This one evolved in a weird way. My first shot at this strip this ended without the reveal. The caller was just a moron of completely unrealistic proportions, and was really doing the things described, and that was the punchline. Unsure about it, I ran it by both Rob and my wife, neither of whom liked it. So I shelved it for a few days. At some random moment I started thinking about it again, and the revenge twist occurred to me, which brings the story back to the land of the possible and gives it an extra punch. So I changed the third panel, and here it is.
MRS. SHOEBOX’S ASSESSMENT OF TODAY’S STRIP (first draft): Weird.
MRS. SHOEBOX’S ASSESSMENT OF TODAY’S STRIP (final): Very amusing!
In other news, I’ll be appearing at Pi-Con in Enfield, CT August 20-22. I’ll be performing as Worm Quartet alongside several of my fellow funny musicians from The FuMP, and I will also – for the first time – be appearing on a couple of webcomics panels. Be gentle.
Oh, and the webcomics guest of honor is Rob Balder. Remember him from the pre-stinkchunnel days? He’s apparently doing some comic with cutesy misspelled mythical beasts and stuff now.
See you next week!
-=ShoEboX=-
I like amusement, especially when it’s in the form of a comic with a tech writer named Carl.
It’s like two punchlines in one comic!
(Which is how it should be.)
What exactly is a tech writer? I get the general idea here, they laid him off so now he pesters them with hilarious fake customer calls of an idiotic nature.. which, by the way, was hilarious enough on its own in my opinion.. this makes it even better. Glad to know you put so much work into this.
Technical writing – These are the people who write user manuals, among other things.
I haven’t had that job myself, but I’ve seen enough examples of tech writing (through the whole spectrum of quality, from competent to omigawdicouldatrainedasquirreltowritethisbetter) to know that a good tech writer is worth keeping around, even if their effect on the “bottom line” is not so obvious. Of course, Carl might just be an jerkwad, too.
“Pre-stinkchunnel days”? Maybe we should have a standard term for that era, like “Before Stinkchunnel”. And we could abbreviate that, and say that everything in PartallyClips before ShoEboX took over was B. …
Um, nevermind. -_-
At the second panel i thought it was going to be a reference to the Flash’s cosmic treadmill, and the punchline would be something to the effect of the manual explicitly that the comapny is not responsible for translocations in space or time if you exceed light speed. So the actual denoument was something of a disappointment.
I get it now XD either he’s trying to let them know they should have kept him around because they need to keep writing longer manuals, or he was already putting in hilarious warnings and now he’s letting them know why..
I love this one! If I end up getting a job as a technical writer (one of the things I thought I might actually succeed at for a career) and get laid off for not being worth the cost of keeping me on, this is so what I expect to do!