life. The true beauty was in the narrative of telling someone the joke again and again, at every possible opportunity, annoying the living hell out of them, until they too found it funny and started telling it, themself.

The bear-riding-the-cat strip became a running gag in its own right with a callback I remember down the line that was entirely for the purpose of trolling a guy who had been reading Flatliner for years before we’d met him. That was a wonderful moment.

This Asian Theater class that everyone at my school seemed to take as a giveaway credit which I have now referenced twice in the strip was actually one of the more fascinating classes I ever took. Unfortunately I was a dumb gamer teen who could never seem to stay awake during daytime hours.

For some reason we introduced a cat, and that cat got abused? I’m not sure. I wasn’t a drinker at the time these strips were published. I made up for that for about fifteen straight years after Flatliner ended but hey, it was funny to picture me as an angry drunk at the time.

We did not see the Lizzie McGuire movie. We were not fans of the Lizzie McGuire TV Show. But it was the sort of thing we would get up to- fascination on a media franchise that was targeted solidly outside our age group.

The poster changes in each of these strips. This theoretical place we lived was evidently the battleground in some decor war that did not end in a “line drawn down the center” gag. Well, it probably did. But not getting to it sooner (if it did) was extremely out of character for me. I love dumb sitcom tropes.

This marks the point where I had officially decided I was talented enough at MS Paint to start making more of the strips myself. I was working under false pretenses, as I was not ready and there is no such thing as talent when it comes to MS Paint. Though my need for the software was far more great than for the average person, these days there is none. Well, I guess I could be editing these strips from it, but two things stop me on that front: I never got used to the ribbon interface when they added that, and also I’m a Mac user now. 2003 me would be livid if he knew that.

2003 me would take issue with plenty of my other lifestyle choices since then, too. Namely, the waterfall of alcohol I stood under with my mouth open from late ’04 until an uncomfortably recent time and also that whole disastrous marriage thing. But and despite the entire original premise of this site, inevitably onward and potentially upward.

It would make sense to talk about some of the new content that will be launching here soon. It would but I’m writing Flatliner posts a week ahead, so feel free to enjoy the new content launching about four days ago. I’m sure it was cool!

We’re firing on all cylinders in these strips. For what it’s worth these were published on March 15-20 of 2003. We hit the comic shop, Brigham’s- a place neither of us worked at in quite some time, and the couch.

The couch may be a constant across many parallel universes. That would really tie things up nicely. Unfortunately that was not even close to being anywhere on my mind. I might have wrangled this strip into the post-Sliders pre-Multiverse of Madness dimension hopper of its day if I’d been a little more prescient, or had run the series for like two weeks longer than I did.

I used to love throwing “you can call that– aPEELing” as some kind of net to catch any other falling punchline. It’s pretty effective, so it was rarely used in Flatliner.

Some of that new content I’ve been going on about is nearly upon us. Not to totally reveal what it is but I sure hope you like references to video games from the GameCube era. We sure don’t have enough of that around here.

What a wonderful batch of strips, here. They’re reminding me of the fact that my childhood thoughts were correct- working in a toy store was in fact, pretty awesome.

I guess the official name of the toy store in the comic was TS Toys, which is funnier than most of the strips about the toy store anyway.

Regarding these strips- at all 14,000 retail jobs I held throughout my teens and teen bonus years (21st-century 20’s) someone asked me to “check in the back” for products that were not available. Street dated, sold out, plainly not present when using the store’s inventory system that could be viewed from many screens, it didn’t matter- someone would inevitably ask me to go physically check for something that– there or not– I absolutely must attempt to go lay eyes on.

I should have stolen the shit out of one of those Wind Wakers, though. We for real had that like five whole painful days during which I may have had some rabies-like symptoms developing because I hold them but not have them. Cruelty on the part of corporations at its finest.

The second and third strips are in fact in the order they were published, though clearly reversal would make much more narrative sense. I had actually forgotten how we knew Dave. There used to be a video on YouTube of Harvest absolutely destroying Dave in a friendly fight they put on in a garage. The fight was planned and it was because Dave’s girlfriend was mean to him and he wanted to relieve some stress.

What’s mostly important is that I could be seen- in TS Toys shirt, ponytail and all- effectively cosplaying Flatliner Jason. Sadly the YouTube video is gone. Or at least it’s pretty far down the search even when I use the secret phrase we had to use to find it all those years ago. What a shame. (Not really.)

I mean this with the utmost sensitivity and thought, what the hell was happening to our brains when we were in our late teens? I mean, it’s probably better not to know, but these comics can’t help but make me ask.

I spent 15 minutes this morning worrying that I had posted some of these strips out of order. I looked at the posts that were up, the posts that were in draft, what events where referenced where in the blog. It was going to take forever to sort out.

Then it hit me- no one cares, and that is beautiful.

Ian’s humor is a brand, and it’s one that has gone on untarnished through the ages. I nearly cried laughing a few weeks ago when I suggested finding a certain low grade celebrity on cameo, and his concern was whether or not we could pay them to eat a handful of sand on camera. It wasn’t even Hayden Christensen, which if I were tying it back to this comic, would be the perfect choice for that.

Taco Tom was a staunch believer in the idea that all bosses, managers, and supervisors operated under the “If I didn’t see it, it didn’t happen” model of management. In many ways, he was correct. He was the lynchpin of the mall employee shadow economy, where minimum wage employees struck back at corporate America in the form of stealing. It was beautiful.

The reality TV boom of the whenever-MTV’s the Real Word started-to-the-heat-death-of-the-universe era that was on the rise then was bad for television, and of course it still is. We just live with it now. Did I know what a Kardashian was at the time? Probably. I just didn’t know what the word for one was.