Jason Rodriguez - The Moose in the Closet: Big Toe, Preview Art and The Worst Way to Spend Fifteen Minutes (Not Including Sympathy Sex, Although I Should Have Got Some For It)

Jorge Vega is a good friend of mine. He has a book deal with Arcana studios for his book Zoo with Darrin Stevens and he’s sitting on one of the coolest pitches I’ve ever seen called “The Coat” that he did with Thorsten Ebert. He’s been doing his thing over at Everyday Cosmic, first with the Everyday Cosmic comic itself (illustrated by Grant Perkins), followed by Gunplay (illustrated by Nicolas Meylaender) and now, the reason why I’m repimping him, he’s launching his third webcomic with his Zoo counterpart Darrn Stevens, Big Toe (Only on the main page, for now). So, go check him out is you have some time, drop him a line if you like what you see.

Secondly, a little sneak peak of my Elk’s Run #2 back-up, three of the six pages (pages 1, 4, and 6), co-written by Chris Fabulous and illustrated by Paul Maybury. Click the thumbs to see the full pages (and don’t forget to preorder Elk’s Run #2 in April’s previews, order #APR052944):

I can’t stand improv. I can’t stand the faces the performers make, the big movements, or the stupid voices. I can’t stand the big smiles or the phony enthusiasm. I can’t stand how the audience suggestions get twisted into a players “schtick” and how when a scene falls apart performers resort to gimmicks, lame pop culture references or bring-backs of a joke that was funny the fist time around, forced the second time around.

And this is coming from a guy that spent two years doing improv in college.

I’m not being fair to all forms of improv. There is good improv out there, but it usually depends on the mood of your audience. You can have the best performers in the world and if the audience doesn’t give a fuck (and if they’re like me, which the usually are, they don’t give a fuck) you will stop seeing these people as comedic performers and instead see them as big expression, big movement, obnoxious, loud, unfunny assholes that are totally ruining your buzz. We had some good audiences and we had some bad with my troupe and the worst of all time was one that I myself booked (the last performance I booked): some Clairol make-up festival.

I was helping a friend out that was organizing this rather large promotional thing for Clairol. They had people getting makeovers, bands, product information booths, this whole big thing and she asked me if my troupe, Liquid Fun (oh, yeah, and I hate improv troupe names, as well), would come down and do a fifteen minute show. We agree.

It was outdoors. With no microphones. No stage. Across from the live bands. About fifteen people came to see us perform and they just didn’t give a fuck. It was the BIGGEST bomb ever, fucking painful. Every minute one of us was looking at our watch. We had to scream so people can hear us. We were on grass and the field was wet. In order to get our points across we had to make HUGE motions with our bodies, everything was exaggerated times ten.

The show just wouldn’t end; we deteriorated to caricatures of the improv performers I described in the opening paragraph. At one point I was pretending to be Eminem giving Guam a Stone Cold Stunner, the WWE’s Stone Cold Steve Austin’s trademark finishing move, in order to amp up the pop-culture references. We were slumming for jokes. Someone fucking mooned the audience. It was that fucking bad.

At the end I apologized to my friend, Duh-Diesel (I’ll tell that story in a minute); blaming the lousy performance on every possible factor except for the fact that improv inherently sucks. She claimed we were actually pretty funny, which was bullshit, but we were doing it for free. We were doing it “for the publicity” but I guarantee you we didn’t pick up any fans.

Ok, Duh-Diesel. This story should have been told last week cause it happened during senior trip. Maribelle went to high school with me and college. She was a great girl, loved her to death. She was also extremely well endowed. On the senior trip, I actually asked her what size she was rocking and she told me double-d.

Barring in mind that I was stoned, I asked her, “Do you know what double-d stands for?”

“What’s that?”

“Duh-Diesel,” the nickname sort of stuck, it was a nice inside joke. And the “Duh” is the short “Duh” sound, not the moron “Duh”.

To bring it back to the improv performance, our horrible show got me no closer to Duh-Diesels’ Duh-Diesels. That is one fantasy that I never got to live out. One of the several thousand fantasies, being that I fantasized having sex with every girl that I ever looked at.

equilibrium sucks, fanboy: Scarface - Watched it yesterday, no better way to spend Easter.

Labels: mitc

Big Toe, Preview Art and The Worst Way to Spend Fifteen Minutes (Not Including Sympathy Sex, Although I Should Have Got Some For It)

Monday, March 28, 2005

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