Three Men and a Comic

By Gabriel, 30 Jun 19, 4

My Recollection

Bartman. Left Vulcan ear. Pennywhistles and moon-pies.

The pre-internet outer suburbs were a howling void which is why I know it’s harder than you think to tie up a ten-year-old. You’d get bored out there. The kind of bored that would make a great art-house film if your stupid, ten-year-old brain were capable of appreciating the beauty of such oppressive nothing. If time flies when you’re having fun, out there we were immortal.

The modern world is one of long beaten paths, paved and lined with tourist-friendly pit stops. Each hobby neatly divided into countless bespoke holes along the internet’s Amigara Fault. The olden days were a desert pocked by oases and mirages, dangerous places, and even then, why explore when you didn’t even know if there’s anything to find?

This is why we copied things we saw on TV. Not because the messages were more dangerous than others, it’s that there were no others. I’m the sexiest man alive if I’m the last man on Earth, and in kind, the dumbest ideas you could have were brilliant in their loneliness. We saw someone being tied up, so we went looking for rope, and only because we knew nobody had rocket skates.

The means of selecting a victim is a natural logic unpolluted by human thought. A process essentially the opposite of women’s bodies deciding who to sync their cycles to dictates some combination of weaknesses to be punished. It was seldom ever me, in spite of usually being the smallest and weakest, meaning nature’s crimson claw has at least some respect for personality.

Local scouts were less about teaching us knots than they were about teaching us which pagan weather entities weren’t allowed to harass us anymore, so nobody knew any binding spells more powerful than the legendary Double Granny. The thing about the Old Dame though, is that it’s a hard knot to tie while maintaining the overall tightness of the wrap. The moment you go for the second, and necessary if you don’t want an immediate escape, Grandma, you introduce a slackness that our pea brains couldn’t figure a solution for.

But the human story is one of midgets standing on the shoulders of giants, so we got some packing tape.

Stephen was a gaunt child with a head of cropped brown fuzz. His shirt selection was a Joe Dirt affair consisting of upbeat slogans made ironic through wear, and shirts from places he’d either never been to or tragically spent a lot of time in. He’d submit to dares easily and could squeeze himself behind the gas canisters of his house. He was sitting in a swivel chair, expecting nothing more than a sense of importance, as we tore the tape open and started at his ankles.

A parent had foolishly purchased a 3-pack of the cheap packing tape thinking it would be useful for things like packing. The stuff was, and still is, a paradox material. It’s brown but you can see through it. It sticks to everything but will never hold anything together. That second one was the linchpin of reason to this. So what if you wrap me in it, it’s not that tough. My brother, another neighbour, and I went to work on our cocoon.

People who don’t grasp victim blaming didn’t grow up around the modern-day sub-peasants on the periphery of modern society. I’ve seen people go back for second tastes of visibly off milk on the off chance it somehow stopped tasting like koala smegma in the intervening 3 seconds. At a certain point, your problems are on you.

As we got past Stephens knees, he realised that, like gravity, a lot of a weak thing can prove remarkably powerful. He mused, as we wound around him, that he should probably put an end to this, as his normally dormant sliver of planning intelligence had begun hooting about some imminent danger. All he had to do was say stop. He didn’t, so we pressed on with all the compassion of frat boy behind a dumpster.

The last thing his mouth said was, “Don’t cover my eyes”, which was an odd thing to say as we were obviously going to cover his eyes and there was not a goddamn thing this muddy brown boy-tube could do about it. A little sun-pinked nose was the only clue that there was a creamy human centre to this glass and a half of mummified rat child. That and the aggressive “MMMMMMMMMMMM!”s coming from within.

It was glorious. It looked exactly like the dumb, cartoony thing you are imagining and watching it wobble about, wordlessly begging for help, was a kind of comedy I wouldn’t see again until Jackass. My neighbours first thought was to tip him over, and that was a commendable bit of cruelty, but a yard too far. I mean, we covered his eyes. His eyes. So we aided him as he hopped out of my house, down the stairs, and toward his home.

We got him to his front steps with surprisingly little trouble, a fact I now realise meant he could see a bit through the eye layer, then scattered as he began up his stairs like a Chinese zombie. His mother shrieked like an old lady on Monty Python, Devlin began laughing like it was, and it probably was, the funniest thing he’d ever seen, and his two younger sisters began throwing things at him.

Later reports revealed that his family didn’t free him from his curse for quite some time.

 

The Episode

There’s a moment in the highly regarded Dark Knight where The Joker busts in on a party, pile of goons in tow, and begins causing mayhem. Bruce Wayne is attending the party, gets changed into Batman, and saves Maggie Gyllenhaal by following her out a highrise window and landing on a car. The Joker and his mildly bruised goons are still upstairs at the party, but the film cuts to Jim Gordon talking about other narrative elements, forgetting the party entirely.

There are certain things you can’t ignore. If a character starts a fire in their flat as they head out to work, the audience will expect that to come up later. A goonswarmed Joker at a party full of wealthy jerks is a fire that demands closure, but we never get any.

I didn’t even notice this on my first watch of the film, neither did any of my friends, and none of the reviews I read or saw mentioned it. It’s a glaring thing when you see it, but most didn’t notice because of something I tend to yammer on about: narrative impetus.

Humans have a grasp of cause and effect built in, and, like a lot of other instincts, these can be engaged in narratives. A cliché way in writing is to start “in medias res”. That’s Latin for, “in the midst of things” and refers to the narrative tool of starting your, in this case, reader in the middle of an event. Starting a book with the line, “Colin ducked the boomerang and prepared to wipe the smile from that koala’s face” creates questions that the human cause/effect instinct will demand answers to. Now you HAVE to read on, because what the fuck? “Colin awoke in his house, unaware that a mutant koala, the dominant ethnicity in his post-apocalyptic society, was about to come knocking”, answers all my questions so I’m less motivated to read on.

The resulting forward momentum that these questions create is an example of narrative impetus, the anticipatory space between the tumbling dominos that keeps us engaged, and, as Dark Knight demonstrates, it can work some borderline magic.

Three Men and a Comic is a flawed story. Firstly, it’s not three men and a comic, it’s Bart and a comic. Milhouse and Martin are introduced but are then ignored until they’re contrived back into the plot as a last-minute conflict point. It’s particularly baffling as the tools were quite obviously there to fix this. All three are at the convention, and this could have been where each sees and is consumed by the first issue. Even the second act’s admittedly funny time with Mrs Glick could easily have either involved Milhouse and Martin as well or had some cutaways to their jobs and other jokes. It’s using gum to patch a hole you drilled in your roof for no reason at all.

But the third act, pulled out of nowhere, is still good because, even in the mere 7 minutes it has available, there’s great character to it. Milhouse is a sad follower, only really wanting Carl Yastrzemsk, but still being a notch smarter than Bart when it comes to sharing the comic. Martin is the smarter one, but still child enough to physically fight over it. And Bart has descended into absolute paranoid madness, but this works because of what keeps this episode watchable, narrative impetus.

Bart’s mad need for the first issue of Radioactive Man is such a simple and strong narrative motivator that it holds all this stray material together enough to keep you from really noticing that The Joker is still at the party. It is his single motivation from 5:30 into the episode and this is not a level of focus seen in a lot of sitcoms. This is why he nags his father. This is why he listens to his mother. This is why he gets a lemonade stand, works for Mrs Glick, gets into the three-way ownership, ties up Martin, and nearly lets Milhouse fall.

The movie Starfish is about a girl dealing with a friend’s death as sound monsters invade from another dimension. If that last bit stands out, exactly, that’s a strong narrative drive. Because this is an indie style film though, it opts to spend an unnecessary amount of time working against that drive. Long, pointless sequences of the character surviving alone in a house, and an even longer one after she initially opts not to take up the task of finding the sound code that will end the invasion, are unpleasant as they exist in opposition to what is a very strong narrative impetus: sound monsters invading from another fucking dimension.

The first issue of Radioactive Man permeates Three Men and a Comic so absolutely that none of the impediments to Bart’s progress work against the narrative impetus. Each is a function that results directly from and works directly toward the narrative drive. Bart needs the comic, which necessitates money, which necessitates the jobs, a nice line of dominoes. The time spent with Mrs Glick is, structurally, a wild diversion and one that comes at the cost of a richer character experience with the other two children. But these stray matters find commonality when caught in the pull of good narrative impetus.

Yours in having the big sideburns, Gabriel.

 

Jokes, Lines, and Stray Thoughts.

Lisa’s line about hoping Bart never knows true popularity is good. It’s one of those ones that is very vicious if you think about it for more than the second the show provides you with.

Casper being the ghost of Richie Rich feels like a legitimate piece of early comic headcanon.

“Too bad we didn’t come dressed as popular cartoon characters”, see, THIS is how you do a meta joke. It has to function in-universe or it’s just a garish wink at the camera.

Otto’s self-insert comic has some pretty decent art that I’m assuming he drew himself.

According to the commentary, this was the first episode to beat The Cosby Show in total viewers but not in the coveted “Women 18-to-asleep” demographic.

Wes Archer, the animator for this episode and series such as King of the Hill, Bob’s Burgers, Rick and Morty, and Disenchanted is the one responsible for those weird moments where the heads twist. Everyone else hated them and they got phased out.

This isn’t even the worst one

In the 90s, shows were concerned with legal action, so most of the stuff you’d see at sci-fi conventions and the like would all be knockoffs. I’m glad it’s changed because I fucking hate that shit.

Bart with the swoosh entrances when dressed as Bartman are great little touches.

Dirk Richter’s death gag is probably a combination of one of the Superman actors and the Hogan’s Heroes guy. Both fun, look ‘em up.

It’s the first appearance of Comic Book Guy! He was given a name later on, but I’ll never use it. His accent here veers more regional American than what it evolved into. His line about having a masters in Folklore and Mythology was one lost on me as a kid, but now that I’ve spent time in those areas of university: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Homer adding an extra syllable to words begins to phase out after season 2.

The joke with Bart’s inner monologue being read by Daniel Stern is a reference to The Wonder Years which was a goddamn huge show back when it was on, but I never really hear about it these days. Imagine How I Met Your Mother crossed with That 70s Show. The use of a narrator was a stroke of genius, the show didn’t have a laugh track, and I think it was actually the first single camera sitcom. Still baffled it’s not about more or popping up on streaming services.

Bart eating the couch gum is a goodun

Patty and Selma: Origins

There’s a shot of the weird little light bulb oven thing when Marge is talking about it that’s oddly outside the narrative world. It’s brief but strange, like a bit of visual free indirect discourse.

Sarcastic Guy voice in the bank teller. I imagine him now as Quantum Leaping all about the Simpson’s universe.

First proper Nelson HAHA joke! The last episode set it up but was three HAs so I don’t count it. This is the first true one.

Speaking of free indirect discourse, intense character focus paves the way for jokes like the show moving in to Bart’s imagination of Glick’s brother dying in the war. This was a very early example of it being used in such a drop-in way.

 “Because you remind me of me”, wildly out of character for Comic Book Guy.

Chloris Leachman plays Mrs Glick.

 “Genuinely arousing” from Glick is another of those lines you can kind of miss at age 7. Horny old lady, rad.

Pulling weeds for 50 cents actually happened to one of the writers.

First appearance of Android’s Dungeon as well.

Using children as the audience perspective is a great accompaniment to a driving narrative as it helps cohere stupid behaviour. This is the other factor that keeps the final 8 minutes from getting too stupid. They’re kids, of course they’d be this stupid about a comic.

Overhead shot really emphasises Bart’s tube skull

Circle pan is good

“Let’s tie him up!”, has the rope in the treehouse already.

Rumpus room seen! And with a great gag from Homer too.

Gabriel

gabrielmeat

4 replies to Three Men and a Comic


Magnumweight on 30 Jun 19 said:

Of all the episodes in this season, this is the one that stuck with me the most when I first viewed it as a child, especially Mrs Glick stuff (mostly the part about the grenade) and the entire third act.

Comic Book Guy's voice sounds just off enough from his later voice to feel wrong to my ears on re-watch.


Gabriel on 01 Jul 19 said:

The thrust of the episode is something that is not often seen in the show, so the third act's absolute laser focus really etches it into the mind.


Shaky on 01 Jul 19 said:

Two things.
If you Google "Double Granny", make sure you add "Knot" when searching.
Good job on finishing two seasons. Only at least 29 more to go. But at least it starts to get more interesting.


Gabriel on 01 Jul 19 said:

Still one episode of season 2 to go, but at least I'm making progress and getting them done quicker. Now that I am a Professional Content Technician (Second Class), I have standards to live up to.

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