[TLC] On espionage and weddings

I have mixed feelings about Real Life Comics. On the one hand, when it's funny, it's very funny, and even on its most serious days, it's usually at least amusing or interesting. And while you *could* fault his updating, if you really wanted, he's never missed more than one day in a row without prior notice (and now he's in the Daily Grind Ironman Challenge). No, Real Life is a pretty solid, high-quality workhorse of a strip. What gets me about it, periodically, is its tendency to be self-indulgent.

Now, of course, a little self-indulgence is to be expected in an (ostensibly) autobiographical strip. Even though its universe now encompasses more weirdness and science-fiction than most of the "crazy" and "offbeat" comics on the web, Real Life is still at its core a strip about its creator and his life. In between popping back and forth to the future and creating a supervillain base in an abandoned missile silo, the characters have bought a house, gotten engaged, and changed their appearances, more or less in time with their real-life counterparts.


(Click thumbnail to see the full comic)

One of the things creator Greg Dean does really well in general, in fact, is the blending of the real with the fantastic: the above strip is a small-scale example of this. But he does it on the large scale, too, spacing out his ridiculous, off-the-wall storylines with a week or two of relatively mundane, everyday "Greg is crazy" jokes. And in general, it works fine, although the moments where the comic-world is suddenly updated to reflect the real world seem a bit random (since we obviously haven't been following the gradual changes of Dean's life).

Friday's strip, however, was jarring for a very different reason. See, we've just come out of a three-week arc in which government agents interrogated the guys about Tony's blatantly criminal activities. And it was well done on Dean's part, in many ways--a knowing wink reminding us that yes, he realizes how absurd the comic has been. The thing was, it was also darker and way, way more serious than any previous storyline had been, with characters literally getting handcuffed, beaten up and shot at. While there was still a comic element present, the strip frequently ran for multiple days without a punchline.

This, it seemed Dean was telling us, was his version of serious Story. The interrogation sequence ended with one of the main characters actually threatening the life of a government agent with a handgun.

And then, all of a sudden, it ended. The characters got home, with the cheery cry of "Hey sweetie! We're free from the clutches of government oppression!" and the very next day we're in the tuxedo store doing a "Greg is crazy" joke:


(Click thumbnail for full comic)

The phrase for this is "brick wall on a highway." Where the hell did this come from? On the one hand, I really would like to believe that this is merely an interlude, a brief moment of exaggerated normality before the dark wave that was left looming over their heads comes crashing down again. On the other hand, though, I'm afraid that this is all we're getting. I'm worried that Dean doesn't realize how unfinished the previous story feels. Sure, it lasted for as long as most of the previous story arcs he's done, but it led us to anticipate longer and more involved dramatic pacing than any of them did. And it feels a bit like it ended when it did just so that he could get to the wedding sequence in time for it to match up with his upcoming real-life wedding.

I really, really hope he surprises us.



(...in the meantime, though, I have to say that the tuxedo strip, out-of-place though it might be, definitely made me laugh. So maybe it's all for the best.)