Author: Bowie

No one of consequence

Lusty and clear from the goatherd’s throat

If pressed I could probably come up with a sandwich worse than the one Mandy orders. there’s nothing particular that is wrong about any of the ingredients, but they certainly don’t belong together. There might be some far-flung Thanksgiving dish that employs both mushroom and raisins out there, but you lost me at Thanksgiving.

This is still all very first-episode clunky. Todd is an exposition sounding board. The fact that Marty has not brought up this obsession with Mandy to him prior to this doesn’t work very well, but we have to get our information about what is happening with the main character somewhere.

With Marty every situation is immediately intense. To him, every action has an equal but opposite overreaction. I think I may have actually used those words to describe him in some of the notes and other materials I had while fleshing this out.

Life keeps rolling along despite objections

When all the strips are lined up, rather than 3 per week at most, it becomes a lot more obvious that it was a weird time where everything was changing. I’m piecing all the specifics of this era together, but it’s getting hazy. I’m 20 years old when these strips are drawn. I’ll be just shy of 39 when they post to RIS. I guess this is just one of those days where it feels discomforting.

I’m definitely still in my slump of that era. The typeface tells me immediately that Harvest made the Captain Shotgun strip and the Marvin Gaye strip. The middle one is me and doesn’t ring funny in any way right now.

I’m looking forward to this chapter ending and getting into The Cancelled Years, which ditches a lot of the reality-based jokes for a more experimental long form thing for a bit. In true Flatliner style it does fizzle out into nothing and things return to normal, but it’s there. For a while I had forgotten that the chapter that follows that had even existed, so that will be an interesting read.

I don’t remember having this range of emotional complexity at this age
I assume the shirt says “douche” but maybe it’s mis-spelled? Recent strips have me questioning my vision.
Had they really been together a year with so few Gina appearances? Seems odd.

One little girl in a pale pink coat

Hello all! I’ve just spent about two days smacking my head against the wall over the navigation on this site. A Flatliner would roll into a Gurnal would roll into a bonus, and that’s not how things were intended to work. Fortunately, there ended up being a simple fix once I figured out the correct term to search. Congratulations to me three weeks ago! (Yeah, we are already that far ahead.)

There’s clunky dialog on this page that not only provides too much exposition, it provides to much exposition about something that is entirely meaningless- which is to say why Todd is there. Todd is there in this scene for Marty to bounce dialog off of, but the bulk of the dialog is explaining why he’s there. I hate it. No congratulations to me 8 years ago.

It sorts of redeems itself- Marty does not care AT ALL what they are talking about when Mandy arrives. Todd could have been talking about Marty’s sick grandmother and Marty’s brain still would have flushed out all sense of anything that was going on. This is an immediately unhealthy obsession.

I’m not sure what the long term plan for Marty and Mandy was. If I were going to write more of this now it wouldn’t be a will they/won’t they. It would probably be a “they won’t” but maybe Mandy, despite her apparent aloofness may become more of a mentor to Marty? Not without Marty screwing up a potato sack race or something first, for sure.

Respalted

Agh, the bad semester. I will never forget the professor who removed me from her class basically because I disagreed with her opinions that she backed up with magazine clippings from 1988.

I can’t read the Harvest epitaph but it’s not like it’s the first or only time we were depicted as dead. My character seemed to only ever have his last words as his epitaph, which is pretty decent if slightly cartoonish way to go.

I’m so glad that the “Spalt” typo all the way from HHNF gets a call back. Typos annoyed me intensely at the time, so it’s amazing I didn’t do a pixel-by-pixel edit to the original strip. As far as these strips look now, this second one is somehow brighter and clearer than its predecessor, and I have no idea why.

Good old Community College is a prison joke. It was actually the best part of college. Had my social anxiety taken a slightly quieter back seat, I may have even enjoyed going to the place. Shoutout to Massasoit Community College in Brockton, MA. Your reputation betrays you!

Unintentional story
Just mirroring real life
I cut a non-funny gun violence strip that was truly for an audience of one. You won’t miss it.

and celebrate bad times (if you can)

What a joyous start to the 2004 strips. Harvest came out with this tidbit of info for no reason at some point and no one in the world let him forget it. I’m not even sure which character specifically that is talking to him. I think it’s Lanny, but it’s actually funnier if we don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Everyone talked about it, a lot.

I apparently went through a dry spell in mid-January, which makes complete sense thinking about my life situation at the time. I’m pretty sure the whole year was weird for me and then also the rest of my life until right now and probably well beyond this moment.

Missed opportunity to just paste the sun from Mario 3. Although, I don’t think we ever once directly used a video game sprite. That makes us an oddity at the time. Maybe even retcons some integrity onto the whole thing? That or we did and I’ve forgotten.

Frequent topic of conversation
But, have you heard about it?
I cut the build-up to this. This holds up just as poorly either way.

celebrate good times (when you have to)

It’s looking like the end of 2003 was a little depressing in Flatliner land. I recall where things were IRL so a lot of this tracks. College was boring me to death, I was living in a small town in Massachusetts that prides itself on being boring, and loneliness was something I was particularly bad at dealing with. Don’t worry, though. Things have changed! Now my job is boring me to death.

Sorry to Christmas you all in August, or ever for that matter. Anyway, see you all for the 2004 strips, starting tomorrow!

It’s hard to imagine this conversation only happening once, actually
If I recall correctly, Harvest was talking about making this one long in advance
These days I’m psyched not to be invited to parties

In the midst of a table d’hote

They say that the best writing comes from personal experience, so you can see why I have no idea how to write about someone who loves their job. Flynn just tells Marty he’s doing well and leaves to do paper work. At the sandwich shop. Do sandwich shops have a lot of daytime paper work? I don’t know, I’ve never worked at a sandwich shop.

Oh, sure, I’ve worked at ice cream shops. Two of ’em. And while there was paper work in ice cream, I assume it was of an increased magnitude being as ice cream is more fun than sandwiches. So let’s assume sandwich shops have less paper work than ice cream shops because ice cream shops are more fun.

Whatever the amount of paper work there is, and again, it is minimal since sandwiches are less fun than ice cream, and there isn’t that much paper work with the ice cream to begin with, it only serves to have Flynn exit as quickly as he entered and skip us on to the next scene. We now know Marty is a bad employee and that he can get away with anything. Let’s watch some more

7:15 AM, More than 4 months til Christmas

And lo, a one-panel filler strip gets thrown into the fire, never to return because it wasn’t funny to begin with and the line-crossing didn’t improve it- the same way it never does. Then there’s this Hussein strip, which feels a little bad-taste-ish but here we are.

I saw Return of the King with Jake before going in to work a half shift at TS Toys that day. He gave me some kind of pill that had to be purchased on the internet so the legality of the substance was questionable. Pretty sure I wasn’t drinking at all yet so this was quite the deviation from the norm for me. While watching the film I became utterly convinced that a suit of armor in the background of a scene was a robot, and therefore this movie has Pirates, Wizards, and Robots- the three ingredients for a perfect film. And it was!

The icon on the drum set is a face drawn by a professor from college. She was trying to tell me that I was so frustratingly bad at doing my work that she might crap her pants in rage. She might have been my favorite college professor.

Sometimes we were timely and those comics don’t hold up differently than how the others don’t
He worked in a grocery store deli and was a union member. He could have called out
Whole say

Loud was the voice

There’s almost certainly no limit on what I meant by “prolonged chase.” There could have been any amount of time used or level of violence utilized. I imagine that the only correct answer is also deemed “too long” by many others.

I’m truly hoping I did not follow up on the pigtailed girl at all. It really has to be a one and done thing to keep it as funny as I’m imagining. I have a history of disappointing myself like this, so she’ll probably be back.

I’ve had calculator watches on my mind lately for no real reason. I think Marty would be a calculator watch guy. I say this like it’s some important thing of note. Marty’s calculator watch would definitely need a button pressed to show the time. That wouldn’t be on by default.

I named the sandwich guy Ferdinand Flynn, I guess. With a name like that he deserves to get an eponymous prequel where he’s a treasure hunter.

Learning, Returning, Yearning

Ryan wins the day again. I love that his strips are often demonstrative and full of information, usually to prove next to nothing of a point. He had maybe enough of distaste for negative space that you might say it was a vendetta.

There’s nothing new in the sledding comic. Sledding has at this point in Flatliner already lead to our non-first premature deaths, but Harvest loved it. He loved it above all other things. I’m reasonably certain that the reason he is running around with some non-zero number of children these days is that having them would be an excuse to continue sledding without having to worry about aging out of the activity.

Does the art look weird in the last strip? It’s hard to ever tell that in Flatliner. As usual an appearance of Jon can only lead to Jon/Harvest coupling. There’s more context to this that isn’t shown in the strip. We rightfully assumed anyone who read this knew the inner workings of our whole lives. Gina fully takes the reins of her character at some point down the line, hopefully soon.

The duplicate warnings about time travel are a nice touch
As Selena Gomez might say, “Lather, rinse, repeatpeatpeatpeatpeat”
The bubble pipe is the best part