All that’s old is new again.
While meandering through the comic shop (Jim Hanley’s Universe, for those of you in NYC) last Saturday, I realized a few things:
- It’s been a really long time since I’d been in a comic shop.
- All the comics that I used to read have long since gone out of print or are just not being carried by JHU; most of them were independent books. Battle Pope has been picked up by Image (circa several months ago) and is being colored (for no apparent reason, IMHO) but that’s about it, as far as I know.
- I miss hanging out with my buddies and wandering over to the comic shop after a long Saturday of playing Magic: The Gathering and wandering through the mall. (Yes, I am a nerd.)
Realizing these things made me think back on the kinder, gentler times of the late 90s and early 00s, and the comics that I read when I was first introduced to the strange and wondrous things known as ‘webcomics.’
What? I do a webcomic now, and I was in a comic store.
Moving on.
As far as I can tell, most of those comics are still doing okay. For reasons that I am not entirely sure of, I’ve stopped reading them, even though most of them are still alive and well. Maybe I’ll get back on those respective bandwagons in the near future.
The comic that first came to mind and spurred this entry is The Mr. Chuck Show, by J. Myers. This comic now resides at Keenspot, but once upon several years ago, it boasted its own little corner of the web. I believe that he was invited to join, and now Keenspot holds the comic’s “spot,” so to speak.
In it’s heyday, it chronicled the misadventures of a small cast of animals and humans who interacted in a world without backgrounds, and sometimes did ‘episodes’ of The Mr. Chuck Show, hosted by Mr. Chuck himself, who happens to be a dog. The cast is a bit dog-heavy, but they’re all so different, (in design and temperament) that it doesn’t really register unless you stop to think about it.
It had a curious blend of observational and off-color humor, and featured such pithy phrases as ‘wash your ass, kids. I’m serious,’ (a sock puppet’s advice to the audience,)* and various threats of excessive violence perpetrated with garden tools (a legitimate threat) I personally am a fan of the idea (not the practice) of beating someone with a shovel, but a rake will do in a pinch.
As if that didn’t appeal to your lowest common denominator hard enough, it also had a voluptuous blonde (in fact, the only regular female character in the strip,) who was the subject of many an inappropriate gag, although she held her own well enough.
This comic was a lot of fun, and I haven’t even mentioned the clown yet. But, I won’t. You have to go read it yourself.
In closing, I’d like to say, that like the song whose name I never knew, but still kind of remember: ‘you never really know what you have until it’s gone,’ and now that I realize that the Mr. Chuck Show has been gone for awhile, I miss it. Thanks J., for putting in the work, and taking an interesting little group of characters through a strange and wacky series of events.
I’ll see you guys next week, if not sooner.
*I don’t know if the strip is in the archive or not, but after an hour of searching the archives as quickly as I could, I couldn’t find it- there’s several years of more-than-weekly updates to go through, and a few ‘Rerun Weeks.’ Read the rest of them- I will be, and mayhap one of us will find it.
