THE THINKING APE BLUES - A Comic Of Questionable Taste

#388 - FIGHT THE FUTURE

06/10/09 - This timely updating thing has gone to shit, huh? Well, see folks, we here at the TAB Home Offices have been suffering the same cutbacks as many of you have. As wildly popular and "pop culturally relevant" as The Thinking Ape Blues is, some bad tax shelter investments we made during the Bush Administration as well as some ill advised gambling bets have forced us to cut back on not only some peripheral positions (sorry, Chucky the Water Coole Bottle Refiller Guy and Sweeps the Janitor!) but also some of the writing staff as well as the entire research department. Poop and ass jokes don't just write themselves, people. So as we bid farewell and good luck to Perry, Alice, Jamal, Eustice, Craig, Lenny, Bif & Carlo (they're a team), Janice and Ari, we make a pledge to soldier on and get through these tough times the best we can, providing the most insightful and poignant poop and ass jokes you will find anywhere on the internet.

05/15/09 - Is this week's comic my sophmoric-yet-insightful commentary on the Swine Flu hysteria that is already too stale in the public conscience for even a hack like Jay Leno to still be referencing? No. It is not.

I just took a particularly gruesome and trying turd yesterday. You gotta look for material anywhere,

04/28/09 - The Mouse, the Mouse, the Mouse..... what can I say? Listen, I used to hate the Mouse. I demonized him, was cynical to the core about him and his infernal machinations, his all-consuming infrastructure and tentacles. He was on par with Wal*Mart and Blackwater. But when you have a 7 year old and a 3 year old, a wife who can find ridiculously cheap airfare with her arcane internet voodoo, and above all, a best friend who has worked for the Mouse for a decade and can get you discounts and free park passes for a whole week.... well, you gotta suck it up and love the Mouse.

But then something happened. It was gradual, but one day I woke up and came to the realization that the Mouse and his goddamn sweltering Orlando swamp-kingdom was indeed the Happiest Place On Earth. It sucks. It's hard. But like Winston Smith in 1984, I have come to love the Mouse. The rats in the cage on my face in Room 101 were filled with Chip and Dale instead of rats, but the horror was real, and now I can say without shame, regret or irony that I indeed love Big Brother. Sue me. I love that fucking place. Best 7 days my family probably has ever had.

But alas, even my joy of realization has been tempered hard by the loss of our beloved Beatrice Arthur. I'll miss that broad. Dame. And everything else she was on Maude.

04/15/09 - Tax day, you dumb fucks! Anyway, if you are just returning to this sight after that long, ugly hiatus, don't let this week's comic alarm you. I was never gonna post this on the site, but time constraints and weird craziness have forced me to unload it as "new content" (meaning, I haven't finished a new strip yet and I'm going out of town for a week and I needed to put something up). This strange double sized strip that isn't in the standard format was my last strip for my old paper The Boston Weekly Dig. Even though the fuckers dumped my strip after 8 years, they at least allowed me to go out the way I wanted, sort of... a double sized 2 page spread. I was totally on the fence for 2 weeks after I got the news they were cutting the strip as to wether or not I'd end it for good, both in print and on the web. I actually wrote the real "final" strip and like it so much I'm saving it for when I really kill the strip, but after a lot of thought and beer and advisement from my consigliere Jumpin' James Graham, I decided to not end the strip but say goodbye to my print readers at the very least. And this strip is that goodbye.

And again, thanks to all the folks who have emailed and voiced their support for the mistake that is this comic strip. Rowntree, The Count, McFadden, Dewsbury, other fellow comic creators, et al. thanks. We'll keep slugging in the trenches. And to all the readers, I appreciate you coming back around.

03/31/09 - I think I'll let the comics stockpile up a bit on the main page until folks realize I'm back from the dead (ed. note: yeah, I stopped that. I've been back 3 weeks). But my back hurts like a motherfucker from lugging around mounds of broken limbs, branches and small trees while burning brush in my backyard this weekend. So I may still die.

03/19/09 - Dearest readers, lemme give you a little explanation as to where the fuck this strip has been the past 3 months... let's see, where to start... OK, for starters, we had a huge icestorm 2 weeks before Christmas that knocked out power for 2 weeks in my town and it fried my hard drive, preventing me from updating the site. $1500 to have Drive Savers salvage not only all my work from the past 8 years but the past 7 plus years of family photos (before any of you wiseasses say anything, shut the fuck, I'm looking at my back-up drive as we speak).

Then I had my biggest client (that accounted for 60% of my annual income) reneg on a 2 year contract. 10 days before Christmas I get the news that the latest installment check for 8 grand that should have been in my mailbox on the 1st is never coming (fuck you, Ann Taylor).

A week into the new year, The Boston Weekly Dig, my home town paper that has been running TAB since day one, decided the $20 a week they rarely ever even bothered to pay me each week was too much and they dropped the strip, after almost 9 years. The divorce wasn't pretty.

Then in February, my wife was driven off the road by some kooky person who wasn't looking during rush hour, which resulted in a her getting mild concusion, a fucked up lower back (thank god it wasn't worse) and the car got totalled. Great fun with insurance companies and rental car agencies. She's better now, thanks for asking.

A week later I wiped out running to the car, late to get my son to a doctors appointment, and I fractured my fuckin' wrist ... of my drawing hand. Let me repeat that: of my fucking drawing hand, the only thing that seperates me from unemployable hobos and child molesters. While on deadline from one of my few decent clients. I actually drew 3 pages of advertising art that night with a huge half-cast on my hand and a copy of Helter Skelter ace-bandaged under the forearm (because it was coincidentally the perfect thickness for a wrist rest so I could get the pen angle correct) ... because I couldn't afford to take a week off.

A few days later a goddamn skunk got into our basement on a Saturday night and shot its ass-gas into our furnace area, blowing the stink throughout the whole house, causing us to escape at 11pm. Seriously, Pepi fucking LePew got in my basement, and when I called the non-emergency number at the public saftey building to get info about Animal Control, they sent a whole fucking fire truck to make sure it wasn't a goddamn gas leak (because houses have been blowing the fuck up all over Massachusetts this winter).

Then a week after that, our hot water heater blew up, and that was about $700 I didn't need to drop just then. An emergency trip to the vet for the dog's neck barely merits mention... and finally, I just found out a few hours ago that my neighbor and very dear friend died from a massive heart attack while driving home from work. I think I'll miss you most of all, Garvey.

As god as my witness, I'm not making any of that up or embellishing it. Seriously, by the time I broke my wrist, we were just laughing about shit, to the point where the midnight skunk exodus was funny. So that's been how my new year has started. Obama's super powers of awesomeness haven't quite gotten to my home, but with any luck, they'll be here any day.

So what does all this mean for The Progress Brothers.... are they dead? Sleeping? In jail? The short answer is, nope. The long answer is, I don't know how all this is gonna work out, with no impetus of a deadline from the Dig to make me do a strip every week, but now that I have my fucking hard drive back, have my site back up, I'll sit down with a bottle of Pinot Noir and a copy of Lord Jim by Joseph Cambell and really think shit over and wait for that mutant twinge I've been getting every week since the year 2000 and draw a stupid comic strip that no one will read and put it on my website. Because that's all I know how to do and all I've ever done. I'm not a marketing douchebag like those Penny Arcade fuckwads and I have no concept how to hustle the internet, so with no newspaper outlets left, I'm flying solo and I'm flying blind... or blinder than I have ever been before, but what else is new? I haven't made dime one on this endeavor for almost a decade, so why start now?

So, gimme another week or 2 to unload the last few comics that never made it on the site, then maybe I'll have drawn some stupidnew shit that will make you chuckle. Or not. But either way, we'll be back in business I guess. Spread the word or spread the warning. Thanks for all the emails of concern like I was an old drunken college buddy gone missing after a bad bender in Vegas, thanks for giving a shit, thanks for reading and I hope to entertain you again real soon.

PURE ROCK FURY
- Mark

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