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No. 369: Calvin Johnson

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Calvin Johnson

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Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/itoons/?comic=369

Strip by: KelpTheGreat

Susie: Hi, Calvin. Have you started your leaf collection yet?
Calvin: I've been visualizing the conceptualization process. That's the hard part.
Susie: I'm almost done. Isn't it fun? It's like a treasure hunt!
Calvin: A treasure hunt?!? Are you crazy?? This is a stupid, boring, time-wasting forced assignment! This isn't fun!
Susie: "When life gives you a lemon, make lemonade."
Calvin: I say, when life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade! Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don't want your lemons; what am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Calvin lemons! Do you know who I am? I'm the boy who's gonna burn your house down... with the lemons! I'm gonna get my tiger to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!

The author writes:

The original was eerily close to Cave Johnson's memetic rant. I wonder if a writer on Portal was a fan of Calvin and Hobbes?

This is another idea I came up with a couple of years ago, but put off actually making it until now. It took kind of a ridiculous amount of time to cut and paste all the letters; this is why I prefer just using fonts. Though I have to admit, this does look better than a font would have. I even went the extra mile by occasionally sourcing the same letter from different words, which makes it look even more natural. One last little touch I included was to fix the end quotes of Susie's final speech bubble, which for some reason in the original is a single large dot. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. The kerning is, however, sub-optimal; I apologize.

When creating the dialogue, I went off of the quote on Cave Johnson's wiki page, thinking that it had to be accurate. And it was... but when I went to grab a video link for these author notes, the video I found had subtitling... and the punctuation was different in the video. So, since the official, in-game subtitles had a different way of punctuating the monologue, I was tempted to re-do it in my edit, but then decided that it was good enough and called it quits.

Special bonus section (thanks to people who read the author notes!): If I thought I could make it look good, I'd do a follow-up to this strip. It would be based on this strip. In it, I would make the following changes:

Panel 4 (including the title panel as panel 1) would change the dialogue to: "Loaded with tons of combustible lemons..."
Panel 5 would edit the picture of the missile into a lemon-based ordnance of some sort.
Panel 6 would read "Lemon after lemon streaks ahead..."
Panel 7 would read "...crater is all that remains of Calvin's competitor, Black Mesa..."
And I might or might not omit the final panel entirely. Perhaps it'd be replaced with a picture of Calvin's face superimposed on Cave Johnson's portrait, with a quote below it? I dunno.
If I wanted to go the extra mile, I'd edit the suburban landscape in panels 4 and 5 into some desert terrain, making it look more like Black Mesa's surrounding area.

So, I would make that, but I know I wouldn't be able to make the lemon-missile (or the landscape) look good. It'd just look out of place and weird. If anyone thinks they can do better, go ahead: that one's free.

Original Calvin and Hobbes strip: 1995-10-05.