Annotated 1-19
The closing gag here was one of the most popular jokes in the series, if not the most, but we did over-exploit it a bit. It sold just fine when we made a sticker out of it, but the T-shirts didn’t really move. I’d had my doubts from the start about trying to sell a bunch of shirts that labeled their wearers as douches, and this is the only time I can remember both Phil and Erica admitting I was right after the fact.
But the webcomics-to-shirt market was still so big that we felt we had to try something, we knew better than to limit our market by making it something you had to know the comic to appreciate, and “Well, people like ironic shirts, right? With a little self-deprecation sometimes? Nobody buys a shirt that just says I’M A SWELL GUY.”
I still own one of those shirts and wear it around the house now and again.
It is not very clear here, but panel 1 shows Best receiving the weapon that will come to define him, his ax-guitar.
Just noticed the “Avian” bottled – something – do we want to know where that comes from?
There’s a brand of cosmetics called Avon, I’m guessing that.
Replaying @Lookie
There’s a brand of bottled water called Evian.
Yeah, that’s where I was going with that. This sort of punny pop-culture reference is done a lot in other tongue-in-cheek fantasy stories, but it didn’t really fit that well into Guilded Age, so you didn’t see more than a few gags like this. Let’s be kind and assume that it’s spring water taken from the land of the avians, not bottled avian tears or something more macabre.
I dunno, I could’ve done with more of this.
Not being a critic or anything, that’s just the path of least resistance to get to my sense of humor.
I feel you, and I don’t mind that kind of humor when it’s done well. But very early we got interested in building our own realm and making it feel as “real” as possible, and bits that are clearly inserted to make a veiled pop-culture reference to our world would get in the way of that sense of “reality.” Frigg’s dialogue style aside, we didn’t want to mirror modern Earth too closely.
I didn’t recognize that icon in the achievement the first time because I’m pretty sure Sausage Party didn’t exist yet.
In the background of panel 2 there’s a bawkbagok. Is that Best’s future steed Keirnas (briefly seen in chapter 9) or another one?
Well, at Best, it’s at least a Chekhov’s Dinner.
Well, I don’t see any good reason it couldn’t be Kiernas!
For what it’s worth, friends got me the “Huge Douche” t-shirt & that’s what lead me to the comic.
(I have the best friends)
And I have always loved that incredibly trashy pickup line in panel 3. And the fact that it worked. ^_^
The fact that it worked is one of the reasons I never really liked Best. He clearly deserves the Huge Douche award. Funny, though.
This always made me wonder about how many epics Best was familiar with. I mean, the stuff heroes have to go through in them doesn’t really make me want to rip the arm off a monster and beat him over the head with it, to put it mildly.
So if shirts declaring you’re a douche didn’t move, what did the people who bought stickers use them for? :p
Well, we didn’t always ask and they didn’t always tell, but some of ’em were happy to stick them on friends as a prank.
> Nobody buys a shirt that just says I’M A SWELL GUY.”
Uhm… actually…