A Brief Interjection

Page 13

A Brief Interjection
Cartoon Brian

A Brief Interjection

Original Release Date: October 13, 2002

So, this comic appeared almost a year and a half after the last one. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, I worked for the school newspaper during my senior year of high school, so a 6-strip Mike and the Ninja (or Chewy Ninja Monkey Bars or whatever) side story appeared there over the course of the school year. The side story was about a gorilla escaping from the zoo, and Mike and Stu naturally find themselves in its way, and trouble is imminent. The gorilla even has to stand trial in one of the strips. The amount of meta humor injected into this story was intolerable by today's standards, and I don't think it was well received, or possibly even understood, by the audience. I overheard a couple of girls talking about it in Study Hall, and they didn't have a clue what was happening.

I was crushed. Was it that incomprehensible? The school newspaper was also probably not the best place for a serialized comic strip, either. I retooled the next couple of strips to be more gag-a-day. In the last one, Stu gets a date and Mike comes into some money, so it looks like things are really looking up for our intrepid duo. However, an agent appears to tell them that the strip has been canceled, so they end up not getting the girl or the money, after all.

Then, I started college and got a job, and anything I used to spend my time doing fell off the map while I adjusted to that, which is where the strip comes from. Scott Kurtz is the creator of PvP, which was then and is still one of my favorite webcomics. He occasionally inserts himself into the strip to explain a hiatus or make a joke about his dad or something, so I figured it would be fine if I did that, as well.