Category: Uncategorized

Attention Advertisers, Marketers and Promoters of All Types:

Imagine your product featured in an authentic “alternative” comic strip that is read by the most desirable demographics:  educated young professionals; sophisticated internet users; upwardly mobile newspaper readers; and discerning australopithecine enthusiasts.

Your product will be featured not in an ad, to which these groups are notoriously resistant, but within the artistic framework of the comic strip itself!

The fantastically popular “Tom the Dancing Bug” comic strip is auctioning off a product placement.  The highest bidder will have the product of its choice unobtrusively yet noticeably placed in an upcoming “Super-Fun-Pak Comix” installment of the comic strip.

Participants may place their bids by emailing the following information to tomdbug@gmail.com  :  Name, E-mail address, Corporation or Business Concern, Product, and Bid (in US dollars).  Upon conclusion of the Auction, the winner will be notified by e-mail, and must make payment, by Paypal, within 24 hours.

Quaternary Features reserves the right to reject any bid that it, in its sole and absolute discretion, determines to be unsuitable for any reason, including but not limited to concerns of propriety and good taste.  The winner shall be determined by Quaternary Features in its sole and absolute discretion.  The manner in which the winning product is pictured, named or otherwise referred to in the comic strip shall be determined in the sole and absolute discretion of Quaternary Features.  Proceeds will be donated by Quaternary Features to The Committee To Protect Journalists.

Bidding starts now.

According to David Brooks, Sonia Sotomayor achieved great success in her life because when she was a child, her aunts and grandmother staged an intervention to get her to stop reading Archie, Richie Rich and Casper comic books.

And here I've been, encouraging my kids to read those comics.  So much for having a kid on the Supreme Court.

UPDATE:  Here's the quote from the original Washington Post article about Sotomayor's debilitating comic book habit:

"The females were expected to achieve more," said her younger brother, Juan Sotomayor. She loved comic books — Archie, Casper, Richie Rich — so much that, after her father died, her paternal grandmother and aunts once convened a family meeting with her mother. "They were concerned about the role of the comic books in my sister's life," recalled her brother, an allergist outside Syracuse, N.Y. "It was maybe corrupting her."

Wow, this might be a great movie.  Can't wait.

OK, everybody in the world has probably seen this by now… and it is cute dancing babies.  But man, it's funny.

The AAN Judges may want to reconsider after seeing…

Bob Figures It Out
#147:  How to Escape From Terrorists

"Tom the Dancing Bug" just won the 2009 AAN Award for the Best Cartoon in Alternative Newsweeklies.

SUPER-FUN-PAK COMIX!

I'm only sorry I didn't have room to add one more WWII soldier in the rag tag group:

"Ghost" Caan.

In this week's comic:

We're gonna rock it tonight.

Now that actor Ed Helms is a big movie star, I can reveal the even more important truth about him — you can blame and/or credit him as the actual originator of the word "totes," now ubiquitously used as a shortened version of "totally."

Years ago, I attended a performance of Prime Time Kalan, a small weekly live comedy show hosted by the prodigiously talented Elliott Kalan.  In that show, Elliott interviewed Ed Helms, who at the time was a co-worker of Elliott's at The Daily Show (Ed was a correspondent, Elliott was a segment producer, and is now a writer). 

One of Elliott's incisive questions was about the word "totes," which apparently Ed used around the office all the time, but which Elliott (and I) had never heard before.  It had become infectious, and Elliott asked where it came from.  Ed explained that it was something he started with some friends, and that wherever he used the word, it caught on.

I never heard the word again for some time, but a couple of years ago I started hearing it dropped in conversations, and then in the media, and now you totes can't get away from it.

Now, I'm no lexicologist, and it's possible that Ed actually heard the word before he started using it and misremembers originating it — or maybe he's a bald-faced liar.  But I think Ed is not only a very funny guy, and a superb comedic actor, but he's also the inventor of a wonderful word that has brought color and a mischievous sense of fun to the conversations of millions of Americans (particularly middle school girls), not to mention saving us valuable time and energy by reducing the syllables of an often-used word by 67%.

Do I salute Ed Helms?  Totes.