Sunday, June 26, 2005 :::

my reaction exactly
 

I belong to drew's mailing list... I sincerely love his comic and his column, and his emails are always fun and make me smile if not laugh.

slate has an article about drew... and I thought it was really cool 'cause the d00d who wrote it describes things that I went through when I was first introduced to toothpaste for dinner by my friend sam [thanks sam!].
anyhow... here are the highlights, according to me, of the article.

"The characters all have oblong heads, three-fingered hands, and stacked eyes like flounders. They are noseless and earless and always on the brink of perspectival disaster. The handwritten text that sometimes dominates the drawings often flirts with illegibility. The art is so bad it suggests some kind of tragic and inspiring back story: an artist soldiering bravely on after losing his thumbs in a bear attack or a factory accident...
When I first Google-stumbled onto the site, I abandoned the urgent project I was researching and spent all day reading the archive, in which glorified stick figures launch into casually cerebral soliloquies about hamsters, hipsters, and office life in Columbus, Ohio. Soon I had a serious habit, using the comics as my desktop wallpaper, monitoring their daily updates, and forwarding my favorites to friends...
It's an exercise in virtual behaviorism: Like rats in a Skinner Box, we click and get an instant reward. Even its inconsistency makes it more clickable; it's an old chestnut of behaviorism that the best way to cause an addiction is not through consistent payoff but through what psychologists call a "variable ratio schedule"�a powerful reward (food pellet, good joke) unpredictably dispensed..."


david used to give me a lot of shit about my affection for the comic... he even went so far as to make a mockery of it by doing his own comic - his impression of drew's art, and also a certain drawing that he made because I bought a toothpaste for dinner tshirt (which I promptly turned into a tshirt and ordered).

today's comic:



and another of my favorites:



david's impression:


::: posted by tinafish at 5:50 PM :::