A Retail Spoiler
Friday, December 21st, 2007Hello, Everybody, I’m back! Hello… Everybody? Anybody?
Hmmm… Guess I’m gonna have to wait til they all get back… So I’ll just set here and ramble on about my favorite webcomics. Which, come to think of it, is what I always did on this blog…
Okay, if you didn’t already know, I have been seriously enjoying the convoluted plotline of Goats over the last two years, maybe because the oddness has never gotten in the way of bringing the funny, and in fact has been more often than not the funny that was brought. (Is that proper sentence constructionation? Gee, I’m out of practice at this.) I mean, they went from Urethra Weasels to Corndogs in six weeks… I don’t even think Joss Whedon could do that if Fox ran the episodes in the right order.
Anyway, it all came to a rather shocking and pus-filled head in the last few days… The entertainingly unstable Brock Stalkley was about to do a hybrid-performance-art-suicide-bombing-wish-fulfillment at the Starbucks at the Center of the Multiverse, which, unfortunately, threatened Phillip and several other characters. Meanwhile, in a fit of step-particidal rage, Oliver was about to use his robot arm to tear the head off of Our Favorite Pseudo-Satanic Chicken. Now, normally that is not much a threat, since Diablo has re-attached his cranial part on more than one occasion. But our Fine Feathered Fiend was wearing an explosive collar that promised instant death within a 200-yard radius of anyone tampering with it and tearing his head off does qualify as tampering. Then, in the blink of a major-studio-motion-picture-like scene change, we find Woody Allen (who, if you didn’t remember, is the Interim Editor/Supervisor of the Infinite Monkeys) getting a kind of Mafia-style collection action on his overdue bill for the Multiverse-Simulating Laptop Computer. Only instead of breaking his legs, they break the Multiverse. Of course, since the Mafia guys don’t break all your limbs at once, then One Death and his gang wouldn’t destroy everything… would they?
Now, it just so happens that I had taken advantage of Jon “Goatherd” Rosenberg’s One Day Insanity Sale on Diablo Action Figures. I also snuck in an order for a discontinued Lollypop Guild REPRESENT shirt that I am wearing right now, where nobody else can see me. Anyway, I received the email notification of shipment on Friday, the day after Everything Go Boom, and received my shipment on Monday, the day Jon took off because he was not feeling well. (From Easthampton, MA to San Luis Obispo, CA over the weekend during the Holiday Mailing Season… yes, the US Postal Service does sometimes function adequately!) Everything was there, the minimally-posable action figure, the human skull that can be substituted for the regular head for maximum creepiness, the tiny unreadable Necronomicon, the whoopie cushion and the three pieces of ‘oversized novelty bacon’. But also, on the back of the box, I saw an omen of things to come (on most of these same stations)….
Okay, I know that cocky cock has lost his head before, but it was just too coincidental after the last time we saw him here.
And sure enough, the next morning, the scene of wreckage included this:
Okay, it’s his leg, not his head, but it was certainly a bad sign, because as we have seen in the next couple of days, everything in every-verse seems to have been destroyed except for the one immediately surrounding Jon, Fish and Xibalba Consulting. Now we know that Jon (the cartoonist) has previously brought back the entire planet Earth after blowing it up and going on a two-week vacation with no explanation whatsoever. But is it possible he’ll do something like that again? Even after the explosive climax that came out of nowhere like a deus ex machina then blowed everything up real good almost exactly five years before the originally scheduled end-date??? (Actually, TODAY, December 21, 2007, is EXACTLY five years before the Aztec Calendar Reset)
Well, Mr. Rosenberg has certainly improved in his storytelling abilities in the 10.7 years since it all began with the Other Jon and Phillip sitting in front of a TV. And one of the skills he has gotten pretty good at is dropping little hints… foreshadowing… and tying together details that seemed unimportant at the time. Like the last words we heard Phillip say: “I need to go to the bathroom right now.”
Do you remember what we previously saw in the Mens Room of the Starbucks at the Center of the Multiverse? Huh? Could it be… this?
Oh, this story is far from over.
Made Technically Possible (but still unlikely) By
