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Commentary:

Panel 1: It’s one of the crime-scene photographs from when the Avon lady was murdered. Apparently the buildings in St Louis are made out of shoe-boxes, purse straps and those wooden containers that brie cheese comes in. Whatís with that squiggly-line thing? Is that a tire track? I retract my first sentence–this is a four year old’s rendition of the murder of the Avon lady.

(To the tune of “Johnny B Goode”:) o/` It’s St. Louis, Missouri, where the story begins | a lonely furry-fucker named Davey-kins | sittin’ in his shoebox with a pen in his grip | drawin’ up a horrid-lookin’ comic strip | never ever learned to draw with proportions | gave all of the women freakish square-shaped chins o/` Rock on.

Panel 2: Now, this panel was drawn in art class by a second grader who was in some kind of tragic accident, rendering him immobile save for his left foot. Unfortunately, they don’t teach the students about the concepts of vanishing-point and perspective until next semester. Oh, and also, the second grader is really a sea slug.

“A young cartoonist we’ll call Jim Goodlow” But his friends call him “David Gonterman”. (Well… if he had friends) Let’s just be honest, here, Davey-kins. You’re not really fooling anyone with the whole “covert” self-insertion deal. Quit with all the denial. Just come right out and say it. “This is a documentation of a furry-fantasy involving myself and a cavalcade of animated animals. Too bad my pencil only works on paper and not real life! *SIGH*”

Panel 3: “And a comic strip that he has just finished.” Complete, unlike this sentence. Or any of the others so far, it seems. I have a feeling this will become a recurring theme. Of course, it doesn’t really look at all like the comic strip is really finished, unless the final panel is about a blank piece of paper. Though I suppose that is better than the alternative: an actual finished Gonterman comic.

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Commentary:

Panel 1: Apparently, he’s either staring down the edge of… well… what I’m guessing to be a clipboard, or he’s giving the door across the room a thumbs-up. I’m not exactly sure. Perhaps he’s holding a small door in admiration as some kind of comic-finishing celebration.

Panel 2: “One more page to go…” I thought you said he was finished. Also, I’m somewhat impressed to see that he can draw with such a freakishly disfigured hand. I wonder if that was a birth defect or if he was involved in a fist-fight with his lawnmower. Maybe that explains the wild, unkempt grass growing in his living room.

Panel 3: “And this’ll be ready to be put out for all to see…” Oh, yeah. Thanks a lot, Davey. Why don’t you go ahead and put out some glasses of paint and a platter of shrapnel and rat penises for hors d’oeuvres at your unveiling party while you’re at it.

“And maybe even publish.” Fat chance.

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Commentary:

Panel 1: Either he’s getting an ice-cold enema in this picture, all the ink on his drawing just ran and ruined (which I use loosely) the whole thing or someone is spot-welding a gerbil to the inner wall of his colon. In any event, he doesn’t have any teeth.

“There! It’s finished!” Yaaaay, another David Gonterman bag of shit unleashed upon the poor, suffering world!

Panel 2: Suicide? Is the next step suicide? Is it? Huh? Please say suicide.

Panel 3: Aw, dammit. It wasn’t suicide.

At this point in the strip, his eyes have inexplicably morphed into candy corn. Maybe it’s some kind of superpower.

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Commentary:

Panel 1: “Comic conventions are not just about finding about what the companies are doing…” They’re also about having strangers stick their hands up the sleeves of your t-shirt.

You didn’t see it, but Jim instantly just grew a set of breasts in the fashion of a mid-pubertal 13-year-old girl between the last panel and this one.

Looking at the background, it appears that this year’s St. Louis Comic Convention is being held on someone’s scalp. Oh, I see what the guy on the right is doing: he’s feeling for Jim’s newly-developed breasts.

Panel 2: Oh, apparently I was wrong. It’s not on someone’s scalp, it’s inside of a tree. And you have to enter through a sign that hangs magically in midair. He should totally illustrate Harry Potter books.

Panel 3: “A place for their dreams to be realized and for them to join the people who make them…” Huh? What the hell’s that supposed to mean? Do “the people” make the local artists? Or maybe he means the dreams. Maybe “the people” make the dreams. Also, by “join” Iím pretty sure he means “be miserably rejected and laughed at by”. In Davy-kins’ case, at least.

The guy on the right looks totally thrilled that he’s there, it seems. Or maybe it’s just the unidentifiable black thing lodged in his ear thatís pissing him off.

P.S. Nice ass, Davey. If you’d take a figure-drawing class, you’d know that asses don’t look like crotches. Maybe he just has three butts. So our hero, so far, is an “illustrator” with candy corn for eyes, three butts, and a set of breasts that pop up randomly on his chest. Okay.

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Commentary:

Panel 1: Oh, look, I was right. Even own his shitty-assed illustrated editor rejects him. He sucks so bad, he can’t even escape rejection in his fantasy world.

Is that a right-handed thumbs-down? If it is, shouldn’t the fingers be on this side of the hand? Maybe he’s trying to feebly stab at Jim with a carrot. Or maybe they just disappeared like the bottom of Jim’s right eye. And the guy almost looks like some kind of pouty chicken. What the hell is that? And why is it speaking?

Panel 2: No! Don’t listen to him! Go back to the other guy, he was right! This one’s merely a projection of your own dim-yet-overblown self-esteem, which blinds you from your complete failure as an artist!

Judging by the expression on his face, it looks as though our hero Jim just ejaculated a bowling ball. Either that or he wants Stan to sign his tongue. Actually, looking at David’s previous “works” with his pathetic “I’m Japanese on the inside even though I don’t understand the language and know nothing more about the culture than what their animation depicts” fanboy attitude, I’m rather amazed that he didn’t call him “Stan Lee-san” or something equally lame and embarrassing.

Panel 3: When I was a kid, I often wondered what it would be like to have hair on my eyes, or “eye-beards”, if you will. Fortunately, puberty was much kinder to me than it was to this shitty rendition of Stan Lee. Were I Stan, I’d have a grave dug for me now just so I could crawl down in it and roll over repeatedly and get some headway.

Also, does Stan Lee even go to comic conventions anymore? I heard he hasn’t for years and years. All I know is that if he did, he sure wouldn’t be telling a thirty-one-year-old man with the drawing talents of an eyeless four year old with three fingers that he’s doing a great job.

“Dispite (sic) what some of my younger collegues (sic) think.” What the hell does that mean? He spells like a retarded parrot, and his grammar is even worse. Is it an order? Does he want Jim to “dispite” what Stan’s younger “collegues” think? Perhaps he really did mean “dispite” and “collegues” and these are words that I am unfamiliar with that make the sentence coherent in some kind of made-up space language. Maybe it’s the beginning of whatever’s said in the next panel, though maybe he should take the effort to make his commas distinguishable from his periods. Which means not having the penmanship of, well, a sea slug. So that’s not happening any time soon.

I’d also like to add: There’s a difference between being a “rookie” and just plain sucking. Look at how long Davey-kins has been drawing and he sure the hell hasn’t gotten any better.

Jabberwock

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Commentary:

Panel 1: Well, no wonder he thinks it’s great–he’s not even looking at it! Though, it’s true that having your eyes closed really does help you appreciate Gonterman’s work. He probably does this with all the shittiest work: “Close eyes, smile, give stock encouragement phrase, run away quickly.”

Panel 2: Yes, let’s all welcome “unimaginably shitty” as the new style in the field of illustration. A welcome change indeed!

Note: Fortunately for us, that speech bubble is strategically placed–you do NOT want to see the self-gratified spurting that’s taking place on the other side.

Panel 3: What’s that, Stan? A miracle?

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Commentary:

Panel 1: Hey, Stan, quick tip: save it for someone who doesn’t suck. Jim here’s got about as much promise as a fat Britney Spears.

“…in this kit I give out to prospective future Marvel artists.” Aside from the obvious incorrectness of the notion of this David Gonterman self-insertion ever being considered for a job at Marvel Comics, this sentence is wrong in that “prospective future” is rather redundant. If something is bound to happen, do you expect it to happen in the past? “Here’s a little kit I give out to prospective past Marvel artists. I’m looking forward to their already having had worked for me prior to this very moment!”

What a self-congratulatory wankjob. David draws himself up a self-insertion and then has Stan Lee, a comic book artist legend, tell him that he’s a talented artist and worthy of work at Marvel. I wonder if David sends himself flowers, too.

One other thing: you’d think that Stan Lee would have the ability/money/talent/intelligence to put a more attractive design on the cover of an informational packet for “prospective future Marvel artists”–a ‘kit’ that’s supposed to lure them in to wanting to work for the company–than a series of vaguely parallel lines of no distinguishable pattern.

Panel 2: Guh. Did he just use the word “kewl” unironically? Urge to kill… rising…

Apparently the rapidly-growing grass is something that follows Jim around throughout the day. Maybe this is another superpower he has, like the candy corn eye transformation ability. Either that or the transfer of the ‘kit’ caused the two to teleport to somewhere in the middle of an African plain. David: YOUR SHADOWING IS LIKE THE POOP MARKS OF AN EXCITED TWO-YEAR-OLD WITH A LOOSE DIAPER AND CURIOUS HANDS.

Panel 3: I guess I have to give Jim a little credit, here. Somehow, he’s managed to defy the laws of physics by creating a comic that randomly changes size from one moment to the next. In previous panels, it’s roughly the size of a newspaper. Here, it’s about as large as the distance between his elbow and the floor. Perhaps physics is more your field, Jim.

David’s Stan Lee impresses me as well in that the comic artist legend has only a finger, thumb and black stump of some sort on his hand. It’s great that he could overcome that adversity. And is he waving or making a shadow-duck?

“Good luck, kid.” Maybe he’d have some more success if you wished him some talent instead.

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Commentary:

Panel 1: What this is, I do not know. My best guess would be subway or train cars of some sort, but they look more like a couple of trailers underneath some kind of canopy. Right about now, I’m realizing that I’m probably spending a lot more time doing the commentary on this page alone than he spent ‘drawing’ the entire series.

“If you’re going to be a good artist, you don’t need to show what’s on the resume.” Right–you need to not suck. I can’t tell whether that’s a period or a comma. For all I know, those are two different sentences. After all, the ‘y’ on ‘you’ is kind of big. I also have no idea why there’s a colon at the end. Maybe it’s to signify that the trailers are a demonstration of what one would put on a resume.

Panel 2: I’m hoping this all ends up being important because Davey-kins dedicates an entire fucking strip to it. Quite frankly, and I think I speak for just about everyone, here, I don’t really give a shit about what he thinks Stan Lee would say in a tape aimed at “prospective future Marvel artists”.

You know, if you think a normal human hand can bend like that, you’re probably not going to be working for Marvel any time soon. In fact, you’ll be hard-pressed landing a job making fecal scribbles on brick walls of abandoned buildings for insane, homeless men.

“Oh, sure your education and experience can get you a job and pay the bills, but that won’t show many people much about you.” What’s the downside? Was there supposed to be a downside? I mean, do we really want to know all that much about this Gonterman self-insertion?

Panel 3: “If you want to be a great comic book artist…” you need to have some kind of discernible talent in the field. David apparently really likes doing this, but that doesn’t mean that he’s worthy of a job at Marvel. In fact, a portfolio of any of the drawings he’s done would make any ambition and passion he has just seem like annoying obsession. Oh, and it already does.

Are all of the characters going to be this cross-eyed?

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Commentary:

Panel 1: The duration of the tape is Stan Lee describing X-Men #348 as part of Marvel’s new “Comic Books on Tape”. Or, judging by the pleased smile on Jim’s face, a recording of a couple of people fucking while dressed as squirrels.

Panel 2: “Home sweet home and studio” …and shoe-box. It’s really hard to distinguish what the fuck it is, exactly, that he lives in. It seems David has an art for covering up parts of scenes that may be (relatively) interesting with speech-bubble placement to make room for things like big patches of grass and the sky and whatnot. From what I can gather, looking at the apparent elevation and angle, Jim lives in some kind of tree-house or lookout post.

When working with noises, “AAAAAAAAH” is usually a scream of sorts. Someone walks in and sees a ghost and they exclaim “Aaaaaaah!” Relaxation or relief or understanding is usually denoted by a different mix of the same letters, “Ahhhhhhhh.” Apparently Jim is afraid of his own house. (A home-o-phobic? Har har! Take that, humor!)

Panel 3: It’s a new addition to your house, Jim. Davey-kins uses so little detail that it’s hard to differentiate between one box (say, a house) and another (say, a package) without the proper context, which he never provides.

Wait, is that something Jim said, or is the package talking? Or is that just some writing on the side of the package? I really can’t tell.

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Commentary:

Panel 1: “A package for me??” Can you not fucking read? What is it that’s confusing you, Jim? You’re staring directly at a package that says “To Jim” on it. And do you always provide spoken monologue for everything that happens?

Panel 2: Apparently the concept of receiving a package not ordered from a site on the internet gives Jim the sensation of having a roll of icy pennies inserted into his anus or of chewing on a handful of ball bearings. And where did his new ‘teeth’ come from anyway? Perhaps the same place his 13-year-old-girl breasts keep appearing from and disappearing to.

AND DO YOU HEAR THAT EVERYONE? THE INTERNET! I, JIM, AM IMPLYING HOW HIGH TECH AND CUTTING EDGE I AM BY TALKING ABOUT THE FACT THAT I BUY THINGS OFF THE INTERNET.

Panel 3: “So how dumb am I in finding out what’s in this box?” I’m finding the meaning difficult to parse, here. Is he saying that he’d be a fool to open a package? Maybe it’s a contest in which he tries to find the stupidest way to open a package just to see how dumb he is in finding out what’s inside. Also, is this internal struggle over whether or not to open the package really all that necessary? We all know he’s going to open the package. Why waste (well, let’s just say ‘waste’ for lack of a better term) an entire three-panel segment talking about a package he doesn’t intend to open? “Should I open it? I mean, how stupid would I be to open a package? You know… on second thought… naah. Now I’ll make some toast.”

Jabberwock

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Commentary:

Panel 1: It was David Gonterman. Ohhh! You were talking about the package. You meant the package was a bomb. Gotcha.

So our protagonist is someone who’s paranoid to the extent that any package that he receives is automatically classified as “mail bomb”. I have a feeling we’re in for a real adventure!

Panel 2: Yes, let’s find out who made the bomb by opening it. Certainly, there’ll be no kind of trigger mechanism to detonate the explosives contained within!

Panel 3: Awww, dammit. So it’s not a bomb? You got my hopes up for nothing.

Judging by the expression on his face, itís apparently a pair of severed breasts, or the corpse of his favorite pet nailed to the femur of a human child.

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Commentary:

Panel 1: Oh. A costume. Well, that was certainly worth the two strips (out of twelve) of hype. My only consolation comes from the notion that in a parallel universe, the package actually was a mail-bomb.

Panel 2: Did I miss something? Did it just puncture one of his kidneys? What in hell is with the look on his face? David apparently has a tendency to overuse the “my vas deferens just ripped in half” expression.

Panel 3: Sure, if you’re the type of person who has to turn to anthropomorphic, oversized animals because of a complete uncomfortability with sexual arousal in relation to a regular human body, and if on top of that you have no standards for visual aesthetics. Strangely, I’m getting a feeling that it only gets worse from here.

Is that hair or is he just using the bald head of the costume to make crop circles in the uncut grass of his living room?

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Commentary:

Panel 1: I was apparently right about the crop circles–what’s on its head now looks nothing like whatever was around its head in the last panel. I guess when he was done with the crop circles, he sprayed some whipped cream onto its scalp.

Panel 2: “Can’t think of a better compliment”? Who would’ve thought that sentient stuffed humanoid fox costumes would be so easily flattered? Guess she’s not one for creativity or genuine passion, and doesn’t care if the only part of her that’s appreciated is her body. Then again, it’s not like I’d expect Gonterman to be at all familiar with a woman’s wants and desires.

I never knew that one could be stricken with such intense surprise that their mouths reached up and touched the bottoms of their eyes. Ah, and it looks like his teeth have disappeared into the void again.

Panel 3: Now I don’t know about you, but I always open my packages while kneeling on a table. What the hell is he doing up there? And how’d the box get under the table?

Now his teeth are back, but the bottoms of his eyes have disappeared. Maybe he accidentally ate them when they were so close to his mouth.

Look at where his hands are: either he’s very protective of his genitals when startled, or the mere sight of an anthropomorphic fox sends him into a state of compulsive masturbation. My money’s on the latter.

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Commentary:

Panel 1: “Of course I’m alive, silly.” But of course! Jim would be a fool to think that a stuffed fabric costume that came from an airhole-less box and has a head that’s detachable from its body would be a non-living object! An absolute fool!

I really can’t explain why his mouth has turned into the number six. Maybe it’s being indicated that that’s what he’s saying, but David just didn’t have enough room to put it in a speech bubble. “I’m a Zoot, an alien symbiotic costume.” “Six.”

From this angle, I can kinda see why he’s on the table: the grass. He’s probably afraid of getting bitten by a tick. Though, this stuff’s not really touching the ground. Maybe he’s pissing a tornado.

Looks like the rest of this comic’s gonna be a real Zoot Suit Riot!*

Panel 2: “My name is Susan Foxfire.” What a great and clever name, David. Maybe she can team up with Janet Catwind or Angela Fishwater.

Though apparently a “fox”, it has humanoid breasts. Actually, it looks more like someone stapled earmuffs to its chest, so maybe that’s what that is.

Panel 3: Yep. Definitely earmuffs. Though, in this shot it almost looks like a scrotum in an ice cream cone.

It looks like the strip itself is crying. I would be too if I were touched by David Gonterman. Maybe he’s indicating that Jim’s head is raining.

Why can you see a part of Jim’s left eye from this perspective?

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Commentary:

Panel 1: “You can’t be real, are you?” No, I are not be real.

Panel 2: What in hell happened to her body? Her overly-round earmuff-breasts are now reduced to some kind of uneven, pointy tumor popping out from on the right side of her otherwise flat chest. And the patch of fur on the front of the torso is in a different shape. The whole effect has become definitely very un-scrotum-like.

Panel 3: Okay, what did I say? This whole thing is just an excuse to “illustrate” a furry sexual fantasy with an anthropomorphic fox. Within the first, like, minute of this damn thing stepping out of the box, it’s already asking the Gonterman-self-insertion protagonist to “feel [it] over”. Prior to this groping request, it said seven whole things to him. The opening of the box got more of a lead-up.

Jabberwock