I am going to presume T will talk about the Dexter thing in his portion of the writeup, so I’m gonna step back and wonder idly… does Shanna know what DeGrassi High is? The Fans universe has a lot of renamed pop culture stuff, like Startec instead of Star Trek and whatnot. I mean, she doesn’t need to know what it is for the joke to land, and in fact it’s probably even funnier. She does admittedly seem to know who Spaceman Spiff is, even if he appeared in a newspaper strip called, like, John and Calvin in her universe. I just wonder if it’s a television show where she’s from, or if it’s called DeGassy High or something shifted like that.
what’s t got to say
SHANNA: “You know, I’ve just lost all interest in newspaper comics since your cartoonist quit. [slowly turns to camera] Like all right-thinking people, I prefer webcomics. Sometimes I read them twice or three times, just to make sure I’ve clicked on every ad. I sure wish there was some kind of subscription-based patronage service, or maybe some crowd-supported burst of funding that kickstarts new projects, so I could support webcartoonists even more. They’re the real heroes here.”
MONKEY MASTER [with a calm that reflects 548 petaflops of quiet contemplation]: “Indeed.”
HEAD ALIEN: “Once I’m done ruling the world, I intend to give control of it to webcartoonists.”
MEIGHAN: “You know, I’b agtually a webgomigs publisher. Seriously, my lasd abbearance in Fans before dis was aboud tryig to get VC fundig for id.”
HEAD ALIEN: “Well, why didn’t you say so? Monkey Master, cut her down immediately! How many zeroes do you want on this check?”
Loading ...
Saving up for The Sound of Music? Or did he give that up after Joyce?
Originally Posted:
April 29, 2003
My favorite alternate universe name for Calvin & Hobbes was Luther & Locke, I think from Bill Amend.
That commentary is making me imagine that, before Roomies!, H.A. worked at Shortpacked to fund his world domination schemes.
Somehow I can’t see Galasso tolerating a rival to world domination for more than five minutes. Then again, maybe it’d have made them besties.
For the record, I assumed at the time it was a reference to Dexter’s Lab, which is about a short guy who wears gloves and boots and a coat that buttons all the way off to one side.
Yeah, me too. It fits in nicely with Shanna’s mockery to compare him to a little cartoon kid with delusions of grandeur.
I was wondering why HA was called Dexter in Dumbing of Age.
Also, Calvin and Hobbes is probably my favorite newspaper comic. Nowadays I prefer webcomics, but I still read newspaper comics as well because there’s still some good ones out there and the first comics I read were newspaper comics.
As a lefty, I shoulda caught that “Dexter” namenclature (sic). But you know.us sinister types.
Sinestral. “Sinister” is derived from the Latin for left-handed, but that Latin is “Sinestral” according to one of my Public High School teachers. He was one of the interesting ones…
Wouldn’t the opposite of Sinistral be Dextral?
Making anyone watch Degrassi High videos is just plain cruel, especially the next generation stuff with Drake! Dexter really is an cruel evil genius after all!
Shanna may be from a timeline where big art books of great vintage newspaper comic can be found at the library. Where else is someone gonna learn about Krazy Kat?
Willis, your guest strip for Randy Milholland was aces.
We have those books in OUR universe, so… But when did she mention Krazy Kat?
Never. That’s just a throw-in I made for the youths who have given up on today’s business-card-sized comic strips in newspapers.
There used to be room, and artists who knew what to do with it. Today,not so much. All the creativity is in webcomics or zines.
At least most of the old strips, including Krazy, have been collected in big books now. I can find most of then at my library.
Interesting… Are they from the Dumbingverse then? If they know Head Alien as ‘Dexter’?
Shanna doesn’t know the Head Alien. She’s just being dismissive.
(The Dumbiverse has Star Trek, not Startec anyway.)
In what way is calling him Dexter dismissive?
It’s basically a fancy way of saying “Whatever, righty,” referring to the fact that he is quite literally right-handed – his left “hand” is just a claw.
(“Dexter” is Latin for “right”.)
Also “Dexter” can be short for “Poindexter,” which is another word for “nerd.”
I thought it was just the generic thing of calling someone the wrong name to get under their skin, but this all makes a lot of sense.
For the record, the whole “everything is an off-brand version of itself” thing in Fans! got phased out pretty much around this time. In part 6, the sequel / soft reboot, it name-checks Steven Colbert on the second page.
Well, since he’s Stephen Colbert in our universe, I’d say that at least still counts as an “off-brand” version.
I haven’t read Fans yet, but now I’m picturing an episode of Masterpiece Science Theater 30,000 in which Htom Servaugh tries to convince everyone his name has been changed to Tom Servo, and another where Escobar has a midlife crisis and wants to be called Crow.
Just in case things aren’t confusing enough, the TVTropes page for Dexter and Monkey Master (because that’s a thing that exists, obviously) claims that the name comes from a fanfic of the original Head Alien comic book, where it caught on amongst the fandom before being canonised by the cartoon.
So that’s a fan theory that an official name that was a fan nickname in the previous universe before being briefly canonised as a dismissive nickname here was an in-universe fan nickname before being canonised in the current universe, where there is no canon evidence it was ever anything but a canon name in-universe. I hope that’s clear.
Please explain in more detail.
Did Willis just reference “The Devil is a Part-Timer” in his commentary?