Yes… it’s that serious.

More ska hate. What can I say, I really didn’t like ska back then (still don’t). It seemed like the height of immaturity to me.

I’ll just come out and say it. I hate ska music. A lot. She Said What? is a parody of a young ska band that used to play the venue I used to sound tech at (The Well). They were known as That’s What She Said (The picture on this last.fm profile was actually taken at The Well, Portland, ME!!). I found ska music to be insanely irritating. One of the last ska shows we ever had at The Well, I actually “skanked.” People’s minds were BLOWN.

Also, this comic first introduces Bull. The guy that owns the favorite hangout of the Disassemblance gang, The Wall.

HERBY!! THE SCOURGE OF HELL!!

Herby was based on this really silly sketch I did… in MS Paint… in my young impressionable years for the first webpage I ever created. It was called “DarkHart’s Cavern of Darkness” and it was a quintessential early 1990′s webpage… over-use of animated GIFs and all. I’d like to think I came a long way in my web development skills.

I always picture Arron was a very big believer of personal space. Especially when that invader is a touch-hungry, Ecstacy enthusiast.

I’m pretty sure those colors representing “rave lights” in the comic’s panels are the three default radial gradients in Flash. All Dis comics to date were done if Flash. I originally started this as a means of easily reusing art… as I was clearly couldn’t be bothered with drawing things over and over again. Eventually, even when I did start drawing things over and over again, I still used Flash.

I have nothing against raves or the raver scene. I always found raver girls adorable.. especially those with pacifiers. Still quite enjoy cute adult women who frequently suck on pacifiers… with indifference to what sort of music is playing during said sucking.

I was clearly more anti-drug the near decade ago that I wrote this. Heh. Old Ethan would be so disappointed in me.
New Ethan, would not…

GOFFS DON’T DANCE!

Well, some do… but there is usually just ethereal swaying involved…

This comics first introduces “MiNK” (real name: Miho Nakayama), a perky, “cyber-goth” girl gamer geek of Japanese-descent. As you may remember (or will soon discover) she has a love for the fleshy robot known as Arron. In retrospect, it probably would have been better to actually have her talking to Arron in this comic, thereby introducing MiNk’s interest in him and his particularly stiff way of life. However, I was only 12 or so comics in, so I don’t think I was thinking that deeply about everything. DAMN HINDSIGHT!

I should pull a George Lucas and re-released all these Dis comics with new effects and dialog (RE: Every re-release of the Star Wars Trilogy, especially the Special Edition in 1997). This Disassemblance comic I should have inserted cool CGI of Spike Riding on a Dewback.

Is Ethan a creative, imaginative genius… or just fucking insane?

This is the question I tend to explore throughout Disassemblance, as sometimes there is a very, very, paper-thin line between genius and insanity. Sometimes I just felt like being weird… and random… when I sat down to write Dis comics. So Ethan’s odd imagination was the perfect place to express my own weirdness. And naturally, Arron, with feet not only planted firmly on, but significantly buried in, the ground acted as a perfect straight-man for Ethan’s non-sequiterness.

And… through out my young life I’ve nearly choked to death more times than I count. My mother still tells of a time I nearly choked on a lifesaver when I was very young and nearly died. So that’s where that came from.

This comic came out in the hyper-(and hypocritical)-patriotism, post the 9/11 tragedy. This was a period of unquestioning, mindless national fanaticism that was born out of fear and bred xenophobia — a hatred for everything that wasn’t painting red, white and blue. As it does, consumerism embraced the fanaticism and everywhere you turned people were buying up propaganda-”Go USA!”-wear (99% of which, ironically, was made elsewhere in the world.) And it wasn’t just the citizens that were spending… military spending, justified by the tragedy, boomed as America entered countless wars to somehow stop an ambiguous, nebulous concept of “terrorism.”

And that whole time I kept thinking… what a fucking waste. We have a greater chance at bringing peace if we spent a FRACTION of that military budget on bringing food and clean water to the world. People would sure as hell be less likely to blow us up, if we spent our resources helping people to build infrastructure and do what we (as Americans) could to help all people (not just our own people… which we also largely neglect, anyways.) According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is would cost $30 billion a year to launch the necessary agricultural programs to completely solve global food insecurity. American alone spends $685.1 billion on military spending… a year.

And this extends to an even bigger idea… why are we not striving for a “hold each other up” world. I WANT my tax dollars to go to invest in technologies that will feed, bring water and free power to all people, not technologies to blow them up. Our governments (and the corporations that control them, and reap profit from that control) are like sociopaths with a fist full of knives. This way of living is pure insanity.

America… the world… needs to embrace an ethical platform… a moral democracy, where the needs of all people are paramount.

This interaction would become common in Disassemblance. I intentionally made Spike a Jewish character (and a secular one at that) to help contrast and act as not only a contrast to Trent, but also a spiritual support (as despite being a secular Jew himself, he has experience in the mentality and culture of the Abrahamic religions).

Now, would Jesus actually be in a punk band? Who honestly knows. It actually kinda bugs me when anyone claims they know exactly what Jesus would do (WWJD? — “What Would Jesus Do?” — is meant to be a rhetorical question) or what God really wants/thinks/hates. But, at least as far as Spike is concerned, Jesus has more in common with punk musicians than the tight-laced, legalistic, conservative, “sinner until proven saved” people that call themselves Christians in our modern American culture. The later had more in common with the Pharisees of Jesus’s time.