So, there are several reasons for the recent delays in me posting strips, and in the next few the strips are gonna get a bit meta and start explaining some of the thought behind the strips. One reason for the delay, though, is that I’ve been writing a bunch of shorter strips that weren’t really part of Damaged Goods or anything, but that I just wanted to do, and I decided at this point it would be a good place in the story to do a bunch of them.
Several of them, like this one in particular that mentions Mitt Romney, are a bit timely, and if I didn’t do them now I might not ever do them. Sometimes I come up with an idea for a strip, and then it sits on the shelf forever until I get around to it, and when there’s something topical in it it then ends up going through several iterations. The strips I posted about turning 28 was originally about turning 27, and it sat around long enough that when I did it I had to change the number. The Carnac homage joke I did a while ago originally had another name in there for the slut joke, and went through a few iterations of slut until, when I finally illustrated it, Kim Kardashian seemed like the slut du jour, so I put her name in there even though I don’t think anybody knew who she was when I originally wrote the strip.
This one though, I particularly wanted to say that there’s something wrong with anybody who would vote for Romney, and, although I’m sure there will be other idiot Republicans in the years to come, I particularly wanted to say that about him. Also, the fourth and, let’s hope to God, the last Twilight movie is coming out soon, so if I waited on that I would have lost my last chance to make fun of those movies with this particular joke.
I’ll go into this more as it goes along, but I think I had a bit of a breakthrough about Damaged Goods. I love the big epic plans that I’m working on for my characters and that I always allude to, but I think I’ve realized that I was sacrificing something by tying myself in bit to tightly to that. If I came up with a joke or a strip that didn’t fit within the framework of Damaged Goods, I’ve been setting it aside and figuring that I’ll get to it later. That was starting to make me frustrated with Damaged Goods, though, when it should be something that I’m excited about. When I tried to make myself sit down to do the strip that should come next in that story chronologically, I was also thinking, but what about this other thing I want to do… If Damaged Goods has, say, 250 strips, and I wait until I finish it until I work on this other thing, that means this other thing is at least a year and a half away in the pipeline.
The whole high concept of A Waste of Time- Or, one of the several high concepts, as I take myself extremely seriously- is that it’s supposed to be an umbrella concept that drifts in and out of fantasy, and thus allows me to write about whatever I want to write about, write about all the things I’m interested in and passionate about. Sometimes it can be very autobiographical, but then it can get off on tangents about Rickets and Prester, etc. I realized that, by tying myself too strictly to finishing one thing before I work on another, it removes some of the freedom that allows these strips to flow out of me. So, this has been a balance I’ve been struggling to find all along, and sometimes that resulted in storylines being started in the middle and posted all out of order, etc. I don’t want to do that anymore, I want to at least tell a particular story in the order it’s supposed to go in, but I’ve decided I want to allow myself more freedom to post asides and tangents. So, right now we’re in the middle of the first chapter of Damaged Goods, The Children of Marx and Lady Gaga, but I’m gonna post some strips that are one-offs and not necessarily part of that.
I think that, when I collect Damaged Goods, I’ll probably release some other magazines or collections that contain all the other stuff, and Damaged Goods will just be the strips that are relevant and designed to go there. So, reading along on this website, you’ll get that big adventure that my characters are setting off on- You will, really, even though I know I’ve been alluding to that long enough that when I mention it now some people are probably rolling their eyes, just like they probably roll their eyes when they see the optimistic ”Updates Monday/Wednesday/Friday” projection on the banner on the top of this page- and then, you’ll also get asides and other random strips and drawings. I’ll just try to place them at breaks in the story, so it doesn’t make things too confusing to read as you scroll through the archives, which were a mess for a long time and which I’ve been working to make more cohesive. So, we’ll see how this all works out.
