Serializer, The Model Train (2 versions), 2002
Added 2024-03-29 00:25:35 +0000 UTCIn this primordial—nay, primitive—strip, a very rough sketch of the Roast Beef prototype inadvertently communicates to Vlad that he has nearly zero exposure to women. In return, Vlad says something that has not aged well. I am vastly certain that if I were to rewrite this strip today, Vlad would reflect on how the little landscape reminds him of his childhood home, and suddenly magical realism would shrink him down to live there, only his mustache would remain life-size, and it would drag behind him like wings. (Arc Title: "A Very Little Robot With Enormous Wings.") It would become a 19-installment arc and end sometime in 2026.
If you can't read the color one, the b/w one is much larger. Why? I somehow have the original, enlarge-able art for this in a non-colorized form, and the colorized form is in the usual undersized, pixelly gif version.
I have no idea how a tech industry guy in Silicon Valley (me) didn't back up his actual, job-type artwork in any findable form, but maybe it's a clue as to why I got laid off from that startup.
Well, joke's on them, they're gone (got bought out for 110M the year after I left) and I'm still here! (I have a head cold and bad savings)
Comments
ahhh i remember this one well x
Peter Griffiths
2024-07-16 09:32:06 +0000 UTCPlease write tiny robot with enormous wings.
Hilary Kitz
2024-04-27 07:45:09 +0000 UTCI have to assume it's because Hotmail is not a common @ anymore, at all. Most people who throw a hotmail address at you are lookin' hell of outmoded in the year of our gourd twenty-fourth. EDIT: Oppido, I cannot lie and say that the way Beef says "retarded" excitedly in response to Ray grabbing him a cold one from the bar that one time still elicits a hearty one to this day. Dunno what that says about the strip, me, or society, but there's the data.
Mackenzie Guillory
2024-04-02 13:47:03 +0000 UTCYou don't have to download, you can use the scroll wheel to zoom in
E Corcoran
2024-03-29 22:03:55 +0000 UTCIt was a trap
E Corcoran
2024-03-29 21:52:54 +0000 UTCI guess the last panel MAYBE suggests that Polish women are unintelligent/unsophisticated/superficial? But I agree, nothing really jumps out at me here, certainly not as much as the various uses of "retarded" in the Achewood 1.0 run.
Oppido
2024-03-29 17:30:31 +0000 UTC"Ray Gets Sort of Stoned" was for sure the first strip. "I am from...History!!!" sold me.
2scrogz
2024-03-29 16:14:15 +0000 UTCMy first was Beef contemplating the ornate names of the 19th and early 20th century. I, myself, was driven to hysterics.
John Ashton
2024-03-29 14:57:06 +0000 UTCIn Soviet Russia, woman pay to sleep with YOU
E Corcoran
2024-03-29 13:31:12 +0000 UTCReading this again, which is the line that hasn't aged well? Serious question. They all seem fine to me, even with today's exaggerated sensitivities
E Corcoran
2024-03-29 13:30:29 +0000 UTChttps://achewood.com/2003/04/30/title.html
E Corcoran
2024-03-29 13:24:33 +0000 UTCI don't know Chris. I think that the elegance of the strip shines through. roast beef saying hate them to hell is an amazingly efficient way to show that character. end even though Ukrainians have been programming in working in tech since the 80s, I look at Vlad as a Soviet throwback. I mean if you figure he came here after the wall fell he would be right in line with hanging out with women who are impressed by burner phones. complexity is not necessarily better and this strip is really really funny. Great rhythm.
J Hardy Carroll
2024-03-29 11:26:30 +0000 UTCI may be some kind of knuckle-dragging throwback, but I access websites on a computer and not a phone. I still have to download images from Patreon to zoom in on them properly.
P Arbuthnot Walker
2024-03-29 10:50:47 +0000 UTCMemory tells me Vlad refers to “read basic email” when he’s extolling the virtues of banging lady robots to Beef. But with memory, who knows.
Doctor Link
2024-03-29 07:44:50 +0000 UTCAll the local 10'x20' indoor storage units were sold out when I needed one recently, but I got a very reasonable deal on two 10'x10's. As I made to pile the last of my woman-adverse hobby junk into my units, one of the unobtainable 10'x20's stood open. It was filled, wall-to-wall, with miniature wargaming terrain on simple, counter-height tables. Among the people who walked between the tables, inspecting whatever was supposed to have been occurring, was a woman who shyly slunk behind the doorframe as I marveled at the scene.
J.
2024-03-29 07:29:08 +0000 UTCI don't have them but I must have read someone's copy of that, there's no other explanation apart from a crazed brain
E Corcoran
2024-03-29 04:51:14 +0000 UTCDo you have the book collections, by any chance? I found this one as a bonus comic in volume II.
A. Hamster
2024-03-29 04:26:12 +0000 UTCI swear I remember the basic Hotmail account line from the main strip, but ohnorobot denies it
E Corcoran
2024-03-29 03:05:09 +0000 UTCapocalyptic machinery just mowing us all down
s b
2024-03-29 03:04:32 +0000 UTCI vaguely remember the trivial pursuit strip, which had the reference to women hating computer programs to hell, but i think by the time i was into achewood serializer (08-09 I *think*) was already gone/i didn't know what it was and didn't care enough to find out, so i could only accept the joke as a bit of world-building. I guess at least that particular mystery is solved. :D
Caleb Gerard
2024-03-29 02:38:07 +0000 UTCYes. It was the phrase, “we got much crispy Stellas out by the pool Ray” https://achewood.com/2006/01/20/title.html
Kate S.
2024-03-29 01:49:28 +0000 UTCI showed up sometime in ‘04, and I think it was in the neighborhood of high Ray’s “these are some pots that I have” that ensured I’d be back for decades to come.
Cody Richmond
2024-03-29 01:47:47 +0000 UTCIs it possible to remember what strip/sequence got you to keep reading (asking for anthropological purposes)
Chris Onstad
2024-03-29 01:40:09 +0000 UTCThis one predates my own introduction to Achewood (2006). Working for a startup blows. I’ll never do that again
Kate S.
2024-03-29 01:10:14 +0000 UTCSerializer launched October 1, 2002, one year to the day after Achewood. The Beef/Moon/Train stuff ran in like June 2002. So, the serializer/train strip came second. Furthermore, I have not explored Beef's deep feelings for trains nearly enough.
Chris Onstad
2024-03-29 00:56:48 +0000 UTCI'm sure model trains are right up there with D&D games on the Babe-O-Meter Richter Scale.
Walter Cooke
2024-03-29 00:53:37 +0000 UTCI remember this one! Still hella funny 😁
Ismini Roller
2024-03-29 00:44:28 +0000 UTCDoes this predate RBs trip to the moon? Because Ray lured him with promise of a really bitchin' model train setup.
Josh Egbert
2024-03-29 00:32:12 +0000 UTC
