Let's Be Friends Again

I’ve restarted Fallout 3 five times. I get a couple of hours into the game and start to get paranoid that I might’ve missed something I can never go back for. So I restart. And my instincts prove true. I am always one fork richer.

When I play a video game I scour every dark nook, every hidden cranny, for anything that could give me an advantage. If your video game is a garage sale, I am the person there at 5 a.m. on a Saturday offering four cents for something that costs a nickel. It’s for this reason that it is not wise for me to play a role-playing game when I have, say, anything at all to do ever.

Fallout 3 begins with your time in a socially, chronologically, and literally sealed Vault coming to a violent end, as your father has decided to ditch the Vault for reasons unknown and now, of course, the security staff is blaming you for bringing disharmony to their paradise.

You’re meant to snatch a gun or a baseball bat and follow swiftly behind your father; his footsteps your precursor, his plans a mystery. Guards were firing on me as I attempted to leave. Irradiated roaches that had infested the place were nipping at my heels. Despite the clear and present danger, I was shuffling along like a walker with an old lady at the wheel, taking bullets and insect bites in turn while I lumbered along overburdened by a wealth of forks, plates, drinking glasses, pencils, clipboards, and anything I had run across that wasn’t specifically programmed by a man with a Computer Science degree to not be taken.

My character is some sort of office supply thieving mummy. He casually slips a wrench into his pocket as he shambles towards the Vault’s exit, taking the time to stop and brain a security guard with a baseball bat if they get too close. Nice outfit that guard has on. Shall I take it? Yes, please.

I ended up leaving the Vault with about ten pairs of clothing I had looted from the dead, quite a few #2 pencils, five or six batons with my blood still fresh on them, 12 shot glasses, 11 drinking glasses, five plates, 4 forks, some bobby pins, a couple of 10mm pistols, a baseball hat, glove, and bat, and a healthy sense of accomplishment.

Why bother restarting the game so many times for junk that would barely get me any money, given that Fallout is a world where any given person would prefer a lone assault rifle to an entire set of kitchen equipment?* I don’t know. It probably has something to do with low self-esteem or father issues.

So there I go, encumbered by everything except my own dignity, inching forward like a pre-2000′s zombie. No danger of me running away from a giant leopard or some kind of murderous robot. I can see a shop in the distance, maybe a half a mile away. See you there in six hours.

* Yes, the game world is remakably similar to most Southern states.

Not sure how Old West prostitutes and 70′s maverick cops with a penchant for ankle straps are supposed to vote. God damn America indeed.

This is an alternate version of our Election Day strip, conceived and done up proper by Chris with nary a fingerprint of my own to be seen on it, hence its high trend towards inaccuracy. Let’s take a look at everything he got wrong.

1. I would never watch TV with Chris for more than two panels.

2. I would kill myself or everyone else before saying “meh,” whichever is more likely to be doable from my couch.

3. It is true that I did not vote, chief reason being that I was too busy changing my Facebook status to variations of Nobama and McLame. (For the record I should say I was only changing the cases of the letters in the words, NoBamA, mClAME, etc.)

4. Forgot where I was going with this, so let’s just take this opportunity to thank April Steele for the awesome coloring help she’s provided us with. Thanks, April! You have good skin! (My mom told me to say the skin thing, girls enjoy hearing that shit, I guess.)

5.

My ‘c’ key was broken when I typed out that headline, sorry guys, hope it makes sense.

This is a mash-up of ‘Sam and Max’ and ‘Uzumaki’. Both are comics I have a great fondness for. Please, enjoy. Or don’t. I don’t know what I’d do if you didn’t enjoy it, though. It’s not like I can give you your time or money back. So, remember, it’s in your best interest to enjoy this because you gain nothing from hating it!

Click on the pictures and say “reggib” out loud to magically change their size to something more legible.

So here’s the full on picture of Chris as done by Liefeld for some unknown Alan Moore book.

The impossible muscles, the distracting lens flare, the hideous signature at the bottom: yes, this truly is some sort of art, the kind I’m not sure has been defined yet. Can we call it anti-art? It’s like wrapping all the way back around the circle from pretentious and you come back perilously close to where you started. What the hell am I talking about, I sort of lost where I was going.

Lots and lots of thanks to Justin Stewart at http://justin3000.blogspot.com/ for risking his corneal capacity to color that abomination!

And finally, I leave you with a few words from Chris. I think he was feeling left out because I get to call him an idiot every day while he can only look up and shake his fist from the comments box.

The new comic is based on an actual conversation between Curt and I that really stuck with me. I then told Curt we should make it into a comic. Such is the nature of the collaboration. The portions featuring crying, pleading, and more crying have, of course, been omitted so as to keep things as light as a summer’s breeze around these parts.

Rob Liefeld was not the original funeral portrait artist, and even though making fun of Rob is like shooting apples in a barrel (full of apples), it was classier than Curt’s original joke.
The original joke was probably funnier, but we are nothing if not classy.

The part of today’s comic that features me requesting something of Curt is 100% true as it really is something I made Curt promise me.
Seeing how he’s going to handle things though, perhaps I should try to institute some further stipulations.

Hey, nobody ever accuse ole Curt Franklin of being stingy with the Christmas gifts. Check out what’s gonna be under young Mr. Haley’s tree this year!

I can only imagine the advertised “Dimevision” is a mode where the image of the movie is obstructed by a grey haze and a simulated phone call is made where your parents tell you how disappointed they are in you because you’re in the band Pantera.

Also, I didn’t actually buy this, the Christmas gift is just this picture. I’m spending all the money I have on this website, as you can clearly see.

Here’s Chris art from last Thursday’s strip, unhampered by that giant block of text that threatened to make your eyes non-functional. It’s been fun watching Chris get better and better at the different aspects of his work. I felt like he gave this one a great air of desperation; approximating pretty well the feeling of a person who’s just run out of gas and can only climb on top of their mobile mini-tank to give themselves a few more minutes of life.

There will be a strip tomorrow for Thanksgiving for anybody keeping track. So go ahead and forego the celebration of the genocide of Native Americans and instead give thanks for Chris and I as we massacre an entire art form one comic at a time.

Terrorists attacked the LBFA computer, destroying the years worth of strips we already had finished. This terrorist was a program I somebody downloaded called porno.exe. Terrorists are getting increasingly crafty in their attempts to destroy everything America holds dear (porn).

So, starting from scratch, we had to start other comics. Literally from scratch. As in we reverted both of our minds to infant-like states (no jokes, please), re-learned how to read and write, developed our own visual and verbal language starting with crude cave paintings (you can see those cave paintings at www.ctrlaltdel-online.com), created all of our tools from their most base components, and started working on the new strip.

This means there will be no new strip today. Instead it will be TOMORROW ON FRIDAY!

Yes, the terrorists win today. And they will probably win tomorrow when you look at the strip and say “what the fuck, I don’t get it.”

We’re going from trying and failing to post a comic every Tuesday and Thursday to trying and failing to post a comic every Tuesday and Friday! This has to do with some extra business we picked up so hopefully it will end up meaning even more comics for you to hate in a week’s time.

When you were young and dreamed about the best day of your life, this is what you dreamt of.

1. Today marks the first day of our weekly one panel comic that Chris and I are doing for the film and entertainment news blog blah blah blah buzzwords site Fused Film. The guys that run the site are very nice peeps (does that not mean baby chickens any more) and we are happy to being doing work for them. And by doing work I refer to me going on a three day coke binge and then handing Chris a bloody towel with my ideas written on it in black tar, leaving him to slave over every part of the comic.

So, yeah. Go to Fused Film! Tell them how cool we are!

2. You may have noticed we have a new logo-header-picture at the top of the page. This was done by man among weaklings Dylan Todd of Big Red Robot. He has an excellent blog and even more excellent taste in who he designs free logos for. Free, right? Yeah, free, okay, he’s still cool.

Here is a picture of Dylan if he was a dog:

In short: Dylan owns.