The Deep End
on March 6, 2013 at 12:01 amJoe is mimicking the art style of other comic strips on the page. The first two get named, but the last is a second reference to Doog and Blair.
I’ve mentioned previously that I was mostly drawing these comics in a vacuum. Look, nobody cares about the comics page in a newspaper unless you’re 65, and this was a college campus. But I got my second bit of feedback ever on this strip. I was sitting in the dining hall, and I overheard two other students talking about Roomies!. “Looks like he’s run out of ideas,” one said.
At the time, I was sitting on all this tremendous Ruth stuff I had recently brainstormed, but I couldn’t start building up to that until the next school year. And so part of me raged. I had buttloads of ideas! I just can’t do them right now and I’m spinning my wheels until school lets out! The other part of me agreed that fourth-wall-breaking was pretty damn lame. It is. There are interesting ways for a comic strip to break the fourth wall, but Bloom County did them all thirty times over already.
(Which is why so many webcomics break the fourth wall. We all grew up reading Bloom County. Fourth-wall-breaking jokes are the equivalent of having a fan character who looks suspiciously like Sonic the Hedgehog.)
Anyway, feedback sucks.
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Haters are a superstitious and cowardly lot.
So that’s why Willis became Amazigirl!
Is it just me, or has something gone HORRIBLY WRONG with Joe’s eye in the fourth panel beyond just concentrating? Because it’s pretty bad.
While you were breaking the fourth wall, you might as well have one of your characters mention that this was filler week/month/whatever.
Looks like that’s not the only thing you ripped.
“Bloom County was awash with pop references and celebrity mockery, largely because those beguiling assets were virtually absent from comedic media at the time. But just look at us now. No, it’s not my &@%# fault.”
The title of this comic is tounge in cheek as not only the name of one of the charades but also fits into this weird drop in story in favor of 4th wall jokes (ie. off the deep end)
Hey, my fan character looks nothing like Sonic the Hedgehog!
He looks like Silver the Hedgehog! Get your facts straight, hater!
Too bad the younger David Willis hadn’t come up with the idea for toy jokes yet. If younger Willis couldn’t come up with a filler arc that was better than this, he deserved that feedback. Though scheduling limitations do suck, so I’ll cut younger Willis some slack on that.
hang on, this is genuinely funny…comic strip characters can do “impressions” of other comic strips by mimicking the art styles. That’s pretty clever I think!
Originally posted:
April 17, 1998