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Memory Foam II

Huzzah for Roman numerals!  Here’s hoping Toby sticks with it long enough to get to the Roman numerals that confuse people, as why not bring that back?  A little bit of history never hurt anybody.  That page I sampled below hit home with me, and probably with most of you if you stop to think about it: motorcycles.  While all people who ride them are clearly not assholes, it does seem to attract some of the scum of the earth.  For example, there’s some asshole who drives down my busy street every morning between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m., revving his damned engine at the stop light and most likely waking everybody up who doesn’t have some form of a white noise machine going.  If I could string up piano wire across the road and be guaranteed to just take out him or her, I believe the world would instantly be a better place.  Toby does me one better in his story by “inventing” a device that makes all motorcycles self-destruct once their noise output gets over a certain level.  His comic self was gripped with remorse, but the headlines on the newspaper the next day were priceless: “Countless Jerks Dead:”, “World Better Place”, and “God: ‘Great Job Toby'””.  As with many things, I thought South Park handled motorcycle riders best, and seeing as how they have every episode up at their website for free, you can see for yourself if you’re so inclined.  If you’re going to defend the assholes that rev their motors at every stop light, I’m sorry, but you just don’t have a case.  As for the rest of the comic, it was a pile of great stuff.  There’s Toby wondering what’s going to happen to him in the long run, getting a job at a donut factory (and yes, it’s about as bad as it sounds), trying to make time for all his creative endeavours, standing on principle and not eating a piece of stuffed crust pizza (I agree with his crying girlfriend on that one), phrases he’d love to never hear again, dreaming all day, reading online reviews about himself, not saying “you too” when people say “have a nice day”, and how his younger self would view his older self.  For what it’s worth the guy worries too much, as he clearly has a boatload of talent, seems to have a fantastic girlfriend and, despite being broke, has enough free time to work on things like this comic, and he’s only 22.  The pessimist would say it’s all downhill from there, the optimist would say things are only going to get better, but screw it, enjoy what you have now.  And that is my philosophical thought for the day, the first of a one-part series… $3

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Memory Foam #1

What an f’ed up nose.  Sorry, I shouldn’t start off with something so meaningless to the quality of the book, but it’s just sitting there.  These are autobiographical stories from about a year of Toby’s life (7/08-8/09), dealing with all sorts of things, so if you’re a hater of all thing autobiographical you should wander off somewhere else.  As for me, I’m always up for some angst. Stories include Toby wondering if he has always been this much of a hermit or it’s more of a recent thing (and using the lyrics of Frank Black’s “Hang On To Your Ego” to illustrate his point at the end was brilliant), the desire to kill a mouse versus everybody else thinking it’s barbaric, a series of short strips dealing with the sickness and death of the mother of his girlfriend (and his own ineffectiveness in dealing with it; I love how this subject was dealt with using a series of three panel strips, which are generally reserved for “jokey” topics), how his master plan to hide in dorkiness in college to get girls was ruined when he met a girl who was equally dorky, handwriting analysis, a hilarious primer on how to deal with “your” Toby model, his top 10 video games (and getting a fancy new PSP just so he could mod it to play old games), dessert over job hunting, and trying to find a decent job but ending up (briefly) with the notorious Kirby salespeople. So let me just get my autobio checklist over here… it’s insightful, funny, revealing, and it looks much better than you might suspect from that cover.  Yep, I’d say it’s a winner.  Toby was also nice enough to send along the most recent issue (there are only 2 so far), and I look forward to seeing if he kept it up with the second issue or became a totally unreadable hack.  No, I can’t remember the last time that happened either, but it’s best to keep an eye out for these things…