The process by which John and I pro­duce a new comic is twisted and tor­tur­ous, not entirely unlike the dark rit­u­als one might use to summon a bale­ful demon to this earthly plane. It’s not uncom­mon for both of us to come away from our Skype chats feel­ing drained of vigor and full of bile. One unlucky lis­tener once char­ac­ter­ized our con­ver­sa­tions as “con­tentious and blunt”, a charge we seem to have taken to heart over the years of our collaboration.

Inspired by other, greater indi­vid­u­als than our­selves, John and I have been con­sid­er­ing for sev­eral months now how to best inflict our cre­ative process upon you, dear read­ers. I think we’ve finally come up with something.

And so, with the hope that I’ve dis­suaded at least a few of you from lis­ten­ing, I present to you the very first episode of Tempus Fugit, the Chronil­log­i­cal Podcast!

The title of this episode is Scatil­log­i­cal, for rea­sons that will become dis­tress­ingly clear should you choose to listen to it.

Although we are billing this as a “pod­cast”, we can’t really promise these on any­thing like a reg­u­lar basis. To be honest, it’s not entirely clear that we’ll be doing another one of these. The main dif­fi­culty in pro­duc­ing these things, we’ve dis­cov­ered, is the sheer, mind-​numbing drudgery—the drudgery of sift­ing through buck­et­fuls of old mate­r­ial to extract those few meager flakes of gold.

Also, the eerie horror of lis­ten­ing to a record­ing of your own voice saying vile, appalling things—things that clearly would never have passed your lips in a sane state. Mustn’t forget about the eerie horror.

Finally, a few notes of prepa­ra­tion, expla­na­tion, and clarification:

1. The intro/outro music is a track called Just What I Always Wanted by Mizuk­isLastChance, from the ever-​awesome chip­tune repos­i­tory, 8 Bit Collective.
2. John and I have potty-​mouths. If you don’t like potty in your mouth, then we def­i­nitely rec­om­mend you give this MP3 a pass. Con­sider your­self warned.
3. Early in the pod­cast, we start talk­ing about the film Metrop­o­lis. If you’re con­fused why we abruptly start talk­ing about “the medi­a­tor between the head and hands” and robot sluts, it’s because we’re ref­er­enc­ing to this movie. I just want to clar­ify that I do not gen­er­ally bring up robot sluts in con­ver­sa­tion as a matter of course.
4. You will hear the name David Schultz; he is a mutual friend of ours. Fun fact: he was the inspi­ra­tion for the design of Pro­fes­sor Malloc!
5. We spend a lot of time dis­cussing “pavil­ions”. Specif­i­cally, we are refer­ring to pavil­ions as imple­mented at EPCOT Center in Walt Disney World. If you have no idea what that pre­vi­ous sen­tence meant, then I hon­estly have no idea what you will make of this record­ing. Good luck.

Alright, there’s clearly been too much ado here, and I need to wrap things up. Shoo, ado! Shoo!

Here, while I’m fin­ish­ing up with the ado, take the pod­cast and enjoy.

Tempus Fugit, Episode 1: Scatillogical

Not a whole lot to say here, but I wanted to give our read­ers a notice that we’re not dead! John is work­ing on col­or­ing the new strip, and I’ve been fid­dling around a bit with the new releases of Word­press and ComicPress.

(Aside: I’m actu­ally grow­ing kind of annoyed with Word­press. It’s not bad soft­ware con­sid­er­ing it’s built in PHP—but that’s like saying that kick­ing a child in the face isn’t too bad, because you aren’t kick­ing 10 chil­dren in the face. Or… some­thing. Look, what I’m trying to say is that using PHP is a lot like kick­ing chil­dren in the face.¹

Anyway, I’m get­ting annoyed with Word­press + Comic­press because it does a lot of stuff that we don’t want/use, and doesn’t do every­thing we would like it to. I’ve been con­sid­er­ing build­ing a comic pub­lish­ing plat­form in Ruby on Rails for a while now; maybe one of these days I’ll actu­ally get around to doing so.)

The upshot of all of this is: the rest of this week will prob­a­bly be sort of boring for you, with only maybe a blog entry to hold you over. But between John and me, we should be able to deliver some­thing inter­est next week! It should be excit­ing! So get pre­pared!

Hey gang! John here. Thanks for stick­ing around while I finish up the next comic. You know, it’s coming along! And to prove this, I will post an official-​brand Teaser Comic, cob­bled together using these unfin­ished, non-​contiguous panels.

Click to large-​make

Final dia­logue may or may not revolve around Pokémon.

In 1989, in a small town in rural Utah, an Ital­ian film com­pany shot a horror film that would even­tu­ally be released under the title Troll 2—I say “even­tu­ally”, because the film was orig­i­nally titled Gob­lins. This ini­tial title made a lot of sense, because the film is in fact about a town full of gob­lins that ter­ror­ize and attempt to devour a vaca­tion­ing middle-​class Amer­i­can family. Hence: Gob­lins. Troll 2 makes com­par­a­tively little sense as a title, largely due to the rather con­spic­u­ous fact that the film does not, in actu­al­ity, fea­ture any trolls what­so­ever.¹ And need­less to say, it is not an actual sequel to the orig­i­nal Troll in any mean­ing­ful way.

From even just this scant infor­ma­tion I’ve imparted to you, you should be able to get a good sense of the kind of film Troll 2 is.

But I’m get­ting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to 1989, with the Ital­ians out in Utah film­ing a low-​budget horror movie (with a cor­re­spond­ingly low-​budget cast). And so the thing gets shot, every­one parts ways, the Ital­ians fly back home, a movie gets cut together. Some­where along the way the name changes from Gob­lins to Troll 2. It gets released to VHS. The story of a thou­sand low-​budget flicks, right?

Well, not quite.

By way of expla­na­tion, let me show you a chart. It is rea­son­ably simple chart, plot­ting how good a movie is² versus how enter­tain­ing it is.

As you can see on the right side of the graph, high-​quality films pos­i­tively cor­re­late to highly enter­tain­ing films. Pulp Fic­tion is fun to watch because it is by most rea­son­able mea­sures a fan­tas­tic film. The Fifth Ele­ment: also very good.

Moving left, the films get a bit worse, and are cor­re­spond­ingly less fun to watch. Die Hard 2? Okay, but not great. Most movies fall into this category.

A bit fur­ther down the curve, there’s an inter­est­ing bump. By most objec­tive mea­sures, Armaged­don was a pretty bad film. But much like Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing”, there is also some­thing unde­ni­ably great about it. We are firmly in the realm of guilty plea­sures. On an absolute scale, it’s still nowhere as enter­tain­ing as Pulp Fic­tion; but it is more enter­tain­ing than Over the Hedge, even though the latter is in some sense less of an Affront to the Art of Cinema.³

At some point, though, enough is enough. Case in point: most ratio­nal people simply cannot derive 80 min­utes of enjoy­ment from Look Who’s Talk­ing Too.

So far, I have been using Bruce Willis films as exam­ples. But the inclu­sion of Bruce Willis (if even just as a voice actor) adds some base­line level of qual­ity to a film. This base­line I call the Willis thresh­old; there are many, many films that fall below it.

Occu­py­ing the realm far to the left of the Willis thresh­old are movies like Manos: the Hands of Fate: unre­deemably bad films, the sort you hes­i­tate to call “films” in the first place, nearly-​unwatchable dreck made only barely palat­able by the inclu­sion of mock­ing com­men­tary a la MST3K.

But the most strik­ing part of my chart is the mas­sive spike just to the left of the Willis thresh­old. This is the cat­e­gory of film that I’m most inter­ested in for this post, and it is the cat­e­gory of film that Troll 2 squarely falls into.

Look at that chart! On an absolute level, Troll 2 is com­pa­ra­ble to The Fifth Ele­ment in terms of enter­tain­ment value! It is So Bad It’s Good. I.e., it’s awe­somely bad.

For this sort of film, it’s kind of point­less trying to con­vince some­one of its awe­some­ness by describ­ing the plot. I could tell you that it’s about a family that gets ter­ror­ized by a group of veg­e­tar­ian gob­lins; or that the gob­lins are com­manded by a spas­tic druid; or that the gob­lins keep trying to turn people into plants by hiding con­spic­u­ous green slop in their food; etc., etc., etc. I could try and tell you all these things, but they don’t really convey the genius⁴ of Troll 2.

Which is all to say: if you haven’t seen it yet, what the hell are you wait­ing for?

I saw Troll 2 for the first time two weeks ago. I had occa­sion to see it because a doc­u­men­tary called Best Worst Film—about Troll 2 and its cult fol­low­ing—was play­ing just around the block from me. The film­mak­ers were per­spi­ca­ciously screen­ing Troll 2 later that night in the very same the­ater, and after catch­ing the doc­u­men­tary I con­vinced my friend Cliff to join me at mid­night to see the cult hit.

I’ve told you about how great Troll 2 is, but I also want to spend some words on Best Worst Movie. It was a lot of fun to watch, and def­i­nitely enter­tain­ing.⁵ It focuses pri­mar­ily on the charis­matic George Hardy, who played the patri­arch of the ill-​fated vaca­tion­ing family in Troll 2.⁶ We catch up with him and other former cast and crew mem­bers, dis­cov­er­ing how their film has mor­phed into a cult phe­nom­e­non and how this trans­for­ma­tion has affected their lives. The whole doc­u­men­tary is pretty light­hearted and fun, and it’s really hard to dis­like Mr. George Hardy.

Most every­one seems to be in on the joke—that is, they fully rec­og­nize and have gen­er­ally come to terms with Troll 2’s posi­tion on the curve I charted above. But this isn’t the case for every­one. There are a few awk­ward moments involv­ing the direc­tor (an Ital­ian, type­cast as the eccen­tric for­eign film­maker), who seems unwill­ing to see his film for what it is. Hon­estly, he comes off as a bit of a stooge—a por­trayal that’s prob­a­bly unfair but is admit­tedly amusing.

Let me empha­size that the doc­u­men­tary is, essen­tially, fluffy fun. It does a great job at cap­tur­ing the verve and elec­tric­ity you feel at a mid­night movie screen­ing. At heart, it’s a poppy expres­sion of fan­boy­ish enthusiasm.

The doc­u­men­tary has are a few more poignant moments, but they really aren’t the focus; they tend to get swept up in the rest of the film. It’s a bit of a shame, really, because at times it feels as though a very human under­cur­rent of sad­ness or regret gets steam­rolled by the ironic joy of this cult phe­nom­e­non. For exam­ple, in one par­tic­u­larly moving scene, the actor who played Grandpa Seth in Troll 2 (now an old man) reflects resignedly upon on his life and asks: “What is there to do with a life besides frit­ter it away?” It’s a rather shock­ing rev­e­la­tion, but it gets swept aside pretty quickly.

Then again, I can under­stand why the film­mak­ers didn’t focus on this stuff more: it’s a total downer. Still, the film prob­a­bly would have felt more robust if these issues had been exam­ined more deeply.

If Best Worst Movie is show­ing near you any­time soon, I’d heartily rec­om­mend you go out and see it with a friend or two. And if they’re show­ing Troll 2 later that same day, I’d highly rec­om­mend you make an evening of it.

Part I: Apologies

1. Sorry this post is up a little later than I’d hoped. I wanted to talk with John before putting it up, and the ear­li­est time we could talk was Sunday evening. Thus, the Monday post.

2. Sorry for the abrupt­ness of the ending of the Troy storyline.

Part II: An Explanation

For those of you who have pay reg­u­lar atten­tion to this blog­space, you may recall a post from March in which I dis­cussed our plan for Chronillogical’s nar­ra­tive moving for­ward. One of the com­po­nents of this plan was to wrap up the Troy sto­ry­line more quickly than pre­vi­ously intended. Per­haps our inten­tions were under­stated, and the extent of our stream­lin­ing caught people by sur­prise. But the essen­tial logic behind our task was simply this: we wanted to get on with telling other time travel sto­ries, so we cut away every­thing we felt was extra­ne­ous to the gang return­ing to the present.

That said, we’re not going to leave all these ques­tions dan­gling. More on that in just a moment.

Part III: Moving Forward

We’re plan­ning to focus now on making larger, more self-​contained updates on a less fre­quent basis. These larger updates will vary in size and com­plex­ity, and as such I don’t think we’re going to be able to commit to a reg­u­lar update sched­ule for them.¹

With a slower and more erratic update sched­ule, John and I feel oblig­ated to fill the inter­ven­ing peri­ods with some kind of con­tent to keep you engaged. We have a few ideas already: the one most press­ingly rel­e­vant is our plan to do “mini-comics” in the gray-​scale style of our pre­vi­ous filler strips. The first batch of mini-​comics is going to focus on resolv­ing some of those lin­ger­ing issues from the Troy storyline’s con­clu­sion. Per­haps you could think of it as a kind of extended epi­logue? For exam­ple, we will be taking a look at how Cas­san­dra is adjust­ing to life in the 21st century.

We don’t have a plan as to the update sched­ule for the mini-​comics. One thought is to stick with the Tuesday-​Friday thing. We may simply try to do two a week and leave the exact days unspec­i­fied and vary­ing. We’re not sure now, but we’ll keep you posted.

We have some other con­tent ideas up our sleeves, but we’ll wait a bit before we promise any­thing on that front.

Part IV: Conclusion

That’s it! If you have any ques­tions or con­cerns about the stuff I’ve men­tioned in this post (or else­where), ask away; feed­back is always appre­ci­ated

Dr. Evermor’s Fore­vertron¹ is a sculp­ture park in Bara­boo, WI, about an hour’s drive from Madi­son. It is a place we went to and boy we are sure glad we did!

John and I drove up to the Fore­vertron from Chicago back when I was still living in the Mid­west, some­time in Sep­tem­ber 2009. We took a bunch of pic­tures during our visit and have been mean­ing to write a post about the place ever since, but for one reason or another we’ve never quite gotten around to it. So, now that I’ve for­got­ten pretty much every­thing about our visit, I’ve finally decided to com­plete our little write-​up.

See that? That’s me! I was the driver for the day, since I was the only guy with access to a car. John sat in the front, replete with all sorts of gear (binder, pen, etc.) for Get­ting Work Done. This was going to be a Pro­duc­tive Jour­ney for him, since he had a good 3–4 hours of pris­tine free time each way.

He then promptly fell asleep, having stayed up the pre­vi­ous night so he could finish a Chronil­log­i­cal comic on time. Good work, John!

On the way up, we stopped for lunch at Culver’s.² John tried his very first taste of Culver’s frozen cus­tard and was largely unim­pressed. What a buz­zkill, that guy!

As we approached the gallery, I told John to keep a look­out for the proper turn-​off. John, for his part, saw sev­eral large metal sculp­tures all along the side of the road, right in the vicin­ity of where we were expect­ing the Fore­vertron to be. I didn’t see them myself, mostly because my atten­tion was focused on pre­vent­ing our Honda Odyssey from flying off the road and explod­ing into a flam­ing mass of twisted plas­tic and steel.

Inter­est­ingly, John utterly failed to men­tion these sculp­tures he saw—the sculp­tures along the side of the road that he saw right where we expected the sculp­ture park to be—the sculp­ture park that we were specif­i­cally look­ing for, out in the middle of rural Wis­con­sin. He failed to men­tion these sculp­tures, and instead we ended up wan­der­ing aim­lessly and self-​consciously around a small res­i­den­tial area for 10 or 20 min­utes. We finally found the Fore­vertron, tucked behind a scrap and sal­vage shop.

John even­tu­ally told me that he saw the sculp­tures when we were dri­ving along, and that he failed to bring them to my atten­tion. When I asked him “Why? Why did you do such a thing?” his only defense was that he had just assumed that elab­o­rate scrap-​metal sculp­tures were a big thing up in this neck of the woods.

As I men­tioned, the sculp­ture park was tucked away behind a scrap sur­plus store. After wan­der­ing around for a few min­utes, we saw a mass of metal jut­ting up from behind a group of trees in the dis­tance. It was an aus­pi­cious sight, Indi­ana Jones-​esque. We had stum­bled across the park.

As you might expect from a sculp­ture park, there were delight­ful sculp­tures strewn all about. Really, I can’t do it jus­tice with just words. In fact, I think this was the main reason both John and I dragged our heels so long on writ­ing this post: too intim­i­dat­ing a task to try and describe the place with mere prose. So instead, I highly rec­om­mend you check out the Flickr pho­to­set I made with all the pic­tures we took.

Below is a small sam­pling of the pic­tures we took, just to give you a taste of what was in the park.

And the end of the visit, we ran into Dr. Evermor’s wife. She was extremely kind and told us all about the park; I don’t remem­ber the details very well, but I dis­tinctly recall her speak­ing about the unex­ploded ord­nance they have to deal with around the site of the park. Some­thing about a live cannonball.

And so, with a sigh, we hit the road once more. The drive back was very much like the drive up, and we lis­tened to Radi­o­lab most of the way.

And upon arriv­ing home, John and I agreed that one of these days we’d need to return to Dr. Evermor’s Fore­vertron.

Mark your cal­en­dars: Chronil­log­i­cal is return­ing on April 13th!

Hello!

If you stretch your memory waaaaay back, you might remem­ber there exist­ing once upon a time a silly little comic called Chronil­log­i­cal. Depend­ing on how strong your memory is, and specif­i­cally whether or not your brain is the sort of brain that inter­mit­tently cleans house, dust­ing away those mnemonic motes that cease­lessly and sub­con­sciously accrue: pass­ing thoughts of pass­ing people, of places, of things—per­haps that fellow you spent all night talk­ing to at last year’s New Year’s Eve party, or that strik­ing woman who sat next to you on the bus on an oth­er­wise dismal Novem­ber day, or any of the other count­less indi­vid­u­als that chaot­i­cally float into your life and are ejected just as hap­haz­ardly past­wards, the rocket fuel pro­ject­ing you into tomor­row—which indi­vid­u­als have exactly zero rel­e­vance to your day-to-day, month-to-month, or year-to-year oper­a­tions, and among which indi­vid­u­als we can now include, with the advent of this brave new inter­net age, those half-​substantial beings who exist some­where across the ether, at the other end of an inter­minable wire strung deep beneath the land (or sea) (or bypass­ing the wire alto­gether and going via satel­lite, quite lit­er­ally through the ether, if there were actu­ally any ether out there to be literal)—because let’s be honest, as bal­ly­hooed as this wave of social media is, there’s still noth­ing quite like star­ing another human being in the eye and affirm­ing that yes, by gum, they do exist, and so do I, and here we are in the real honest-to-goodness phys­i­cal uni­verse, and if I wanted to shut this other person up I could per­fectly well do so, per­haps devi­ate his septum with a well-​planted fist, or a knee to the groin that he would cer­tainly never see coming (the knee, that is, not the groin); depend­ing on how strong your memory is, you might not remem­ber me, Greg Poulos, co-​creator of the afore­men­tioned comic strip.

You may be more inclined to remem­ber John Chouinard, Chronillogical’s other co-​creator, my co-​conspirator and gen­eral guy-I-do-things-with-on-occasion.

Anyway, long story short (too late!): John and I are start­ing up Chronil­log­i­cal again!

*crick­ets*

Well, we’re excited about it anyway.

We’ve been mean­ing to bring Chronil­log­i­cal back for a while now, but we didn’t want to announce any­thing until we had finally gotten some new strips under­way. Well: we have finally got some new strips under­way! We have some new scripts writ­ten (taking off from exactly where we left off the story) and John will be draw­ing them this week. He may even be draw­ing them as we speak¹!

Full dis­clo­sure: John and I are kind of eager to wrap up the Troy sto­ry­line and start trying out some new ideas. As a result, you might notice things moving along faster than pre­vi­ously. That said, aside from the (hope­fully) quick­ened pace, the rest of the Troy sto­ry­line will be pre­sented in much the same format as what we’ve done so far.

Once Troy is over, how­ever, we reserve the right to start play­ing around a bit more with form, tone, and per­haps even (gasp!) the update sched­ule. Ulti­mately, we’re hoping to free our­selves from some of the more unpleas­ant stric­tures of plot so that we can actu­ally mine the full poten­tial of our time travel conceit.

Suc­cinctly: We want to make the strip more fun for you to read, and more fun for us to write.

But that’s a little ways away, and we can cross those bridges when we come to them. Let’s presently refo­cus our atten­tions to the more imme­di­ate future, shall we?

Back before we went on hiatus, John and I didn’t really have much in the way of a buffer of strips. We (gen­er­ally) man­aged, thanks to copi­ous amounts of flex­i­ble free time. In the interim, that free time has sat out in the sun a bit too long, dried up a bit, become a smidge more rigid. As a result, John and I are think­ing about prepar­ing a buffer of 6–10 strips.

That would, how­ever, post­pone the re-​launch of Chronil­log­i­cal by sev­eral weeks. Which brings me to the true pur­pose of this far-too-lengthy post: we want to hear what you want, dear read­ers. Are you so parched of comics that even an extra week of wait­ing would be dis­as­trous to your health and sanity? Should we there­fore release what may only be an ini­tial trickle; or, are you will­ing to extend the cur­rent drought a few weeks longer for the promise of a more sus­tained stream—indeed, per­haps even a river?

More directly, with­out my stupid metaphors: Do you want John and me to start updat­ing ASAP, run­ning a higher risk of miss­ing the occa­sional update? Or should wait till we’ve built up a buffer (prob­a­bly by mid-​April) so we can better guar­an­tee con­sis­tent updates? Please let us know!

How­ever we even­tu­ally decide to roll this out, rest assured that John and I are super-​psyched to hang­ing out with Milo, Jen, Roy, and all our read­ers once more. We’re sin­cerely sorry for leav­ing every­thing hang­ing for the past few months—but ulti­mately, we both agree that the hiatus was the best thing for our­selves and the strip. With this break over, we’re hoping that Chronil­log­i­cal will return better than ever before!

Here’s to… the FUTURE!

(Get it?)

(The FUTURE?)

(‘Cause it’s a strip about TIME TRAVEL?)

(Yeah, you know you missed this.)

¹ Unlikely.

*rumble rumble*

(Stay tuned.)

Heya folks! John here.

Just a little note that Greg and I are still plan­ning Chronillogical’s return AND that we still don’t know when that will happen AND the pos­si­bil­ity remains that Real Life will rear its ter­ri­ble maw and devour CI in one grue­some gulp. We don’t want that to happen! But it’s hard to know what will happen in the future.

(unless you have a time machine)

For those of you still with us, I thought I’d share a quick pic of Jen, who appears to be out of her ele­ment, because hey! It exists and maybe people would enjoy seeing it.

Do they even have taxis here, what is going on

Stay tuned! The con­tact chan­nels are always open, and you may very well hear more from us in the future. Or maybe we’ll both die from a horrid case of Ando­rian shin­gles! Life is dangerous!