10-Year Olds in 2003 vs 10-Year Olds in 2020

I'm good at describing things, but am I good at knowing things intimately? Not really. When it comes to making popular comics, does it matter? Unfortunately, not really. 

This comic emerged initially as just the first two panels, and then my sense of self-loathing and criticism took the wheel. It's an indictment of self for scoring such cheap laughs by recycling broad internet tropes about people, and passing them off as true by saying them confidently enough. It's also an indictment of anyone who does the same, of course, (though no one does it as good as me). I suppose its also an insult to anyone who dares lap this slop up, as well as a reckoning with the sort of society and art community that allows bullshit hackery like this to flourish.

Its certainly an obnoxious feature of the internet; a smarter person will make an observation that will become widely recognized as perhaps true, and less funny people will ride the coattails of it, not really understanding intimately but having a broad enough sense of it to approximate its use for humor. Felix Biederman's 'Hot Couch Guy' observation comes to mind- Twitter the week after was filled with Chapo's lampreys latching onto the joke and running it into the ground. The same thing has been done, grimly, with the recent protests as well; so many popular jokes attempting to explain the nature of the protests include tons of shit about K-pop fans and wiccans, because those are, of course, things you'll only see on twitter. I promise that if you were actually at a protest, you would have much more grisly material to work with. 

Does social media uniquely enable such hackery , or can I just get away with such hackery using my own skills? A blind sharpshooter, relying on sound alone? Maybe. Maybe I just added the addendum panels to alleviate the guilt I felt about making such a hack comic. Does doing so add a level of self-reflection, meta-textuality and a broader societal critique, and elevate from "hack" to "high art?" Yes? Maybe? I hope so. Regardless, it was fun to fully let loose with intense wordiness. 

Why is this chick in my house? Craigslist personals! They got deleted after SESTA/FOSTA, but I got a backup on the Dark Web. I didn't know she would bring the kid.