plot arcs?

So it seems I'm trying a new thing with Merely Mortal. Plot arcs. Like a sequence of comics that follows the same character through dreadful situations.

You might have to click on some of those to see the full version. In particular the one with the small font.

still going strong...

So, the comic is doing well, it seems. I've got a bunch of subscribers and about 16 strips up. Been pumping out one a day for two weeks. I wonder how long I can keep this up. Jokes about futility and death involving tiny characters that look like ping-pong balls... well, I haven't run out of ideas yet, so I guess that's good.

Here's one that everyone seems to like:

Official?!?! Webcomic?!?!

I've been having so much fun drawing my new Bone Realm webcomic, that I decided I might as well throw the merely mortal guys up as a side project too. Check it out: Merely Mortal, the Official Webcomic.

I've decided to mainly focus on new material, and if people start reading it, maybe I'll re-hash some of my old ideas in the new format.

akh! splat.

I warned you that I am always in danger of making more of these. This was drawn just tonight. I've found that simplicity is best when the entire message of your comic strip consists of morbid futility.

If you think that was tasteless and devoid of humour, then you haven't seen this one:



Insert canned sitcom laughter here.

i'm around

...just busy with other things. Damn, I had a bunch of Mere Mortal strips from a few years ago that I meant to scan and post, but I can't find the sketchbook.

mere mortal blender

Difficult to make out. It was a pencil drawing, and those don't really scan well. Full view probably will help. (Click on it.)

senseless violence

Something simple for today. Note once again the posthumous monologue.

mere mortal suicide

Best click on this one for full view.

This one explores the irony of powerlessness. A mere mortal, knowing full well he is doomed in any case, attempts suicide, only to be saved at the last minute by some sort of miracle. Then of course, he is deliberately killed by the Artist, who chimes in with "the last laugh".

significance

The effect of this one is better if you click it to full size. I would just like to point out that I am aware that Bill Watterson did a comic in which Calvin shouts this very same phrase at the night sky. I was not aware of that comic at the time I drew this, so I don't consider it plagiarism. Besides, it's not a difficult or complicated idea to come up with, and the layout is totally different.

Another fun observation: no one dies in this strip. I expect that is because it's only one panel long. Brevity is mercy, I suppose.

very important mere mortal.

You'll probably have to click on this one to read it. Not much to say about this one, except I introduced a fish instead of a shoe as the medium of random destruction. Don't ask, I really don't know.

Oh, and this is also the only mere mortal comic to feature a terrible attempt at Spanish.

Blah, blah, blah.

the meaning of life is...

Taking a break from deity-doubting, here's a mere mortal comic that deals specifically with the meaning of life. There's that big shoe again.

You've probably noticed that most of these were hand-drawn completely freehand, with no underdrawing and scarcely any preliminary thought involved. I just had a little funny, sadistic thought, and I drew it. Maybe it helped me deal with my own confusion and despair at the time...maybe not. In any case, at least they're sort of cute.

there is no ARTIST!

A very odd entry today. This is the only mere mortal comic written from the perspective of theism. It features an "atheistic" mere mortal being squashed by the "deity" whose existence he denies, then another mere mortal blaming the Artist/deity for the tragedy. At the time I think I was trying to make the point that people deny the existence of God, but God can kick their asses, and then they whine and complain to God after their asses have been kicked. The argument is weakened however, since my opinion of God seems to reflect dystheism: the Artist is decidedly not a good guy, if he's crushing his own creations with random safes. There are a lot of deeper levels of analysis here....one could almost say that this comic emblemizes the whole mess of confusion that was my mind at the time. I believed in God, and I believed that God smote people, but smiting people is bad, so God must be bad, but who are we to question God anyway...etc.

I'd just like to clarify that I no longer believe in God, nor do I believe that people are smitten by supernatural forces. I like to think I'm better for it, too.

on the moon!

Returning to an absence of borders, this little two-scener seemed hilarious to me at the time, with a mere mortal blasting his way through space using some unexplained means of propulsion which I can only deduce must be flatulence. His destination is the moon, but of course he reaches it by crashing into it and dying. Like Shakespearean tragedy, the mere mortal comics featured many "post-mortem" punchlines.

Also notice I added a little bit of insult to injury, with the traditional "KABOOM" or "BLAM" of a comic-book explosion being replaced with simply "POOF", reminiscent of the Wyle E. Coyote falling from a great height and creating a tiny dust-cloud of doom.

i am amazing!

The format on this one was a little crowded, and the way the pool of water extends into the bottom strip is a little confusing. At this point I had added a few borders, but I hadn't yet graduated to dividing the strip into actual panels. The shoe is a bizarre addition, probably inspired by the giant foot that squashes all the little animations at the beginning of Monty Python's Flying Circus. This is also the first mere mortal comic to feature blood/gore.

As usual, there is a pervasive sense of futility, with the mere mortal demonstrating his abilities and insisting upon being amazing before being squashed. There was a big empty space at the end, so I added my signature and some rather lame shading.

please do not crush us...

I think this was the first comic I drew. Hence the graph paper, which conveniently serves the double purpose (unbeknownst to myself at the time) of demonstrating just how tiny these drawings actually are. At the very beginning, you can see that the mere mortal comics were basically just my own expression of the Problem of Evil (also unbeknownst to myself at the time). I was not just questioning the meaning of life, I was also questioning the responsibility of a Creator that, at the time, I was struggling to believe in.

How is this interesting? Hell I don't know, I just type.

P.S. Notice the use of the word "Author" to denote the mere mortals' concept of a higher power, i.e. God. This was later changed to "Artist"; still later, direct mention of the higher power was omitted entirely.

Introduction

The year was 2002. I was a lonely young lad attending high school. The World Trade Center, a huge building I had never before heard of, had recently been destroyed by a couple of hijacked jets, killing thousands of clueless, ordinary people. Some kid in my school had lynched himself, my dad had just had an operation to remove a cancerous growth, and I was beginning to realize how pointless life seemed in the face of death. Questions about truth, meaning, and mortality reverberated through my chemically imbalanced brain, and I knew I had to find a way out. The way out was not an answer, as such, but rather, a means of laughing at the absence of an answer.

Little round people with no mouths, no ears, no distinguishing characteristics, began to appear in my sketchbooks, proclaiming their worth loudly before inevitably dying in some strange and completely meaningless manner. I thought the comics were funny. I showed them to some friends, and they seemed vaguely concerned for my mental health.

I realize these comics are weird, morbid, and at times, perhaps even offensive. But they are, in some small way, a part of me, and I've grown fond of them. I've written this small preamble so that you, the hapless reader, may not view the comics as an insensitive declamation of life, but rather as what they are: a way for an overly sensitive fellow to laugh at that which he fears the most. What do I fear the most? Not death, oddly enough, but rather, insignificance---the possibility that everything I do, and that everything everyone does, may amount to nothing at all in the end.

Some of the comics that will be appearing here are originals from those lonely high school days, but many were drawn years afterwards, and every so often, I draw more. For some reason, I never quite grew out of these little guys, so maybe someone out there will derive some strange enjoyment from them.

-JMT-