Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 12/06/00


Artist's Statement

Sometimes you do a conceptually ambitious cartoon that nobody gets and you feel all disappointed by your unperceptive public; other times you do cartoons so stupid and obvious that you hope people will read more into them than is actually there. I'm sorry to say that this cartoon is pretty much pure stupidity, inspired by a long, rainy weekend spent with Boyd White (frequent model in The Pain) and Dave Israel (creator of this website). We were all temporarily bachelors (long story, in all cases) and immediately reverted to the level of slobby drunken college kids, drinking all the beer and whiskey in Dave's house and watching The Best of Dean Martin's Celebrity Roasts, Peek-a-Boo ( some "historic erotica," which turns out to be a euphemism for "crappy pornography," purchased from Atomic Books for eleven dollars), and Detroit Rock City. Boyd gave me a box of old comic books (Spiderman, Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, Batman, Superman, Superboy, Jimmy Olsen) which I sat around reading while he and Dave played stuff like Long Black Veil on guitar and accordion. And somewhere in there we came up with this pretty sophomoric cartoon. Still, laughs are laughs, and you gotta love that Tubetop.

The joke that Lowbrow refers to--the one about the epileptic oysterman and the prostitute with diarrhea--was originally told to me by noted American author John Barth, in his "Rudiments of Fiction" class at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University. The punchline, which is best left half-completed, is: "One of them shucks between fits."

 


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