The payoff joke for #46. This strip shows a rare show of restraint on my part. One of my bad habits of doing this strip is that just hinting at some awful thing happening isn't enough, it's like cheating me out of drawing the event. So sometimes I have to kick my own ass to be subtle. In this strip, I did and it works. You don't see what's happening in the last panel, but it's all subtle enough for the reader to guess at what's happening. However, what most readers didn't know is that I actually DID draw what was happening in that last panel a year earlier, as a fan art for an artist I despised no less.
I recommend reading the commentary for #40 before continuing.
Flashback to Toronto, 1999. A bunch of us amateur comic artists were sitting around the food court on the bottom floor of the Eaton's Centre. We were drawing different things like we usually do, drawing jam pics and jam comics.
One of us brought up the topic of the Sickest Thing She Read In Comics. Apparently it was some guy who took a girl's eyeball out, and proceded to make love to the eye socket. I wondered how that would exactly work. I still don't get how it would be done. Another person said "Yeah, you can't get much sicker than that."
Anyone who knows me knows I can't resist a challenge. What if I could do something sicker than that? The idea that one shouldn't try to think of sick things was ignored -- the challenge of coming up with such a sick idea was worth it.
I suggested cutting of the head and having fun with the exposed esophagus.
The jury is still out on whether or not it is a sicker idea, but I thought it was sicker that eye-socket-sex. One thing we did agree on, is that it would make GREAT Ian Kim fan art.
None of us liked Ian Kim -- if you haven't read the commentary in #40 about how he shafted us all yet, shame on you. We thought it would be great to give to Ian Kim as fan art for Anime North 1999.
Well, I had trouble with the pose. I just couldn't figure it out for the life of me. Fortunately, I was among one of the Great Perverted Minds in anime fanartdom, Acid Junkie. He drew up a pose that made me BELIEVE it was possible. And almost look like fun. From his pose I inked in the characters and drew the Emiko's head in jar. The colouring was done by another artist who wished to remain anonymous.
Ian Kim never did go to Anime North 1999, probably because he "outgrew" it. But the art got passed around, notably used in a site called Spazmabitch where the writers of that site were bitching about Ian Kim that week. When the site went down, the art vanished into obscurity, especially with me not being particularly clever about keeping a copy of my own.
Because I was still doing the comic for my friends at that point, it was still filled with nods and in-jokes, and this strip was one of them. As sick as this strip was, it never DID show was Shiunji was doing, but people who knew the Ian Kim fanart knew EXACTLY. Even the quote was the same ... "SO tight..." If you thought it was funny without seeing the Ian Kim fan art, well, it was even funnier if you had.
Well, friends, today is your LUCKY DAY, and you'll either be thanking me or burning me in effegy after reading this commentary. Thanks to the Google search engine, I was able to find the original Ian Kim art. AND I am brave enough to show it to you.
CLICK HERE for the art... and you'll thank me afterwards for not actually showing this in the strip.
As for the eye-socket-sex thing, well, that was too good to pass up, and I used that in a later strip (#120). Surprisingly, I never did get complaints for that joke, leading me to believe that esophagus sex is indeed worse than eye socket sex. I did get a lot of complaints for #150, the maggot strip, which just goes to show you something, I'm not sure exactly just what yet.
This strip debuted along with #48 at the same time. I'm not sure exactly why ... perhaps I put the two together to deflect away from this strip, I don't know.
Strip Published Online: May 15, 2000.
Commentary Written: July 23, 2003.
