So I guess you can consider this comic the companion piece to Wednesday’s comic where I suggested Sam Worthington was some kind of synthespian or artificial actor. I guess I don’t know what to say about it except that I can’t turn down a joke where someone is peeing their pants. I’m talking to my therapist about it.
I thought that I would see Clash of the Titans late Saturday evening. But it looks like I might be going this afternoon, instead. My father-in-law offered to watch Pearl for the afternoon while I go get an oil change for my car. I was kind of taken aback. I’m thankful for a little break, but I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do after the oil change. But when I saw a commercial last night advertising the Thursday midnight screenings of Clash of the Titans, I knew where to go.
This has been my first week home with Pearl since my contract job ended and it has been very rewarding. We have an opportunity to bond a little more now and I’m grateful for the opportunity. Having steady employment is great, but they’re not kidding when they say you don’t get this time back.
That said, taking care of a four-month-old can be time-consuming. Even when she’s napping, I’m taking care of the house so Cami doesn’t have to worry about it when she gets home. Laundry, dishes, dusting – all that. It’s only fair. As such, I feel like I’m not connected to things like I used to.
It was no big deal to take a 5 minute break at work every couple of hours and check things out online. Now I don’t have time to do that, so I feel like I’m floating a little bit.
But, like anything else, it’s about settling into a new routine. I guess I just wanted to share that this first week at home with Pearl has been a success.
Changing gears, I wanted to share something with you guys that kind of threw me for a loop.
First, I need you to take a look at this image. It’s a mockup for a new convention banner that I’m going to take as part of my booth setup to C2E2. I’ve been making the rounds, trying to gather feedback on it and figure out ways to make it more eye-catching. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably seen a few posts related to this.
The second thing you need to know is that I am a paying member at Webcomics.com – Brad Guigar’s site that provides support and feedback to webcomic artists trying to improve their work.
The last thing you need to know is that the general reaction to the banner is that it’s nice, but that the tag line does not reflect the characters. In other words, I’m setting up the expectations that my lead characters are “difficult,” but I show them being pleasant and non confrontational.
My reaction to this criticism can basically be summed up by the statement that I really like the tag line, but I don’t want people to think my characters are jerks.
Brad leveled me with some feedback over at Webcomics.com that must be pretty close to the truth, because I’m sharing it with you here right now.
“What you’ve got there is a derivation of the Mary Sue complex,” writes Brad. “You realize at a basic level that all of these characters are really you on a psychological level. The sooner you allow ‘yourself’ to be disliked for the sake of your humor, the sooner you can write better stuff.”
I’m under no impression that Brad follows what I do with any regularity. But his powers of observation uncovered a truth about me as an artist that I hear over and over again – My Need To Be Liked.
I think anyone that has read this blog for a while knows that I will sometimes apologize for a joke the minute after telling it. A lot of people scratch their heads and ask me “Why do you do that?” In the past, I’ve always said it was because I don’t want to accidentally offend people. But fundamentally, I think it’s because I have a need to be liked.
I don’t know that this was as much of a problem when I first started out. Probably because there weren’t any expectations. Less people were looking at the comic, so there was less of a chance that I was offending anyone.
But in the last few years I feel like I’ve suffered accusations that don’t represent me as a person that have probably changed the tone of my work. I don’t have a problem saying what’s on my mind, but I’m not the kind of person who seeks to offend. So, as a result, I’m starting to wonder I’ve been concentrating less on my work and concentrating more on trying to prove I’m not a bad guy.
I don’t know. I’m still working some of this out in my own head. But one of the advantages to the internet is that I can pose these scenarios to you guys and get an outsider’s perspective.
One of my failings as an individual is that I have absolutely no idea about how others perceive me. I try to lead a good life, I try to avoid hurting people and somehow this combination has lead me into a corner where I am not really letting me be myself through my work.
Maybe that’s the reason I’ve been toying around with the idea of doing a journal comic for so long.
Anyway, now that I’ve dumped that in your lap, I’m curious as to what you think. Is Brad onto something? If you’ve been reading the comic for more than a few years, have you detected a shift that has been otherwise invisible to me?
I appreciate your feedback!
These rumors are preposterous.
Could a CGI character cry on command like THIS?
Whoever coded this emotion subroutine mixed up "crying" and "peeing your pants."
Amateurs.
I can see exactly what Brad is saying. Your banner is good and it is a good catch phrase. But the way you have drawn your characters, they don’t *look* like they are demanding fans. They don’t even particularly look like obnoxious movie goers. As a result, there is kind of a mis match between the artwork and the catch phrase. Your characters *look* like they want to be liked.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be liked. Basic human instinct. Duh! But one class of humour is the self-deprecating kind. You have used a lot of that recently and some of your better comics of late have been making use of that like the the St. Pat’s comic. That easily ranks as one of my top 5 favourites of yours because it is so memorable as a punch line. And self-deprecating.
We all realise that you as a person is not exactly the same as the Tom that appears in the comics. And we like you and comic Tom because you are willing to poke fun at things that need/deserve to be poked. Even if that thing is yourself.
There have been a few comics that have caused offense and you were called out on it. But if we really thought that you yourself were deliberately being offensive just to be offensive, do you really we would keep coming back every day?
You do certainly have a Need to Be Liked. I know because I have the same thing. I’m working on getting through it though, because even if everyone doesn’t like me, I like me. I think I’m pretty cool. No matter how good a life you try to lead, not everyone’s going to like you. The sooner you understand and come to terms with that, the sooner you can get back to being yourself.
As for worrying about offending people, I wouldn’t. From what I’ve gathered, most webcomics readers are not easily offended people. If there’s something REALLY risque in your comic (which seems unlikely. I think Monday’s was the dirtiest I’ve seen OH NO YOU SAID SEX ON THE INTERNET), maybe you could add a ratings system at the top of the site and set it to PG-13 for those comics?
I like the banner. I mean, the other three in the row were a little misleading since they’re not regular characters, but I think the drawings of Jared, Cami and Tom were spot-on. This comic has a lot of satirical takes on movies, and I don’t think calling theater fans demanding is wrong. We are. We expect to be entertained when we go buy tickets. We give enough money to the industry; they may as well give us what we want. If they don’t, we don’t continue to support the actor/studio/franchise/whatever. Demanding isn’t synonymous with difficult. I think it’s good.
Well, I do recall looking at the banner and going “But uh, they’re not acting that bad. Maybe Jerod, who looks like he’s being very loud.” If you had him throwing popcorn, and maybe put someone on a cell phone…..
You know, it doesn’t have to be YOUR characters. YOUR characters could be the one acting annoyed at other people being rude in the theater.
I would suggest popping the three anonymous movie-goers back one row. Sitting next to them in the empty theater almost makes it look like they’re regular characters as well, and draws my attention away from Jared, Cami, and Tom. I was thinking “should I recognize them?” I think Jared throwing the popcorn is a good idea, as we’ve seen much popcorn thrown in the theater through-out the years.
Just loosen up a bit! After seeing your style from reading TH for quite a while, I know you can make them look “demanding” (like the banner reads) without looking like jerks. When you come back at this banner, just be in a fun mood. You know, “wild Theater Hopper fun”… not “we’re so happy fun”.
Gotta say, Tom, I can’t pass up a bodily function joke either. The comic made me giggle like a middle schooler.
Need to be liked, well, that’s something that I’ve talked to MY therapist about. Combating it is a matter of changing the way you think about things. The hard part is in the early stages, while you are telling yourself certain things (“not everyone has to like me, and the people who DO are more important” “if someone is upset with me, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with me” “this isn’t a personal attack, this person is probably stressed/had a bad day/ is just not thinking about how they’re talking to me”) you’re not going to necessarily believe it. That’s where the therapist got her points for being helpful. When I told her what I was down about, she would point those things out to me, and being reminded from the outside makes you feel like you’re not just making it up, which you’re not! Talk to your support system about keeping you in check on these things. Especially Cami, because the wife is always right, right? 😉
As for your poster, I agree that it looks great, but doesn’t match. Still, I don’t think making them obnoxious (throwing popcorn, talking on the phone) would make them look demanding. It would jut make them look obnoxious. The only thing I can think of right now is to show them in the lobby looking at a poster for a ridiculous/gimmicky (made up) movie and doing that “hey would you look at this” thumb point at it and rolling their eyes. To me, this would show that they have high standards for movies, before the movies even come out! Hope this helps.
I think the problem with your tag line is that your characters really aren’t very demanding. They tend (for obvious reason) to reflect your own personal opinion of movies, and you’re a big movie fan. Sure you rip into movies now and then, but when you think of Tom do you think of a cynical demanding fan, or a wide-eyed overly enthusiastic man-child? Rather than try to re-work the picture to fit the tag line, I think your picture captures the spirit of Theater Hopper well, but the tag line; while a good line, just doesn’t fit the comic very well. Just a thought, maybe other people view the characters as more demanding than I do.
He’s kind of played the same archetype in the last 3-4 movies he’s been in. Normally this would bug me, but for some reason I don’t mind.
I don’t get what you’re saying about having a Mary Sue complex. I read a ton of webcomics so I KNOW what a Mary Sue complex looks like (cough questionable content cough) but Theater Hopper is just a plain funny comic. Yeah, the main character is Tom but that guy is just that: a character.
And as for the apologizing for the jokes, yeah I noticed that but it happens in the news post which is not mandatory reading for the comic (cough penny arcade cough) so not everyone sees that.
I’ve read all the comics and the only shift is that they’re getting better, and I think it is because the edgier jokes are being let loose. Nowadays a strip might put forth a view not everyone agrees with (not as extreme as it sounds, just maybe ‘etc. is dumb’) instead of a tame gag.
Not trying to sound like a fanboy or anything, but there are far worse (popular) webcomics out there that have problems that they convince themselves they don’t have.
Oh and Dustin has it right, the tagline doesn’t match the picture. Picture’s great, tagline doesn’t make sense to me.
Tom and Jared have been known to DRESS UP AS CHARACTERS from the movies they’re watching… I’m thinkin’ a little of THAT would make them a lot more annoying to the regular movie goers, especially if they’re doing things like hanging upside down from webs, etc. Tom could have one of his ghastly Iron Man suits on, for instance, blocking everyone else’s view of the film…or his horrible Nemo impression… that sort of thing. You’ve set them all up to do that, even Cami (the Cult of Sandler? The infamous Elektra Impaling?).
I’m going to completely agree with Dustin. Overall, the picture we get from TH is that the characters love movies and are passionate about them. They get demanding and obnoxious with the passion which is where the demanding part comes in, but at the end of the day…. I think most of your readers are going to be identifying with them. I think what it is is that they all have respect for the movie theater (see comics related to glaring at people talking during the movie), so they’d have to be out of character to illustrate the tag line that you have. I’m not certain what you could change it to, but I really like Tom’s expression right now. It’s so jubilant!
As far as your posts go, I would have to say you’ve become more apologetic and cautious since the couple issues a year or so ago. I don’t even remember what caused it but there was an uproar about one of your comics (race related, I beileve) and you dug yourself into a hole with the subsequent ones where you tried to get out. At least according to some people; myself, I thought all of them were pretty funny. It could be that I am not part of the race that was offended, though.
Curse you, Brazelton. You’ve offended me as both a Sam Worthington worshipper and a movie nerd. I’ll never love again, thanks to you.
Seriously, my best friend is just like you in that regard and I always laugh because he tries so hard to be nice to everyone until he gets pissed off too. People are people and sometimes we’re jackasses. If you do the best you can without censoring yourself too much, then I think that’s a victory.