As with my motivations for enrolling in law school, this week's strip has numerous possible explanations. I'll start with the easiest, which also happens to be the real one: I really like it when people talk like hillbillies, I wanted to draw Ellen in a skimpy farmer's daughter outfit, and I thought Kam would look funny in a straw hat. Check, check, double-check, if I do say so myself.
A logical starting point for a discussion of the strip's deeper meaning is a conversation I had with a drunk stripper last night. Her name was Jasmine. During some obligatory "chat the customers up so they'll give you money" small talk, wherein I told her I had recently moved to L.A., she said, "Why would you want to live down there? Everyone's so superficial there." Meanwhile I'm thinking, "You know you're a stripper, right?" Not that strippers are necessarily superficial themselves, but when your bread and butter come from people giving you $20 bills to rub your breasts in their faces for three minutes at a time, it might not be your place to criticize the hand that feeds you.
In keeping with the spirit of "What happens at the bachelor party stays at the bachelor party," I'll resist any further detailed explanations of the weekend's goings-on. I will, however, sum up the evening in a cryptic bit of refridgerator poetry:
Drunk ex-girlfriend lapdance revenge power fantasy.
If you require any further explanation you're shit the fuck out of luck.
But anyway. The point is that when the people I know who still live in the Bay Area learn that I've uprooted and moved my ass down to the Other City, they typically respond with some degree of revulsion, as if I've just told them that I've recently switched from Mac to PC, or Krispy Kreme to Winchell's. L.A.'s numerous unflattering stereotypes are not lost on the smug bastards of the greater metropolitan realm of San Francisco, who are convinced that they've found the most perfect place on earth, especially when compared to the sprawling wasteland of sin and decadence that runs things down south. There's certainly something to be said for the finer points of life in San Francisco, but there are two ways I'd like to respond to my friends from the North. Firstly, Hayward has very little on Santa Monica. Secondly, it's a harsh fucking world out there, guys, and leaving the cottony bosom of San Francisco every once in a while will put hair on your balls. They say New York City makes you hard, but if you're really looking to destroy every morsel of faith you ever had in the legitimacy of Western Civilization and, indeed, the future of the human race in general, there's no place like L.A.
In other, non-soul-crushing news, I've been talking to the folks over at The Docket, UCLA Law's student newspaper, about printing I Fought the Law. Things look pretty good, but since they'll want me to fill half of a newspaper page I'll have to find ways to enbiggen the strips. The weekly updates will still be three and four panels each, but about five times over the course of the year (corresponding to issues of The Docket), I'll post a giant comic extravaganza. Don't be alarmed.
The Docket itself, by the way, seems closer to oldskool pre-color Squelch than any incarnation of The Daily Cal. This is good in more ways than it is bad.
