This wasn’t the comic I had planned on making 24 hours ago. Originally, I had something else in mind. That is, until I saw part of Brian Carroll’s Instant Classic over the weekend where he had introduced a new character. In his words, a “large, jockish, ignorant, sexist Bostonian version of Tom Brazelton from his comic Theater Hopper.” The Jay Leno jaw was a nice touch.

He also made his version of my character the boyfriend of one of his leads. So that means the Instant Classic version of Tom might be around for a while. As a matter of fact, he’s already appeared in a second comic, so you might want to check that out as well.

Brian totally nailed me with the first comic where IC-Tom talks about seeing a movie with Jared. “Actually, we didn’t even see a movie,” he says. “We just saw a poster for it in the lobby and made fun of it for a while.” Zinger received, sir.

You might get a little more mileage out of this mock-beef if you know a little bit about Brian as a person. I would share details here, but I don’t want to misrepresent him further than what I’m doing with this comic. The Orson Welles worship is something I think he would cop to, though. ;D

It’s all in good fun, of course. No animosity. Again, in Brian’s words, “Of course I don’t think Tom’s a bad guy – this is more to the tune of the celebrity guests on Extras where they play grotesque versions of themselves.

I think that’s a clever approach and one I would kind of like to explore. But at the same time, it’s weird. Because MY version of myself is already a grotesque caricature. Bending that image through the lens of another artist’s vision makes things even more bizarre and twisted. How far can we go before it loops back on itself, causing a space-time anomaly that forms a psychic feedback destroying our true sense of self?

Maybe I’m being a little over-dramatic.

Any way you slice it, we’re definitely flying by the seat of our pants. This isn’t something Brian and I worked out in advance. So it will be an interesting little tightrope walk.

Originally, I thought I would do one rebuttal comic, but now I’m starting to wonder if I can’t do a little story line with this! What do you guys think? Do you want to see Brian and I continue to warp and twist each other’s illustrated personas for our individual comics? It could be fun!

Leave your comments below. If you have any dirt I can use against Brian in my next comment, leave those in the comments section as well. ;D