by Craig J. Clark & Elena La Rocca
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One wintry day when the picturesque lakes around campus were frozen over, The Signal's enraged managing editor threw her toaster -- which was evidently not working -- onto the ice. There it stayed for a while until one day it mysteriously disappeared. Soon after, all of the paper's cartoonists took it upon themselves to explain what had happened to the toaster. Kevin Pease made it an integral part of his strip one week. For our parts, Elena and I decided that it was exactly what we needed to make sure our Hippie didn't expose any more of his newly-cleaned body than he needed to.
"I'm bathing" is what I would now call a radio line (or, in this instance, a radio thought bubble). At the time I had yet to begin working on what would eventually become Radio Show #47, but if I had I might have found another way for the Hippie to express his resignation. Then again...
BONUS ARTIST COMMENTARY #2: "I loved that darn Hippie -- he was such fun to draw. I think the one where he's musing in the bathtub is one of my favorite panels -- 'I'm bathing.' -- that pose of defeat, with a big old showercap, and the glasses."
Those who have read Kevin's Absurd Notions Classic archive know that this was not the first time Elena and Kevin collaborated on an end-of-the-year crossover. Three years earlier, when they were both but freshmen, they did The Absurd Notions of Mike, which was a clever blending of her strip The Adventures of Mike and Kevin's Absurd Notions. Thus began a (mostly) yearly tradition. This was Kevin's third and final crossover and his second-to-last college strip. I always felt honored by that.
One thing I should probably explain is the "get well soon, Craig!" in the fifth panel of our strip. You see, the weekend before this crossover was to be published, I had been rushed to the hospital with a collapsed lung (or spontaneous pneumothorax if you want to get technical). This naturally required some time to heal. I missed the last week or so of classes and all of my finals, but I was able to make them up over the summer. Luckily I wrote my scripts well in advance, so Elena and Kevin were able to do our crossover and she was able to do the last strip of the semester while I recuperated, first at the hospital and then at home. I love the fact that that's still Kevin's book hitting Roger in the head in the fourth panel. Violence is fun.
One time Elena and I were discussing the strip -- where we should go with it, what we should do with it once we got there -- and we started to wonder why Roger always wears a hat. It didn't take long for us to come up with a reason. I had taken German the previous year, so the book Roger is reading roughly translates to Oh, My Head (and Oh, My Aching Head in the last panel). Speaking of books, John always seems to have his head buried in one. I decided this was because he always wanted to have ammo ready in case Roger made a bad joke unexpectedly. Either that, or he's the most studious college student ever.
Fans of eye strain will tell you that the tiny print in the fifth panel reads, "So long, and thanks for all the laughs." This was put there by Elena because she was graduating and moving on -- well, sort of. She knew at the beginning of the year that she was going to be on the popular 4 1/2 year plan, so she ended up returning in the fall for the one class she needed to finish her degree. In the meantime, I had tried auditioning a replacement artist for the strip but that didn't pan out, so Elena agreed to hang on for one more semester, which is why there are 30 strips in this archive and not just 18.
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All images are copyright © 1992, 1993, 2001 by Craig J. Clark & Elena Nazzaro. Text is copyright © 2001 by Craig J. Clark & Elena Nazzaro.
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