MTV and the Renaissance?

There are a few words that you never expect to see side-by-side in the English language: funny and Jimmy Fallon, tasteful and Gene Simmons and the renaissance and MTV. In this new comic strip, I was trying to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same ... or something like that.

If you are completely clueless to what I'm talking about, boogie on over to www.room19comics.com. It's the site that a handful of people are talking about.

In any event, this is the comic strip that I wrote about it Friday's Blog. A quick aside, this is a Blog that I wrote at work and was not able to post (read: I was too tired and/or forgetful to post on Friday night) on the comic strip page. So, if you haven't seen it, it's new to you. (BTW, that was a terrible catch phrase that NBC used a few years ago to hype the summer reruns.)

This is the strip, after a few weeks of four panels, I dropped back down to three. Basically this was the first half of my last semester at Merrimack. I need a few more classes to get my minor in visual arts and one was Art II with Professor Longwood. She was a ball breaker. For an hour and a half every class you'd see nothing but slides. This would go on for six weeks. Each test was five slides and we had to tell the name of the painting, who painted it, when they painted it and an explanation of the painting.

Things weren't so bad until you hit the Renaissance. It seemed like everyone and their brother was painting the Madonna and child. There had to be about 30 paintings of this subject, all in similar positions. It was torture going through and differentiating which was which.

That is the situation that our hero Eddie finds himself in. I think that the first panel came out ok. He's sitting at his desk, there are a ton of books around, he's studying hard. Eagle-eye watchers of Room 19 will notice that this is also the first time that the other side of Eddie's face is shown. Normally it looks like it does in the third panel, but I wanted to show some depth.

The second panel sucks. It has a ton of wasted space. While there are just as much art in the second as the first, there is a ton of text which a. sets up the joke and b. shows the gravity of his studies. In the second panel, there is an interesting shot of Ed rubbing his eyes, but nothing else. I wasted about a third of a panel. Not good.

The third panel delivers with the punch line. Not very joke-y per se, but it's more of how no matter how you try to get away from something, it's probably going to find you somewhere. Believe it or not, that stupid TV stand took me a long-ass time to draw. I really wanted to get the perspective correct.

BTW, there were two loose ends I had to tie up from the last entry. One, Alex Cora ended up hitting into a 6-2-3 double play (about the only way that the Sox couldn't have scored a run) and I got to meet Sam Horn last Sunday. I think I told you about SoSH having a get-together that day, well I went and I won a t-shirt. Big Sam was there and I was asked if I wanted it autographed.

I really didn't, but I didn't want to hurt the dude's feelings. It's not that I thought he sucked or anything, far from it -- when I was a kid I thought he was going to be the next big thing, I just liked the shirt too much for it to be written on. I told him he could and now I have a big "SAM HORN" on my new white shirt. Ah well, such is life.

The funny thing about Sam is that he's a huge dude and he has a pretty big appetite. When I saw him he was sitting in front of a pile of buffalo wing bones. There had to be about 40 of them on the plate. Good for you, Horny.