Comics Comics!

Juli of MoochieBoochie.com is a graphic designer, musician, and esteemed relative of myself. She is as talented as she is alive. Also, she loves guinea pigs, but I suppose that goes without saying at this point.

The comic displayed above is a concept piece that I think speaks to the underlying nature of guinea pigs and, dare I say, life itself. It is truly inspired. When asked for a comment on the work, the artist stated simply, “It doesn’t really make any sense, but I made it in two hours.”

Transcendant.

You get to know someone after being related for 24 years. I won’t speak too much about what kind of person Juli is because I think you can tell by the comic she has submitted. I would, however, like to tell a story. Juli and I have always enjoyed making up games, and we’ve also enjoyed things that are large. That may sound strange, but it’s true. We once stacked all the couch cushions in the house on top of each other to form a gigantic tower with a mediocre to poor foundation. We then forced our babysitter to sit atop the “Pig Chair” as it became known as. Why Pig Chair? We originally were going to go with “Big Chair” but someone in the group had a listening comprehension problem and it was thereafter known as Pig Chair. Pig Chair wasn’t really a game so much, though, unless you consider trying not to fall 7 feet onto a concrete basement floor to be a game. The Pig Chair was simply large… and amusing.

We invented some games in our day, as well. The one that immediately comes to mind is the creatively named “ankle game”. This was also invented under the watchful eye of our babysitter. The way that the ankle game is played is first, an area of play is designated by creating two parallel lines about ten feet apart. One person crawls around on their hands and knees in between said lines. Any area past the lines is a safe zone. The rest of the players, for some reason, run back and forth between the safe zones while the crawling player has the goal of… well, grabbing the runner’s ankle. If they can grab an ankle and hang on for three or five seconds (I forget which, we may have experimented with different levels of difficulty) the owner of the grabbed ankle would then become the crawling person. This might sound dumb, but most sports do when you try to explain them. The real fun was derived from the fact that when a child is running top speed and you all off a sudden grab their ankle, often times they will fall flat on their face, and I seem to recall thinking that was fun. Another variation of this game is the ball game where the person in the center is now standing and the people in the safe zones are rolling a ball back and forth. The person in the center has to stomp on the ball to stop it. Apparently rolling your ankle is a lot of fun as a kid, too.

This is all besides the point though, because my point is that Juli and I enjoy games and things that are large. We finally found a way to incorporate both of these in a game which we titled “Life Sized Life”. To play life sized life, all you need is the popular board game “Life”, a ream of 8.5″ x 11″ printer paper, a three story house, and about five hours. The first step is to copy every square from The Game of Life onto an individual sheet of paper. Now, this is where you can get a little creative. The basic mechanics of the game should remain the same - salaries, pay days, children obtained, houses bought, money spent, etc. - but the details of each action can be whatever you want. Not satisfied with “You buy art - Pay $28,000“? That’s fine. You can change that to “You buy France - Pay $28,000“. Once you’ve successfully copied the board onto the paper, you then lay them out in order starting from the basement and moving upwards in the house. Grab the spinner, money, and a couple of stuffed animals as pieces and you are on the fast track to fun.

What does this have to do with comics? Nothing. I was just thinking about Life Sized Life.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 1:00 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.