by Matty Boy Anderson 09.23.09
In this Year Of Our Future 2009, I enjoy many privileges as a Pagemaster of the Web. For example, I am able to glimpse which browser is the most commonly employed among my visitors, and how long they graciously hung around. I can see which piece of my work brought in the most hits (it's usually a tie between McNugget Anatomy and a Bands I Useta Like), and, to better serve the viewing public, adjust upcoming material where necessary. I have a link with my audience that helps me immensely in understanding what people are thinking, and what they want to see.
Ten years ago, things were the polar opposite. Concurrent with the establishing of Mikethepod.com, I made an stab at a low-cost method of getting comics out into the world; I started a four-page fake newsletter called the Last Laugh. Fueled by a love of print, I labored through seventeen issues, piling issues in establishments across the southeast, in a vain attempt to see if anything offended or resonated with anybody. On a technological level, it was on par with slipping a message into a bottle and chucking it into a septic tank.
Yeah, I wasn't the first one to do the fake-news thing, but the Onion wasn't either. I drew inspiration from the golden age (read: O'Donoghue/Kenney) of National Lampoon, and the latent desire to fool people into seeing my comics, like what Dan O'Neill described as a "psychological letter bomb" back in the late 1960s. It was an excuse to do fake ads like I used to see in Games magazine, and if I kept the language light, it usually didn't get shitcanned on first sight.
The McNugget Anatomy piece originally bowed in the Last Laugh. Bear With Searing Gas Pain even made a walk-on, his first appearance in any media. Before the project completely flamed out, I managed to get a lot of choice bits under many people's shnozzes. All told, it was a good run, and thankfully the burnout came months before I would have had to make some sort of hilarity out of good old 9/11, a task virtually everybody fumbled until around 2003.
That aside, in the interest of cataloguing the Last Laugh for posterity (and providing the internet with a wealth of pre-NINE/ELEVEN humor), I present the meat of the 17 monthly issues, 1999-2001, tastefully arranged for you in two (or three) bloated installments. I've also appended running commentary wherever I felt it was needed, especially in cases when I thought of something before someone else did. Please enjoy this thing I slaved over a decade ago.
#1: OCTOBER 1999
Notable For: Being the first issue, also I resisted the temptation to call it "#0" for once. I had no idea what I was doing, design-wise, but oh well.
Crazy as it might seem, there was a point where everyone was extra antsy about the change of the millennium. The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park all had episodes about Y2K, so I'm in good company as far as being dated. It's kind of like the whole nuclear holocaust panic of the mid-80s, when you look at it now.
Please note: I am not making these images look terrible on purpose. In most cases, I don't have a better-looking copy, or one that doesn't look like shit. It was ten years ago and I've lived in approximately 40,000 different locations since then.
FEZ was a comic strip I was testing out that was dated almost before the ink had dried, which is why I've never put it on the site. That's Colin Flotsam, who was the main protagonist of my old Lemmings strip in its last couple of years. As I've noted elsewhere and previously, I redesigned him later as then titular John of John's Arm. And there's a Bands I Useta Like, one of the batch I did back in 1998. Holy shit.
There's a lot I love on this page, but I have to point out that the footline "Soon your mudball planet will be returned to our once-proud kingdom of ice" was spoken by Angelina Jolie in the movie John's Arm: Armageddon. In addition, "Enraged Gorilla With Baseball Bat" obviously morphed over time into Bat-Wielding Alpha Male. So, you know, full circle or something.
And how about that movie review column? Good thing everybody remembers Runaway Bride and Teaching Mrs. Tingle, so the humor isn't lost.
#2: NOVEMBER 1999
Notable For: Improved format, having an article that actually fooled a person (story to follow)
In 1999 Savannah, I used to pedal my mountain bike down Habersham from 65th Street to Bay Street and back again every weekday to drop my cartoon off at the newspaper office. On rainy days, or when my balls ceased to create sperm, I would drive. But I preferred to bike, using the special lanes whenever possible. Despite this, I was routinely knocked to the pavement and screamed at by wonderful Savannah drivers. Then came the news that the town's trademark squares, several of which I and other cyclists cut through every day, were to be off-limits to bikes.
I chose to flee the dump a couple years later. There was no way I would have survived my daily trek while "sharing" the roads bordering the squares with clot-brained Savannah motorists. I was flirting with death already in the areas specifically designated as bike lanes.
The Popeye strip is from when I was 18; I actually typed those lines out on paper, cut them up, and glued them onto the artwork. That is the kind of thing you do when you're 18. This page is also significant for being one of the few times Mike speaks to the audience. And seriously, the amount of versions of "Whoot There It Is" that existed in 1993 was just stupid. Fuck that shitty song.
In the early days of this website, I had the hardest time getting traffic. I stopped keeping a counter on my site because seeing it wheezing in the single digits depressed the hell out of me. It would be some months before I realized that the cause of this was the fact that the site was just a bandwidth-sucking scanned animation of a Pez dispenser, and nothing else that anybody would want to look at, ever. Well, other than the rock band naming thing.
Now we get to the story I alluded to earlier. I used to put copies in the Savannah Mall, in various different stores. One time I encountered a security guard reading this particular issue, and I watched him discreetly to gauge his reaction. Instead of laughing, as I had hoped, he said "Aw, that's too bad. That poor man, all he did was wave. That's crazy." I had to assure him that it was a joke, and nobody had been shot for a friendly wave.
#3: DECEMBER 1999
Notable For: Pokemon Rejects, and my continued bitter grudge-stabs at Savannah, GA.
Speaking of grudges, here is an early example of me bitching about the Oscars. I used to care, but the 1990s simply beat it out of me. As you'll see, the Last Laugh was a form of purgative for me, allowing me to vent about what I feel was the most repugnant decade of the 20th century. It wasn't enough that the millennial clock was about to roll over. I had to flush the Nineties out of my goddamn system like toxic bile.
If you can't read the tiny print on the Rejects, there's a (maybe) better copy here. You may have seen Prolifachu elsewhere before, for example the final scene of John's Arm: Armageddon, in which case I love you.
Like I said, my experiences in 1990s Savannah were tedious and painful. I hope I'm making that clear enough for you. The Fod of Knerf, from Steve the Intern's acid-soaked horoscope, became a character in the Invisible Legends universe. He communicates by smells. Now you know.
#4: JANUARY 2000
Notable For: The beginning of my illicit love affair with Jar Jar Binks, first issue of 2000, my favorite cover:
This was, I felt, the peak. I never topped "DOO KILLS FOUR". Of course, acknowledging said peak, I continued for thirteen more issues.
The comic strip on this page goes all the way back to '93 (it originally appeared in an issue of Drop Dead). There must have been a hundred fucking "unplugged" albums that year. You know what sounds good "unplugged"? Nothing. Nothing does.
Look at that, a Loofah-Lad strip! Well, it's THE Loofah-Lad strip, until someone (me) gets off their drunken ass and does more.
As you can see, I've been defending Jar Jar since day one. He's the acid test of the true Star Wars fan. It's not his fault you're racist against Gungans.
#5: FEBRUARY 2000
Notable For: Ripping on Jerry Falwell and that thing with the poop painting
I don't know what the hell I was typing for the name of the painter. I do crack up at the shot of Dick Tracy every time, however.
The first appearance of "Culty", and a Sordid Hollow from the last MTP comic. What can I say, I recycle material wherever possible, especially if the number of people who saw it in the first place is fewer than 39.
Todd was obviously a last-minute addition. Also, I swear to god, at one point every Vox Populi in the Savannah paper started with "Now I've seen everything". The "Rubes Wanted" bit was inspired by the time I spent as a movie extra (The Gift and The Legend of Bagger Vance, if you care, though I've seen neither and don't appear on screen as far as I know).
#6: MARCH 2000
Notable For: Adventures of Lastlaughboy, coining the term "nymphomercial"
Around this time it had become a tradition to have Mike blurt out a random Frank Zappa lyric in the upper left corner of every issue. These are the sort of things you come up with when you can't come up with anything.
Here we have the Adventures of LastLaughboy, as seen on the sidebar of the Sunday Funnies page, the always-morose Ted 'n Terry who brought you the Fubar, and a proper fake letters column to make things complete.
I have a vague memory of trying to mount some sort of public-service campaign with Seamus Shillelagh. Also: those are my actual Kool-Aid points. I have an embarrassing amount. Like, a book full.
#7: APRIL 2000
Notable For: First issue where I started taking ads; I rebelled by putting "shit" all over the cover, "hidden" by renegade ink splotches.
Look folks; I like to swear. I think swears are funny. Some people get on their high horse and act like it's crude, but I think swear words are hilarious. So it was only a matter of time until I worked out a cheap way to slip in some cusswords.
The He-Don bit comes from when I was 4 years older than Travis; I think it popped up in one of the early Pod comics. Guys actually used to wear acid-neon shirts. It was a horrible time to be alive.
Speaking of horrible times to be alive; any time that fucking "Mambo" song is on the radio.
"Tiniest Restaurant" was originally part of a variety strip I attempted called Blank Planet, which appeared in Fink in 1996. Lord knows why I decided to plop the first one (and only the first one) in this issue.
That concludes our first installment of this oh-so-vital retrospective. Coming next time: Board games! Soft drinks! Smegma!
Don't miss it!
-MBA
