This is not a particular funny strip, but a very memoriable one for me when I was creating it. I pencilled and inked it in two hours, but it was two hours following a drinking party. Japanese drinking parties are odd creatures. In general, you're given this tiny 8 oz. glass and that's what you drink from. You're never allowed to pour your own beer. People do that for you, and they love doing it. The beer flows from these approx. 1 litre beer bottles. Your glass is usually full as people come around to pour beer into it, even if you've taken only a single swig. If you haven't taken a swig, they will egg you to take a swig so they can pour your some more beer. The result is you can drink a lot without thinking you've drunken a lot, because you cannot possibly count how many drinks you've had. It's impossible to estimate. In Canada land, I could estimate by the number of glasses I've had, or the number of beer bottles in front of me, or even how much money I've spent -- none of these estimates work in Japan at these drinking parties.
So I came home early -- about 9pm, and decided to pencil and ink a strip.
Had I been a little more sober, I would have tweaked it a bit ... it doesn't flow that well, and the moral wrongness of the last panel just doesn't work that well. You can also tell that the alcohol's effect was crawling on me. I didn't think I had drunk that much, but by the time I was on the last panel, I was hammered, squinting at Kenta's hands, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with it but not having the mental capacity to understand. At about 11:00, I passed out.
When I got up the next day, I looked at the inking and it looked like a trainwreck. My artistic ability was dwindling in every subsequent panel. I could feel my drunken state just looking at it. However, I didn't feel like redrawing the damn thing. The header of the strip had enough of an explanation so that anyone reading the thing would at least understand. To me, it gives me a chuckle to think that I pencilled and inked this strip in a pretty messed up state, even if it does look pretty bad.
It is not something I have ever done again.
When I was writing an earlier commentary talking about how I'd love to redo these strips, particularly a bad panel in the previous Shibata strip, someone asked, "Well, why don't you?" I think it's important for me NOT to fix these things. SL is an experimental strip. It's not a professionally done strip in any sense of the word, it is completely and utterly up to my whims at any given moment. I have no boss. If I want to draw a strip drunk out of my mind, so be it. If I make huge mistakes, oh well. They are experiences I've had and learned from, and it's important for me to leave my learning experiences as they are and not pretend I didn't have them. Instead of going back to fix previous mistakes I'd rather make a better NEW strip. I could be fixing mistakes in SL for the rest of eternity if I wanted to. But isn't that painfully vain?
So instead, you get to see a drunk artist at work, and isn't that much more interesting than a totally polished and professional strip?
Strip Published Online: September 18, 2000.
Commentary Written: February 8, 2005.
