Episode Seventy-Eight: Squid Man.
With Oats on vacation, we present the first of the 4 original strips that comprised "Episode 71: Query Expressions. " Originally published February 29th, 2018, in the Quechee Picayune-Emetic. Reprinted with permission.
With Oats on vacation, we present the first of the 4 original strips that comprised "Episode 71: Query Expressions. " Originally published February 29th, 2018, in the Quechee Picayune-Emetic. Reprinted with permission.
Negging is the practice of giving negative attention to (or abusing) someone with the intent of reverse-psychologizing them into being attracted to you. The theory being that ignoring or treating someone badly plays on their insecurities and makes them vulnerable to your advances.
ReplyDeleteThe joke in the strip is more or less stolen directly from James Acaster's "Repertoire" (2018), in which someone employing 'negging' is too oblivious to realize that they, themselves, are not being negg'd first - they are simply being ignored.
The larger conceit here is that the Latent Narratives strips are the collage of four unrelated strips found next to each other on a daily newspaper's comics page. (The 'Quechee Picayune-Emetic'.) Squid Man occupies the first panel of the Latent Narratives collage, and always voices a note of censorship from an undeserving authority.
Presented here is an original Squid Man comic in its entirety. The titular character is egomaniacal, and wholly unaware of the effect his words have on other people. His observations are always off-the-mark, if not in a different universe entirely. In this way, it is similar to Guisewite's 'Cathy'.