Hello readers! Ordinarily there are no updates on Fridays, but an enigmatic team of writers calling themselves “Jim and Davis” approached me and proposed to write Friday comics for me if I agreed to draw them. I accepted and for the foreseeable future this thing will be happening. Please enjoy them!
[BEGIN COMMENTARY]
Two things about this comic:
1.) Incredibly, the first panel is a true story. A friend of mine was driving back from Winnipeg when he noticed, of all things, a quilt in the ditch. He recovered it, cleaned it up, and gave it to his girlfriend as a gift. She knew full well where it came from (and was eventually the one to tell the rest of us this story). Later, they got married. So as much as I laugh, I suppose…it worked??
2.) It is finally time to talk about Jim & Davis. One night, my friends and I were hanging out and idly conversing. They (half-jokingly) suggest comic ideas to me all the time and are usually rejected outright. On this particular night I was feeling generous and somehow the idea of appropriating Jim Davis’ name to write mostly surreal, often punchline-free comics was…actually a little appealing. We brainstormed a bunch of ideas on the spot but I left it to two friends in particular to handle the actual writing.
For the next few weeks they’d send me things and I’d try my best to draw them. Outside of my friends these comics worked for basically nobody, and so I wasn’t entirely sad when we all sort of lost interest after a while. [October 7th, 2013]
If you’re wondering whether there is more background to this story I can confirm that there is not. This kid (he was high school age, but I’m old enough to call everybody “kid” now, so don’t take it personally) emailed me totally out of the blue and said I should write about him. Never met him before or since, but I admired his pluck and nobody’s ever tried asking straight up like that before. So I indulged him. However, the next person who tries is going to need to be much more convincing. [October 11th, 2013]
