PITCHER: Unpopular and Undead

What can I say about this? I took an unflattering picture of myself and photoshopped the shit out of it. Then I added a silly slogan and I posted it here:

COMIC: The Chop-Busters in CRISIS IN LATE NIGHT! With Special Guest Star Conan O'Brien!

So the other day I had one of those things where I sleep through a whole day and then wake up and the whole world has gone insane. Except instead of the whole world it's usually something to do with television. This time it seemed NBC had pushed Conan O'Brien too far in their sucking of Jay Leno's ass and Conan had decided to walk rather than see the Tonight Show pushed to 12:05 AM the next day. (What I haven't yet seen mentioned ANYWHERE is the fact (which I first read about when Conan first started on the Tonight Show) that one of his predecessors, Jack Paar, walked off in the middle of a broadcast over a censored joke and didn't come back for a month. Also interesting that no one has yet mentioned Conan's Late Night predecessor David Letterman leaving NBC over their giving the Tonight Show to Leno instead of him (and of course he started a competing show on CBS.) What I'm saying is NBC has a history of abusing talk show hosts and sucking Leno's ass. (Also I have read the censored joke and it is rather tame but quite amusing.))

Anyway, I had a silly idea when everyone started rallying around Conando that it might be neat to do a comic about it. I always have ideas for JB:MG stories where I confront some element of our culture which I have a problem with and then yell at it and then something violent and weird usually happens to wrap things up, this seemed perfect for that. But I didn't want to take too long off of Santa Claus Conquers the Saturnians to do it (and I couldn't be sure that the whole thing wouldn't resolve itself in a day) so it had to be as short as possible. So I wrote it and somehow it became a crossover event (which I've been wanting to do another crossover for awhile) and it also became the origin of a super-team. As is emblematic of my style but also due to the rushed working pace, the characters move as little as possible and some don't move at all (Conan for one.) But I did spend far too long designing a really awesome window shaped like the NBC logo which I will never be able to use for anything ever again. So yay me.

Here it is, in three parts:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three

The Doodoo Butter Invasion

[These Twitter posts have been modified from their original version. New material not in the Twitter posts has been added for this release.]

So I've been gone a couple days and not working on my comics or anything because I had a problem with my place and had to stay at my mom's house for a couple days while it was sorted.

What was the problem? I won't tell you because it is disgusting. Let's just say the shit hit the fan. And by "shit" I mean "the septic tank," and by "hit the fan" I mean "filled my bathtub with sewage and clearly not all of it was mine because I never eat corn and it looked like somebody had emptied some hamster litter in their toilet because I'm pretty sure I saw wood shavings."

Okay so I guess I will tell you. Almost (almost) worse than the bathtub full of rancid feces (there was some water in there, too. Then it drained out and THAT was when things got truly vile.) was the smell, which filled the rest of the house. And it was cold as hell outside so I had to choose between cold and poo gas while waiting someone to pick me up because I don't have a car. I chose poo gas. I evacuated to the furthest part of the house from the gas and I don't really have a great sense of smell anyway. Plus you get used to the smell. My brain did anyway, but my nausea didn't go away until later that night well after I got out of the smell. I went outside to take a Netflix DVD to the mailbox and when I went back in it was like smelling it for the first time. Later I ducked out for just a few seconds and again it was fresh and funky.

TMI right? WELL YOU WILL LISTEN BECAUSE I AM STILL PISSED OFF ABOUT IT.

Anyway after about forty-five minutes my mom showed up to pick me up and we (she, I stood behind the bathroom door as if afraid a dookie monster was going to erupt from the tub and attack) cleaned the crap off the tub (this was after the water had drained out) and made animal sacrifice to the god Doodoocaca that no further feces would encroach on the tub (okay so that last part is not true). We then got the hell out of there.

So what had happened was that the assfaces who run my trailer park have too many people on this one septic tank and they failed to pump it out in a timely fashion. Right before I moved in there had been a problem with it and they pumped it out, then we found out a while later that they didn't connect it right and all my leavings were just going on the ground under my trailer. But that only stank up one room. (The one I never use, conveniently enough.) After my mom argued with the manager about it (he initially refused to believe that there was a problem at all) he finally conceded and checked the tank, which was reportedly brimming with number twos. (During this whole process I was watching Law and Order reruns at my mom's house.)

After a day or two he finally had it pumped out and we reentered the house, with no further fecal leavings in the tub and the smell had dissipated. What concerns me is that this is the sort of behavior that repeats itself. I have been assured by more rational forces (not the trailer park management, those guys don't know their ass from a hole in the ground) that the tank will take at least a couple of months to fill again and I am assured by my own fine self that I know to recognize certain telltale signs in future (a mysterious bubbling noise, the tub failing to drain properly during a shower) that will warn me ahead of time if the tank may be getting full, but my mind keeps coming back to this point of order: what if I'm in the shower the next time it happens? I don't know if I can face a world with the possibility of standing in sewage when I'm just trying to take a shower.

Great: now I'm afraid of my bathtub. Thanks, universe! Thanks for kicking a guy with severe mental problems living in a trailer while he's down!