I’m very late in sharing the news that my pal Bully has resumed bringing joy to the masses at his blog Comics Oughta Be Fun!.
A couple of Januarys past — which might have been a Sandman issue — Bully, the
little stuffed bull who is a fuzzy, cuddly bane to oppressors of the righteous and vulnerable, returned after sadly but understandably closing up shop in June 2020. He continued to live out the message of his blog’s title on Twitter with the help of trusty human friend John DiBello, then made the world brighter for those of us who rarely venture there by firing up Fun! again, filling in posts from 2021 and forging ahead with his mission to chronicle every instance of, well, just what it says on the virtual tin, via the continuing feature Today in Comics History.
I’ve had Don McLean’s “American Pie” on the list of things to include in this
series from the start.
Once upon a time, I figured that when I did finally write about the song it would be
in large part to annotate or explicate it. That was before. It was before cyberspace got quite so full; before I realized that with age the mystery and myriad possible interpretations of the lyrics grew more interesting to me than any definitive answers; before McLean slowly began to break his silence on the subject, most recently and distinctly in a documentary that premiered on the Paramount+ service last month called The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s “American Pie”.
A very long time coming, I Have Issues has gone live.
Kind-of. I’m stretching the definition of “live” there. Right now all you get is a logo
and tag line, plus — maybe, depending on the results of my internal debate over whether it adds value or subtracts from the minimalist placeholder — a brief mission statement. But at least the URL works. I registered the domain a while ago now and have been planning the site for more than a decade.
When a friend demanded a complete version of my “Yoda Clone” lyrics back in 2019,
I replied that I’m a fan of Jorge Luis Borges — the magical-realist, postmodernist master known to reference and review books that didn’t actually exist.
Like many others throughout cyberspace, I enjoy creating images of merch for imaginary movies, etc. Just a snippet of and/or allusion to a work not fully realized can be as satisfying as, if not more satisfying than, making or experiencing the entire work itself. Plus, I simply don’t have enough mental bandwidth and time, so my choice is usually to cobble together either a little bit or nothing.
The problem comes when I get a brainstorm and then let what I’ve sketched out sit
for a while expecting that I’ll bring it to fruition. Lots of Top X lists and mashup ideas languish unfinished in virtual folders, some of whose inspirations have long since left the zeitgeist.
Here are three parody choruses that I doubt will ever go any further. You’ll note that one springboards from much older material than the others, comics I’ve been reading to follow another blog’s reviews — where the mantra in the panel depicted is alternately referred to as a chant and an oath. Moreover, it’s based on a much older song, and its tune has been used here before in my extra look at Lost’s “Nowhere Man” way back in 2010.
I was talking with a friend recently and this happened.
