You have a certain… way with people.
on December 21, 2017 at 12:01 amChapter: Social Darwinism
Characters: Dina Sarazu, Joe Rosenthal
Location: SEMME downtown housing building
- here we see joe deducing that dina is also into the ladies before everyone else
- Don’t copy-paste your properly-capitalized dialogue into a comic book typeface. You’ll end up improperly giving words that begin with capital I, like the “It’d” in panel two, serifs. Those should be reserved for the pronoun “I.” Anywhere else, the Capital I should just be an unadorned stick. Some free font advice from me.
- Here we see Dina more rigorously embodying my own growing anxiety about how terrible I am at interacting with people, and the exponential anxiety side dish that comes with that when one realizes that, actually, you were terrible at interacting with people all along and you never had a clue. Joe, of course, feels like the antithesis of that. I’d say he is, but, well, sometimes Joe is pretty terrible at interaction, even though he’s assumed to be a smooth-talkin’ ladies man. It is distinctly possible that Joe is how someone who isn’t good at human interaction would write someone who is supposed to be good at human interaction.
Whipped cream again?
Well it was 2003, whipped cream bikinis were still a thing…thankfully they have given way to body shots and other things
Thankfully? But I *like* whipped cream.
And other delights, I’m sure.
Peanut butter for the lactose intolerant, Joe really wasn’t much for thinking ahead on allergies and other food intolerances.
I hate the logic with putting serifs on capital I (or not) with typefaces
maybe why I insist on hand-lettering
In contrast, worrying about including or excluding serifs for certain words seems like one of those incredibly pointless arbitrary English rules to me, which I always imagine being handed down like the ten commandments by a league of pith-helmeted wearing handlebar moustached safari men on Mount Olympus in Medieval England (they relocated the mountain there for convenience, you see, incidentally causing countless generations of war), so I ignore that silly rule and put serifts on all my capital Is (even by hand) because that makes it easier to tell they are Is and not lowercase ls.
My lowercase Ls are just short capital Ls
Fair enough.
Most of Joe’s social interaction is for the purpose of having sex with women, so it doesn’t surprise me that Joe thinks that’s what Dina meant in the first panel.
Of course this is the only plotting Joe does, ergo we get a fingertent (variant) from him.
“Or hide under a pile of coats and maybe someone’ll come talk to you about dinosaurs. Either way.”
“a giant toe might be involved”
Joe deserves credit for being sneaky there in getting Dina to get angry enough to yell at him, she wouldn’t have taken him seriously otherwise
So, the mystery of Joe Rosenthal is at least partly explained. It isn’t that he’s particularly misogynistic or even particularly aggressive in sexual terms. It’s just that everything is about him. Everything is about him, his desires, his perception of people and the sound of his own voice.
Some people are social generalists, capable of relatively smooth interactions in almost any situation with almost anyone. (The word “relatively” is key there, because any interaction depends on the social abilities of both parties and there will always be some social types that naturally have friction with each other.)
Joe is not that. Joe is extremely well-adapted to dealing with women who want guilt-free sex with no commitments and no games, and struggles with almost everyone else. Joyce (either version) and Dorothy (DoA version), for all their neurotic moments, are considerably closer to being social generalists that Joe ever was.
Serifs on the capital i are important in more cases than a single i. I challenge you to determine why this may be important to me on a personal level.
Thing I’m getting from this is that Joe did this on purpose. He wanted her to end his railroad speech by making herself loud so that, as he said, she’d make herself noticed.
… or so goes Joe’s ret-con.
Nah. I don’t think you’re giving him enough credit. Womanizer or not, Joe is a friggin’ genius.
Originally posted:
April 10, 2003