Greg By Himself

A single panel comic strip I did in 1991 for the Daily Beacon at UT is now up on flickr. It was more a social experiment than anything else. What most people didn’t know at the time is that I did all of the strips over two separate weekends, not on a daily basis. Therefore, by the time they began to react to the strip it had been completed with regards to the panels that would actually make it into print. The strip while in the paper generated a lot of reaction. The least favorable reactions were in the form of telephone death or bodily harm threats. It is plain to see, unfortunately, where I began to react to these in the second round of producing the panels. I wish I had not. While I was only 21 at the time I believe that for the most part the effect still holds up. Of course there are some slips and silliness as well. The strip’s function was simple, a single repeated image that allowed the constant reader to infer a context onto the image. The sayings were all intended to be out of context allowing the reader to apply them to whatever context they had already applied to the image. Some are successful in upholding this and some are not. I think the fact that I got death threats for such a banal experiment proved its point. Unfortunately the strips are not entirely in their original printing order.

There is nothing more destructive to reality than the paratext we each bring to a given situation.

Getting these 39 .jpgs onto Flickr with a dial-up connection was tantamount to stuffing a Rhinoceros into a teacup without chipping the lip. So enjoy.