All dressed in their Sunday best, I suppose…?

It was sort of a long way to go for a punchline which isn’t exactly guaranteed to cause the slapping of knees… but hey, you get a tiny bit of history and education along with your mild entertainment. What’s not to like?

I doubt I’ll ever be up to the challenge of doing a “rolling punchline” or “joke barrage” like Shamus Young is so fond of, but I love working extra jokes into a comic wherever I can…

And we’re back! Did you miss us?

Don’t worry, Rusty will come around. He enjoys the limelight too much not to.

…

I couldn’t resist the running element of having one balloon in each of the first three panels pointing to an off-screen character. Heck of a way to get back in the saddle, eh?

Realizing that I’d painted myself into a corner, I wondered: How do I either extend this or get out of it entirely?

Once again, the bookshelf saved me… somewhat. I couldn’t find a way to make funny the buildup to Sachiko’s version of the punchline, though. So I stewed, and pondered, and wandered off for a while, and read half of a book about the planet Earth, and then it hit me.

Do what the Pythons did!

Of course! And if this series of comics has got entirely too silly, well… the rest sort of wrote itself. By which I mean I oh-so-cleverly adapted The Colonel’s bits out of the classic “Full Frontal Nudity” episode from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

One should pay proper homage to the classics, I figure.

(Speaking of which: I tried, I really tried, to work another bit of that episode into this comic… but I just couldn’t see Sachiko complaining, “But it’s my only line!”)

Every now and then I must challenge myself. This one involved finding a way to prop up the purple duck in such a way that he didn’t look too much like he was leaning against the desk edge (he wasn’t) but without giving away the propping materials themselves. After some experimentation, I balanced him on a book (to give him the necessary height off of the keyboard shelf) and a small flashlight (to get the correct angle so we could see his face in the shot as he “fell.”)

And yes, that means he actually fell an even shorter distance than Roger claims. See what happens when we peel away the curtain and reveal how the movie magic works?

Also: I know. I changed the dialog from the movie, just a bit. I couldn’t find a way to introduce Roger and Neil and work some proper blasphemy into mix, other than maybe having the ducks argue the relative merits of David Lee Roth versus Sammy Hagar in Van Halen. Something like that would’ve entailed a wall of text, and I’d have lost my closing panel. (I adore that closing panel, I don’t care what anybody else thinks. So there.)

Also also: When you’re done here, maybe you should check out 300 in Fifteen Minutes. I do believe you’ll find yourself some funny in there, if you like poking well-meaning fun at movies.

…

I could’ve gone for tax-related humor for April 15th, but coming up with something funny about the federal revenue system would’ve been too taxing for my feeble mind. So you get my take on an overused movie meme, instead. Lucky you, eh?

(Taxing. Hah.)

Mostly this just was an excuse to use one of the new ducks I’ve picked up lately.

Oh, who am I kidding? This was an excuse to use Bob again. I just love a character that I don’t have to write actual dialog elements for…

This one’s an example of why I need to start planning these out a bit better before shooting: I intended a three-panel joke setup with a kicker, sure, but I didn’t actually have the kicker figured out in advance so I had to come up with one during assembly. And… I’m not really happy with it. It’s pretty obvious where I tried to go with it, but the journey isn’t actually funny.

Mind you, I also need to get more on the ball about comic production so I’m not assembling during the 10-o’clock hour on a Sunday night, either. (I goofed off a bit during the afternoon when I could’ve been fixing up today’s comic, then the Sunday night gaming session went way damned long…)

These two aren’t necessarily Roger’s ideal audience: They don’t really react as well as a good, self-respecting punster would hope.

(What do you mean, “no such thing as a self-respecting punster”?!?)

Merry Christmas, everybody!

…

We’ll deal with the new guy on Monday… and we’re back on a normal schedule after this! Mondays and Thursdays from now until the next time I get a crazy notion to mess around with things.

(Whew. Could I have more tags on one comic post? Yikes.)