Oookay, so all the baby stuff on the brain stemming from Friday’s post resulted in a bizarre dream in which Marc’s very pregnant wife ran up the street and kicked a dinosaur in the head. Yes, you read that right. A Dinosaur. Later in the dream, said Dino was curled up on my living room carpet. Your dimestore psychoanalysis is welcome.
Anywho, let’s talk a bit about this week’s strip shall we? When you’re a kid, boredom can put some pretty strange ideas in your head. I can recall breaking out a shovel or two and just digging holes in the ground in an attempt to unearth some long-lost treasure on more than one occasion (usually after watching a movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark). While we never were able to dig up the Ark of the Covenant, we did come across the occasional valuable piece of kiddie treasure (i.e, lost action figures, arrowheads, coins, animal bones, etc.).
This strip also features a last-minute change. Marc decided to add that great image of Robot running around making Diogee “fly” in the background as Ben delivers that classic Han Solo comeback. It’s a really fun visual addition, and it also helps to add some depth of meaning to the strip. It accentuates Ben’s vivid imagination, while at the same time putting the question into the readers mind, “Is Robot real or in Ben and Devin’s imaginations”? I have a definitive answer to this in my head, but Marc and I thought it would be fun and interesting to simply leave that possibility floating out there.
The change also helps to diffuse the Star Wars quote a bit. A while back, when the first reviews of Boxcar were hitting the web, there was some concern expressed by a couple of the review writers about the Star Wars quote in the second strip, and how things like that can hinder character development. Marc and I are well aware of how unecessary pop culture references can sink a comic strip, and there was even some discussion a few weeks back about canning this strip because of the Solo line. In the end though, I think it works for this particular strip. It’s a nice organic fit, and more importantly, it sounds like something a kid would say.
I hope you all enjoy the strip. It kicks off another short storyline, and just wait ’til you see what’s lurking underneath the boys’ backyard!
