Scott Meyer

How to Employ a Positive Mental Attitude to Improve Your Life

Added 2024-01-15 08:00:32 +0000 UTC

The shocking return of Rocket Hat! It’s been a while. And he’s just as talkative as ever.

The Rocket Hat comics, and most of my comics involving superheroes, are primarily about failure. All of them either have powers that are laughable, self-defeating, or, in the case of Rocket Hat, used solely to repeatedly beat the actual protagonist of those comics to a pulp. In that, the superhero comics actually owe a great debt to my favorite comedy team of all time, Bob and Ray.

For those of you who are not familiar, (That will probably be most of you) Bob and Ray were a radio comedy team. They started in the 1950s and continued into the late eighties. Ray passed away in 1990. Bob lived on, and continued to work, as did his son, Chris Elliott, and his daughter, Abby Elliott.

Anyway, Bob and Ray’s work often repeated similar themes and forms, and was primarily about failure. They were a major influence on me.

Here’s a link to one of my favorite of their sketches, “The Great Lakes Paperclip Factory.”

Another major influence on my superhero comics is, (arguably) my favorite TV series, “The Venture Brothers.” It started as a sort of Johnny Quest parody but grew and spread and evolved into something utterly unique, and far different from anything anyone expected. It’s hard to pick a single scene that represents the show, so instead I’ll link to the first scene of it I ever saw. Late one night, looking for something to watch, I saw, this, the beginning of the episode “Are you there god, it’s me, Dean,” and was hooked.