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029: Aaron’s Guide to the Neck of His Guitar

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Until 2011ish I guess this would have been my guide to the neck of my guitar, too, but I’m pleased to say that I think I got better.

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028: Without a Little Help from My Friends

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Establishing the extremely long-term runner that Josh is bothered by all the conflict.

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027: Taking One for the Team

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So, I think this was the one that had most recently run back when Minnesota Public Radio did their piece on Nowhere Band, which was a pretty wild thing to hear on the radio.

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026d: The Great Big Schmooze, Part 4

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So, it’s worth unpacking that this whole sequence encodes a pretty sexist basic premise, that any woman who steps onto a stage should be prepared to have guys hurling themselves at her just because she’s a woman in rock. I wish I could say that the sequence ends with Aaron getting humiliated as an intentional repudiation of that, but that’s not true; it’s just what I thought would be funniest (and it conforms to the basic guideline that the Awesome Boys always lose). If I were doing the strip now, I wouldn’t do this sequence; or if I did, I’d foreground Tina’s* frustration with constantly getting hit on. Some of these strips, especially these earlier ones, really bear the marks of having been made at a time when I was still lugging around a lot of unexamined sexism about music.

*it’s also wild to me that this character’s named Tina (and that we don’t learn that until her 4th appearance); she’s definitively not the same person as the Tina who eventually plays bass for the Awesome Boys; when bass-playing Tina shows up, a big chunk of that is that I’d started to become aware of some of the unexamined sexism and wanted to try to push back against it.

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026c: The Great Big Schmooze, Part 3

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Angry-Awesome-Boys-stuck-in-a-car was sure a trope I went back to a lot.

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026b: The Great Big Schmooze, Part 2

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MAN does Jon wander off-model here, and MAN did I draw Aaron’s hand wrong there.

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026a: The Great Big Schmooze, Part 1

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My first stab at an extended storyline!

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025: Tales of the Bizarro World

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I had this plan to periodically check in on the other, more ambitious, band, but never really got around to it. But the singer/guitarist in the other band DID wind up coming back and leading the Awesome Boys through their most this-band-feels-like-a-job stretch.

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024: What a Bargain!

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023: So, Like, What Do You Guys Sound Like?

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