Author: Bowie

This post is extremely out of order. I wrote it in advance, then forgot to actually post it on time. ALSO, I eliminated a strip due to the fact that I don’t have enough time in my life to replace the toxic 75% of the dialog of two characters playing Street Fighter, tossing around what amounts borderline racism and homophobia.

Skipping a strip this way, we get back to the real meat of the strip anyway- teen-aged white boys working terrible jobs, while talking about playing Street Fighter. I say this mockingly as the middle-aged white man who streams several Smash Bros. matches at 6 AM every day.

Zelda sweeps in and wins with manipulating this art style into something that is next level. My strips would never look as good as hers does. The art holds up now. Using *sparklesparkle* as an verb is inspired.

The undercurrent of this strip being about people working at low paying jobs is not intentional, but it is what we were all experiencing at the time, being fresh out of high school or attending college. I don’t believe that was the intent.

I censored the Reilly strip. There was a sign that was just gross for the sake of being gross. Fortunately I think that was a one and done setting.

The expression on Dana’s face in the final panel of that strip is pure gold. Pure. Gold.

Zelda enters the battle! Twenty some odd years later and we are still hanging out as early onset Cape Codders. Back in the day, Zelda would contribute new strips so often that by the end we didn’t call them guest strips anymore at the end. Also, Zelda’s strips were the most violent, and brightly colored. Just like real life.

I recall someone did print up porn from the internet and brought it into the toy store. I don’t think it was Lanny, but it seemed fun at the time to blame him. The bubble for my character in that first panel is an extra joke, and ruins the pacing. Thank god no one read these things then or now.

I did a visual censor on the porn. I did not think I’d be doing any of that when I decided to start going through these strips. I was 100% positive there’d be language I’d want gone, and even the one strip I skipped seems par for the course, but I did not think that I’d be muting down photos. I keep on surprising myself.

Welcome back, me. Not you, me. I’ve gotten myself so into the habit of this daily review that instead of taking a break with posting the comics, I’m just a week ahead. Hope last week turned out good, future me. If you can find a way to let me know then we can probably adjust what’s coming for the better either way.

I think about this Toy Store, and how we hid Attack of the Clones figures in the ceiling. It was one location in a chain, and we took on the inventory of four other stores while shutting down. Those figures definitely sat up there unnoticed for at least a decade after the fact.

I’d later have an employer who wanted to disguise ourselves as electricians to get up there and recover them when I told him about them. We never did, and it’s a huge regret. As someone who grew up watching a lot of sitcoms, I thought I’d have to disguise myself as an electrician far more often that I actually do.

In the first strip we have Mitch’s debut appearance, and it was a chance Zoom run-in with Mitch that was the greatest catalyst for me to start this whole project. This is the guy to blame, right here. Actually, don’t blame him. He’s thus far the most reasonable person we’ve depicted up until this point.

At this point, those of the strips I could put together were noticeably mine, but Harvest could make the damned bear expressive. I’ve never had any ability when it comes to drawings. Even this pixel-by-pixel nonsense was a bit much for me.

The knives conversation was real. I had wanted to talk about some very dumb thing and I was trying to blow past Harvest having just woken up on someone’s couch after probably 400 rounds of Tekken.

Retail jobs often consist of being exposed to overprivileged people comparing unspeakably evil parts of human history with some minor inconvenience. It’s day one stuff, if you’ve ever operated a cash register. I did a LOT of it, and I’ve heard some things. My inability to get a home theater installation team to someone’s house within ten minutes and no appointment once left a Hunter and a Michaela dead in their chairs, having starved of lack of the Wiggles or whatever was popular at the time. I am yet to stand trial for my crimes.

Our second, and most assuredly not final afterlife story arc gets up and going. I seem to recall at some point later I think Ian becomes a rebellion leader in purgatory? Amazing to think that at this point I wasn’t experimenting with drugs or alcohol. Trust me, I SHOULD have been, instead of dumping quarters into DDR, but we all make mistakes in our youth.

I’m coming off of a day of brain-addled malaise after a COVID booster. It makes me wonder how these characters, these barely exaggerated versions of ourselves would have handled the pandemic. I don’t think Harvest would have had it in him at 18 to follow the protocols, and I don’t think I would have had it in me to leave the house. I’ve spent the last two years frankly being shocked at how poorly the average person reacted to the pandemic. I haven’t changed much, I suppose.

I did one additional edit in these three strips. A comment bordering on racist, but weirdly I think would make it into some modern comedy efforts. I suppose I shouldn’t point out each one, but it’s not like I’m going to take the time to match up a new font to a 20 year old strip. You can imagine what was said.

Welcome to chapter 2. Vermont and ice cream are largely ditched for Massachusetts and toys. The frustration of interacting with the public and minimum wage job complaint are embraced from here to eternity.

I think I ran into the IRL version of Dana (spikey hair) at a bar maybe in 2012? 2012 contained the vast majority of everything that has happened to me since Flatliner and its lesser known sequel (bad life choices) ended at around that time period. So, it’s been a decade yet again. I hope one of the six or seven yelling bands he was in at any given time found some success.

I can not, for the life of me remember what created the Pumpkinseed character. (Purple hair.) An amalgam of the complainers, the whiners, the people who were in charge at my various jobs but also did not work there. Probably for the best I did this, instead of a direct caricature of someone.

There are some faces to this day that if you were to accidentally connect with their name and the location in which they screamed at me over something I couldn’t control I would fly into a righteous anger. We all have those, though, right?

Looking at the ‘toystore’ sign all these years later and it looks like balloons to me. That was not the intention when I wrapped a series of Microsoft Image Composer filters around some text, but it’s what it looks like to me now. Let’s say it was intentional.