Weird Ones

From Weird Me

When you write 365 comics a year, it’s inevitable that some weird ones will pop up. Retail is weird, people are weird, and I’m weird, so it all works out.

I’ve gotten better with weird comics. As long as I add a punchline, no matter how weak, it keeps people from saying “huh?” It’s weird, but there was an obvious punchline. To be honest, I kind of miss making ones that result in the “Huh?”

But comic strips have always been the home for weirdness. They normalize weird things. I’ve always said that the greatest surrealist of the twentieth century was not Salvador Dali, but Charles Schulz. Among other things, he made the image of a dog lying flat on his back on top of his dog house a common sight worldwide. It’s not weird anymore. It’s normal.

Weird becoming normal is weird.

Here’s a weird one with a normal panel tacked on at the end. This was an actual customer that I just had to put in the comic. Friends and coworkers asked me who he really was, because they assumed I was making fun of someone. Nope. Just a weird guy I saw once.

This is a very recent one and it’s almost a verbatim conversation. I’ve talked to this lady twice now and it’s always an adventure. She actually said, “I’m sick of Europeans and their four foot men!” My immediate response was almost to say that Europeans are generally taller than Americans, but I remembered to never talk logic to crazy.

Not wishing to possibly spread some sort of weird hatred towards little people, fish took the hit in the comic.

This comic was in the middle of a weird storyline where April Bloom thought that Winter Sun was proposing to her. I never go to little outings after work with coworkers, not if I can help it. In this case, I’m the weirdo.

This was a another actual customer. He liked to go on about how we were too good to work there, although he had never worked a job like that himself (this wasn’t at a big box store, but at a print shop). I wanted to tell him that sales was no better than what I was doing, but never feed the weirdness.

I also wanted to make fun of our weird obsession with wise sayings that are simply a repetition of words, because a comic is a comic.

The idea of a greeter working overtime was weird, but I liked it.

Berle is very weird and that’s why I keep going back to him. A fellow cartoonist pointed out that he gets all of my surreal material. The inspiration for Berle came from a couple of people, but when my own life inspires strips about him I know that I need to straighten up. Berle is a great weird-o-meter.

April Bloom’s mother as a greeter pleased me. Overly helpful people can make us question if we are being weird for thinking they are weird. Maybe they just know the secret to happiness, but if you hang around them long enough you might find that they’re just weird.

This is weird. I say it all the time and nobody seems to think it’s as weird as me. People who set off the store alarm tend to stand there and let the loud noise continue rather than backing away from the door so it will stop screeching. If I go between metal poles and an alarm goes off like I’m stealing the Hope diamond, I jump back instantly even if the diamond is in my underwear. I just want the awful noise to stop.

But people just stand there looking bewildered in the blaring sound.

This is definitely a weird part of the strip. I haven’t written about it lately, but there are caves under the store. Here we have Penny falling into the cave underneath the gas station. She got promoted as a result. Perfectly normal retail stuff.

Ah, Ian. He loves the caves and is absent from the strip for long stretches, but he did eventually get a job at the store. That’s kind of the extent of his character arc, which explains why he’s absent from the strip so much.

That’s it for this batch of weirdness. Fear not, there’s more. You can always count on death, taxes, and weirdness (but not in that order).