This strip always amused us as it was the first strip the newspaper ever ran a footnote with. A footnote for what, you may ask? To explain what temporal physics was. In fact, it so baffled the staff (with the apparent exception of the Editor-in-Chief) that the footnote contained a web site that readers could visit to read up more on the subject. Professor Hobo, educating young minds one scientific field at a time.
If Rick is supposed to be so dumb (and he isn’t just supposed to be, he really is), then why does he instantly know what a temporal physics lab is when real college students do not? Was Rick just pretending he knew? Is he really not that dumb? Or was this whole incident a comment on Murray State’s students?
No other strip has sat in our notebook longer than the Racer One strip. It was one of the first strips I ever wrote, but it was far from football season when it was written. So we simply tucked it aside and waited for a better time to run it. It has probably gone down so far as our most successful strip among students. We’re not sure what that says about school pride or animal rights.
The little boy and mother featured in the fourth panel are also the same ones from this strip from the previous semester. This kid gets a lot of punch lines for a rarely recurring character.
Well, this is the most controversial strip that we’ve ever done. What we thought was a simple play on words ignited the anger of at least one homosexual on campus. We were even compared to murderers and said to be inciting acts of hate against gays. It also has gone down as one of our most successful strips that people continue to compliment.
Besides missing the point, that this is no more violent toward homosexuals than showing a girl slapping a guy is violent toward heterosexuals, we think it is ironic that many miss another hint about Rick’s confusion in life. Is he, or isn’t he?
There isn’t much to say about this strip, it is all pretty much there on the page. We had long thought about doing a joke about the Greek ads for parties than ran in the paper, but we were never quite sure which way to approach it. Of course, Mr. Mittens provided the perfect opportunity. This was also the first strip in which we gave a name to Megan’s character.
All the names in the ad are of friends of ours, but more often missed are the things that Mr. Mittens is carrying. Assorted items include a saw, fishing pole, and treasure map.
We’re the first to admit this probably isn’t one of our best strips. Usually, one of our strips fail, it is because we have spent far too much time rewriting it over and over again and in the process kill the joke by trying to get the wording exact. This one was the opposite. We basically had no rewrites. It still makes us laugh, but there is an inside joke there.
This was the third appearance for the female professor character. She was originally created for the Valentine’s Day strip, brought back once more for the staff meeting, but we weren’t sure if we’d really use her much. She appeared in the next week’s strip and became an essential character.
We really wanted to use the “popular guy” character more (he would later become Rick). So we thought a good way was to make him give campus tours. It could even be a recurring theme throughout the strip, if we ever had problems coming up with an idea for an idea one week. It may be the first real time we portrayed him as completely absent minded.
The character of Jean-Luc Seltzer is an homage to a friend of ours. Our friend is really tall so the character will not fit height wise in one panel. Also, he was given the first name of Jean-Luc since our friend is a big Star Trek fan.
We wanted to do a strip for Spring Break, and several ideas floated around about what to do. We decided we’d show what all of our characters we’re doing for the break, and so we brought back the Jolly 4 Jesus guy as well as Racer Patrol. Cancun seemed to be the big destination that year, so we chose it and off we went. It was also one of Mr. Mitten’s first big roles.
Missed by probably everyone who didn’t live in White College at some point in their life, the reason Racer Patrol chose White College’s air conditioner to bust was because it was always broken anyway. In three years of living there I never figured out why, and it seemed as good an explanation as any.
Facebook
Funny or Die
Google Plus
Twitter
Viddler
Vimeo
YouTube