Gold is consistently among the top three funniest of the natural elements. Beyond that, we’ve got two more cases of documenting reality when it didn’t need that. Harvest walked out of a minimum wage job over busy work. Granted, that job was a heavy premise, but this was a reflection of our very lame lives.
Also, he did take dedicated time to say goodbye to a message board for a while. Remember those days, when we were capable of caring about such things? Me, neither.
We’ll open tomorrow with a doozy of an inside reference, though with our superfluous fourth panel technology, we do provide some exposition.
I think “Silence, or I will club you with my gold” became a standard reaction to anyone offering helpful information.Anticlimactic indeed!This won’t even be the only comic about this
I’m digging these three strips more than some of the others, even the third one.
In 2002 when Microsoft entered the console wars it seemed very dumb to me, a person who believed that all problems were to be solved using fire flowers and master swords. The X-Box was the size of a pickup truck and the name itself was obnoxious. Extreme box, I guess? It did for video games what Mountain Dew did for soda- it made them greener and more focused on mediocre results.
Regardless, I won one for free from Taco Bell- the de facto Mountain Dew source that also regularly served as a purveyor of too much sodium. I turned it quickly into cash dollars, which I in turn probably spent at Taco Bell and thusly completed the circle of extremity. I would at some point later briefly own one of the extreme boxes for video game use (I played the gimmick volleyball game for a couple hours.)
The fry littering (assault, as depicted) has a backstory too. Someone I knew had near unlimited access to books of $1 gift certificates to one of the big three terrible burger chains. I hoarded piles of the certificates until after doing the math we realized that you could trade 20 of them in at the drive thru for “18 Medium Fries and a small Coke” and then receive a quarter back for your trouble. Of course, one could not eat the fries themself as they would be dripping in the saliva or other bodily fluids of whoever had to prepare that many orders of them so quickly.
The third strip’s fourth panel did become a running catchphrase we could use after any small triumph or victory. Harvest’s wide-eyed expression is a nice touch, too. Anyway, this post is destined for Patriot’s day. I will hopefully be settling in for a third consecutively day of productivity on new projects when it goes live. YOU HEAR THAT, VERSION OF ME THAT IS SEEING THIS ON THE 18TH? YOU’D BETTER BE PLEASED WITH YOURSELF.
“The X-Box is large” was the “Hope, Jobs, and Cash” of the early 00’s.Just unbridled crueltyHow long before we stopped talking exclusively about then-current video games? Not long, I hope.
I spend enough time lurking on Reddit to see these tier lists and thought I’d take my own crack at it, considering the very bad strip I recently posted about Smash Bros. To this day I manage 3-5 Smash matches a week- with the immersive experience of Phil the cat doing her best impression of the Nintendogs assist trophy.
My opinion of Final Fantasy VII is that it is the single most overrated thing of all time. One of the greatest joys in my life was snapping in half and throwing away the many copies of it that had been left in my home after someone with poor taste had left them there.
The dog from Duck Hunt, though? That is beauty, art, and poetry repackaged, combined, and turned into something even better. Long live the dog who has been laughing at me since I was a toddler.
Today we see a rhythm unfolding, where it’s a verbatim-unfunny strip sandwiched in between two significantly better guest strips. Another guest strip from Jen, though more thoroughly set in the Flatliner world and somewhat accurate to how our (and most other) friendships with Jen worked. Then a discussion about time of day and sleep (groundbreaking), followed by Ian’s guest strip where we beat up a gnome and take its money to go to the arcade.
If I recall correctly Ian had at one point hand-drawn an outline of how the gnome strip would go, and if I had the wherewithal to use a scanner no one probably would have had to do the pixel by pixel editing this comic so often demanded.
Ian’s strip was posted on June 8th, 2002. I’m not sure if high school was behind us entirely or not at this point (and I’m fairly certain it will not be directly addressed in the comic). The first chapter runs right through the end of my one and only semester of college outside Massachusetts.
Here we are at 24 strips, 42 more to go before this “chapter”ends, and I start disillusioning myself of the notion that Flatliner generally improves!
There is so little exaggeration in these early strips…Another word for word conversation, ripped from the AOL Instant Messenger logs.I think about this one a lot. The “end of the story” bit, the Gnome, and the incredibly low stakes victory. One of my favorites for sure.
Starting today’s look back with the guest strip from Jen- a high school classmate of ours who in many respects was a living, breathing Don Hertzfeldt cartoon. There’s definitely a deep lore within those six panels that even twenty years later, we still haven’t fully uncovered.
I’m curious about the second strip here. I can only assume that following the SSBM match in question, Harvest then was obliterated in a second match, where the stakes set by our friend Danny Lanny (pictured) would be that he appeared in the next strip. It’s the only logical explanation.
Coming tomorrow, we’ll have another guest comic from Jen, and one from Ian, who may be the only person that has appeared in a comic so far that I have actually seen for more than a passing second in the last 15 years. Fun! Wait, does Ganondorf count?
This was a favorite among the vast majority of the few readers we had.SSBM had just been released. While this exact scene played out in many basements and living rooms across the world, it was only published as an unbearably unfunny web comic on Flatliner.Surely a calculated takedown of me and my love for animals. Fair point, Harvest.
My memory is all garbage (unless we’re talking about my early formative years where I lived on a constant barrage of sitcoms and Nintendo) but this particular era is coming back with clarity when looking back at these.
Our high school– which at this point is deservedly no longer in existence had such little faith in its students that the number of rehearsals to graduate was in the double digits, and quite frankly the number of students in our class was not much higher than that number.
The place did a lousy job of anything other than guaranteeing that moderately well-off parents could get their dumbest kids into college. It was without life and colorless. It ground anything that could be joyful into a beige paste of Christianity and white privilege.
It’s okay, though. We still believed that there was good Star Wars in our future. After all, we were finally seeing some Star Wars with Christopher Lee- the breakout of star of Gremlins 2. It turns out that collectively, there has been about 75 minutes of enjoyable Star Wars since 1980, despite Lee getting a whole movie of setup just to throw him away in the opening sequence of the one that followed.
Next post, we’ve got a much-beloved guest strip!It’s okay, though. We still believed that there was good Star Wars in our future. After all, we were finally seeing some Star Wars with Christopher Lee- the breakout of star of Gremlins 2. It turns out that collectively, there has been about 75 minutes of enjoyable Star Wars since 1980, despite Lee getting a whole movie of setup just to throw him away in the opening sequence of the one that followed.
This holds up like a CBS sitcom. It wasn’t funny then and it’s less than that now.The origin of this strip, based on the lack of color and not on actual memory tells me this might have been one of my earliest attempts at creating a strip. (I was and to this day am very lacking in PhotoShop skills. This was likely done in the Microsoft Image Composer (no one remember this software but me.)This is probably actually the best strip so far both in terms of visual quality and for coming close to funny. I adore the art for “Mega-Manakin”in the first panel.
Oh, no. Buckle up for some discussion of high art cinema. First, we hit you with a pair of strips about the cinematic masterpiece that is the 1995 film Mortal Kombat. (The title is stylized with a hard K, as it is spelled in the original French.)
This is– of course– the film that rocketed Bridgette Wilson-Sampras and Linden Ashby to the unparalleled megastar status they both rightfully maintain to this day. I believe there was a failed video game adaptation of the film, too. Funny– that should have shown up on our radar at the time since all we were doing was talking about video games. Some things just get obscured. A lot of movies that were adapted into games just couldn’t keep up with the original film (see: Super Mario Bros).
Things take a dark turn after that, veering off into the no-longer-relatable anticipation of seeing a new Star Wars movie. We didn’t know at the time that LucasArts would choose to move from the hilarious-bad of The Phantom Menace on to the nearly-insufferable bad of Attack of the Clones. A bold move with no consequences on their part, really.
Not pictured: an old man screaming at us to make him a “Fribble,” the signature drink of a competing restaurant chain.If this is one of our trademark word-for-word strips, it fails in that it is not funny, and is certainly not accurate. I had said much dumber things before, including in previous strips.I’m a person and my name is Clipart. At first I recalled this as a guest strip, but actually Harvest was doing some heavy lifting- showing the main characters in their primary outfits for the first time, and all the work with the arms and hands.
Here’s three more strips for you. These will be the last I post for the week, unless I choose to procrastinate on one of my other projects.
I sort of like these ones a little more. They are simple, but without error. It’s entirely my own shortcoming, but typos and mis-spellings drive me up the wall. It’s something that was metaphorically beaten into me by my third grade teacher. I was promised “something great” if I got the best scores on spelling tests for the entire year.
Well, spoiler alert- I DID and what I got was an extra slice of pizza at an end of year “just let me drink in peace” pizza party my teacher threw. It was worth it, but only because of the influence Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird had on the diets of children born in the 1980s.
I recall wanting to go back and edit the earliest strips, but thinking I never had enough time to do so. That is an odd take to have considering that my time was otherwise being spent working on new installments of this.
I do think the “Brim” stone is possibly the best detail so far in any of the strips, and credit for that definitely goes to Harvest.
This comic was a master class in how to waste one’s own time and others.I’m pretty sure this is the strip that we honest to god printed out, and should have been fired from our crappy jobs about it. Instead our boss said it was sent to “THE POLICE” in a hilarious note, like something illegal had happened.The bear thing keeps going. How long did we run with this? Only time will tell. This is one of the very rare times a character is show in anything other than the weird 3/4 perspective we used.
In 2002 my hobbies were playing The Legend of Zelda and DDR. But now I am a hundred years old and DDR no longer exists, or at least thankfully has gone so far out of style that I don’t see it anywhere anymore.
This post will arrive only three days into this endeavor. I originally thought I’d only post looking back once a week, but it’s quickly dawning on me that I want to get through at least this first part sooner rather than later. I will probably also have a few more strips ready to go on Thursday- though I think there’s another redaction coming up. Amazing how your sensitivities can change over time, or rather by just not being a POS teenager. There’s a reason so many supervillains clench their fists and yell “teenagers!” when their plans go awry.
I want to say this is the last appearance of Ganondorf, but also we never let a single thing die forever in this comic. We ran everything mercilessly into the ground with no regrets.I’m pretty sure my diet of 100% sugar and caffeine throughout my first twenty years on this planet contributed to my unhealthy love of all things bright and flashing. This made DDR both an inevitable and unfortunate pastime when it arrived at our local arcade. The most annoying, bright, and flashy song of 3rd Mix was a favorite of mine.An overly complex, nonsensical scheme to get myself out of a straightforward situation is either incredibly on-brand for me, or one of the many sitcom characters I have confused myself for throughout my own life.
Hoooo, boy. The first few were rough, and played as hard into the trope of what a bad webcomic could be as possible. Take two dudes who think they are funny then add specific video game knowledge to the mix and you get this.
One might think I would stop here. It would be fitting of what Flatliner was to give up early. However, giving up early was not actually what I ever did with Flatliner. In fact, I ran it into the ground so much that I’m still doing it to this day, right now, IN THIS POST.
Here we see something resembling a storyline start to form, where we thought it would be fun to train the villain from one of our favorite video games to scoop ice cream. I especially enjoy that there is an in-panel apology.
Later on in Flatliner’s run, I would divide the comic up into specific chapters/eras. This first chapter was titled “Hell Hath No Funny” and I stand by the re-appropriating of that idiom on the basis that it is not funny, and that female characters are scarce for a while.
Whoever said “there is no such thing as bad content” should have been kept away from sharp objects.It works as a long-ish way to describe a minimum wage job as a functioning hell, I guess.I could see a bit like this working in a better context, maybe with an original villainous type character.
