Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 12/06/00
Artist's Statement
Sometimes you do a conceptually ambitious
cartoon that nobody gets and you feel all disappointed by your unperceptive
public; other times you do cartoons so stupid and obvious that you hope people
will read more into them than is actually there. I'm sorry to say that this
cartoon is pretty much pure stupidity, inspired by a long, rainy weekend spent
with Boyd White (frequent model in The Pain) and Dave Israel (creator
of this website). We were all temporarily bachelors (long story, in all cases)
and immediately reverted to the level of slobby drunken college kids, drinking
all the beer and whiskey in Dave's house and watching The Best of Dean
Martin's Celebrity Roasts, Peek-a-Boo ( some "historic erotica,"
which turns out to be a euphemism for "crappy pornography," purchased
from Atomic Books for eleven dollars), and Detroit Rock City. Boyd
gave me a box of old comic books (Spiderman, Fantastic Four, The Incredible
Hulk, Batman, Superman, Superboy, Jimmy Olsen) which I sat around reading
while he and Dave played stuff like Long Black Veil on guitar and accordion.
And somewhere in there we came up with this pretty sophomoric cartoon. Still,
laughs are laughs, and you gotta love that Tubetop.
The joke that Lowbrow refers to--the one about the epileptic
oysterman and the prostitute with diarrhea--was originally told to me by noted
American author John Barth, in his "Rudiments of Fiction" class
at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University. The punchline, which is best
left half-completed, is: "One of them shucks between fits."