by Craig J. Clark & Elena La Rocca
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Since Elena was going to be busy with her full-time job and her portfolio class, I helped out by writing all of my scripts for the semester over the summer. Of the twelve I sent her, she accepted all but the last three, which she felt dragged one subplot out too long. One of the rejected strips was revamped and I wrote two more to pick up the slack.
But as usual I get ahead of myself. There's really little to say about "Words of Wisdom with Roger." It is what it is. I will mention, however, that the name of the strip finally restabilized here and that it remained This Happens until the end of the run. Frankly, I was getting pretty tired of coming up with variations on the name that rarely had anything to do with the strip itself.
There is little to say about this one, either, except that "'Ah' is not a color!" is still one of my favorite lines of all time.
There is one other thing, though. After This Happens ceased to be I still had a year and a half of school left, so I hung around The Signal offices occasionally writing guest strips for other cartoonists and generally made a nuisance of myself. Once I made a really big stink when one cartoonist submitted a strip with the same punchline as this one (I think his variation was "Hey, tough teacher"). This was the same artist who ripped off an old Bloom County joke the year before, but that time I had been able to intercede and the strip wasn't printed. Now, while it's possible he had never read the Bloom County in question, this time he had no excuse. The paper printed his comic anyway. Like I said, I made a big stink.
My film influence shows through in this strip, the only one that features a zoom in. And see? John has his quirks, too.
This strip was based on an actual dream I once had. I won't go into detail, but suffice to say it did involve somebody's school ID being baked into a meatloaf. Dreams are weird.
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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.
All images are for viewing only and may not be used without permission.