It`s done, but it`s not what I wanted. Here`s an example of a great idea wrecked by terrible writing. Oh, well, I still liked drawing the robot. Expect a little more, then a nice little story line where the guy plays the sad sack. That and the lucky sonofagun are his strengths.
From long ago, I`ve always wanted to look at the workplace though my comic with different eyes, always adapting. Now, let me take time to point out yet again — I like my job. The comic workplace has nothing to do with my workplace, and I am making jabs at generic jobs from horror stories I get from friends, family, newspapers and imagination. That`s why I wanted a different perspective on workplace humor.
My first attempt at this was actually a panel back in comic #12 (please excuse my early artwork). A zombie-employee stalks money, rasping, “Gaaaaames…” I thought it would be funny to have the main character imagine he`s a zombie at work, but I ran out of ideas quickly. Actually, I ran out of ways to keep his co-workers from thinking he`s insane, but regardless, I couldn`t make it work. I thought of doing a slice-of-life zombie worker drone comic for the local freelance paper, where zombification is reality, but I could barely keep a schedule with YAWC. So, instead of a recurring character, he died on the sketchbook page, barely making a cameo.
I`ve picked on work here and there, but it eventually developed into a “can`t win” scenario for the guy, where the student he gives a card to ends up being his boss (Percy). However, I did eventually come back around. While I do love my job, there`s a lot of data management, and when the papers pile up I can feel like a real automaton, working as hard as possible to move papers from pile “A” to pile “”B via keyboard and mouse digitization. The idea stewed in my mind for awhile, and intersected a desire to draw more fanciful things. One fateful page of sketches later, and I had a robot cast ready to deploy in the workplace.
Today`s comic was supposed to be that introduction, the idea that the robot revolution has already happened, but instead of metal it is made of meat. We work so hard for fear of losing our jobs, and we do highly repetitive tasks that computers either aren`t ready for, are too expensive to replace humans, or are cheap enough to replace humans, but don`t have the “extensive knowledge capital” (also known as compromising pictures of the Vice President at the last Christmas party). The robot is the main character, a simplistic-looking robot model stuck entering data and rerunning the cost-benefit scenarios for the company to upgrade to the next model. Being a robot, this is done every 2.1 seconds to make sure he`s one of the first to know. The new model, of course, could do the calculation twice a second.
But I digress. Notice the robot`s output is paper-based. It`s actually a continuous feed sheet version of a punch card. Also, he talks in flow charts. I wanted him to be robotic, but not rip off the things I`ve seen lately (Curse you, Ramon Perez and your Kukuburi! Curse your use of electonic schematic symbols!). The flow charts made sense, and they can actually communicate frustrations.
In this strip, the robot looks down, and says that his life is a repeating cycle. His choices (branches), though present, have only one possible functional outcome. If you will, it`s the illusion of choice of going to work every day. Notice he`s separated from the working robot, different background color, too — That`s why he`s speaking about his life in general. In the second panel, he is surprised to see that, even at work, the choices he makes are counteracted by other forces, and no matter what he does the end result is the same. Plus, due to a floating point error, it looks like he was due to be replaced .3 seconds ago. Poor guy.
But, alas, I couldn`t convey that in the strip. Chalk it up to poor writing.