Sep 26th, 2003, 09:30 PM
GET READY FOR A WHOLE LOT OF EXPLANATION THAT NOBODY ASKED FOR (or LITTLE JEANETTE: SEASON ONE DVD AUDIO COMMENTARY):
The main problem with the Jeanette comic is after I did the first two comics, I came up with a good ending for the series. So the first two comics are pretty great, and they are what they are. The other two, while they might be pretty good, were really only done out of my wanting to get to the ending, because it was the only really great joke that I came up with since the second strip was over.
Originally when I started the comic, it was all going to just be an obvious insult to Jeanette. Like the last comic was. But after I wrote the first strip I realized it wasn't that insulting, but it was great without the notion that it was supposed to be OUR Jeanette. So yeah, while I did get inspiration for the character from Jeanette X, I didn't mean for it to be HER, necessarily. My character's actually a lot more likable, and would probably grow up to be the exact opposite of Jeanette X.
The first comic I just started with the line "...And that's why I want to be a mom when I grow up!" and I really didn't have anything else. I had just seen the Hours (which is such a shit movie), and it had a scene where some kids found a dead/dying bird. Then I realized what a cliché that was; I remembered a series of Calvin and Hobbs where they found a dead bird, and I remembered a quick scene in Welcome to the Dollhouse where she had a dead bird in the special people's club, and I think almost all of us have found a dead bird when we were kids. I never really saw it made fun of. So I decided what if it were a big fucking Flamingo/Crane/kinda thing. Something that was bigger than her? Hilarious!
The second strip I had this old cartoon on my mind that I remembered from a National Lampoon "Totally Tasteless Toons" book, where it showed a guy stopping at a car accident, taking pictures of a dead woman's cunt. I came up with the idea of Jeanette finding that book, asking her mom about it, and having her mother react to it in a way that suggest the cartoon reflects Jeanette's father's attitude towards women. I redrew the cartoon from memory, changed the random person to a cop, and added the oh-so hilarious caption. This is probably my favorite strip, but I always thought Jeanette's reason for looking in the book was kinda stupid, thinking there was information about "sick" birds. But the joke was good enough to compromise the character's judgment, just a little bit, I thought.
The only idea I really had for what could happen next was to have Jeanette reveal that she understood that the bird was dead, but for whatever reason, she was still taking care of it. Probably just out of extreme loneliness, or just wanting to take care of something in a way nobody takes care of her. I wanted to pad out the series with a few strips featuring Jeanette alone in her room, talking to the bird about various subjects, but I couldn't think of anything good and wanted to move the story along. So I did.
The last comic was going to be two comics, since really up to this point the comics were all each set in one location. I was going to have a comic where she gets sick, and have another comic where they go to the doctor. I realized after I came up with the line "You've been diagnosed as being a stupid bitch," that it was very very similar to a joke in a Daniel Clowes comic "Little Enid," and I originally wasn't going to use it, until when I was running it by a friend of mine, I suddenly came up with the line "But I want to be a mom." I said that and it was a huge laugh.
The Kelly Chaos comics I did because I wanted to be doing SOMETHING while I was trying to think of GOOD strips to get to the ending of Jeanette. The worst thing that I can do when I'm trying to make comic strips is to come up with some plotty kinda thing, where I'm trying to make strong individual strips at the same time. So I just did something else instead. I remembered this old flash cartoon that somebody I know made to make fun of somebody else they knew, where all the cartoon was of a stick figure, jumping around and shaking back and forth, shaking, and then exploding. I remember I used this cartoon a few years ago, when I offered to draw a picture of ravekitty (really just so I could get a photo of her for whatever reason; I think it was some big secret what she looked like), pretended to take a long time on it, then unveiled it as that flash cartoon. her response was something like "uh that sucks you didn't even use details" or something. She sure showed me. Anyway, that drawing gave me the idea to do Kelly Chaos as some twitchy, bumbling mess that ejaculates when he gets any kind of attention (or kills himself when he doesn't). Daphne's idea, as mentioned before, was to end it with nobody showing up to his funeral, which is so great.
THE END.
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