How to Face Reality

I wish it happened more often, but it is rare that a conversation I have in real life will make its way, verbatim, into the comic. When it does, it’s pretty easy to decide who should say what to whom.

I assure you, this comic was NOT one of those cases.

No, in this case, I came up with the dialog from the first panel, and immediately knew I wanted to build a comic around it. Unfortunately, that meant I had to decide who should use this withering insult and who should get it used on them.

Most of you are thinking, “Obviously, Rick. If someone’s going to get insulted, it has to be Rick.” The problem is that this insult felt particularly mean, and I worry that if the abuse always flows from me to Rick it will begin to feel like I’m kicking a guy when he’s down.

I told Missy the joke, and asked her opinion. She said that I should aim the insult at Rick.

I called the real Ric, told him the insult and asked who he thought should be on the receiving end. He instantly and vehemently stated that the insult HAD TO be aimed at him. I mentioned my fear of kicking him while he’s down. He responded with words to the effect that if I don’t kick him when he’s down, I’m never going to kick him at all.

I worry sometimes that our friendship isn’t entirely healthy.

Anyway, I decided to have Rick use the one extremely mean insult on me, then I could just dump on him for the rest of the comic and nobody would mind. I told Missy that I had come up with a solution, and I looked forward to getting her opinion.

Missy reads all of the comics before anyone else. She is the last line of defense between you and my diabolical punctuation.

Unfortunately, I made a small error, and sent her the comic in the last stage of construction, instead of the finished comic. For a few minutes, she thought my interesting solution was to make a comic where the balloons had no tails, and any line of dialog could be said by any character. That did solve my cutting insult problem, with the minor tradeoff of making the entire comic incomprehensible.

She was very diplomatic when she told me what she thought.