Toonbots archive - episode published 20040830
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The ongoing characterization of Frances as a gentle, rather innocent being who incidentally will be causing 12-foot waves to strike beaches mere miles
from the metacartoonist is a richly conceptualized jest aimed at the heart of those callow beings who heedlessly assumed that a simple nine-month
hiatus was anything more significant than a mere gathering of breath and energies on the part of the metacartoonist, who clearly needed only a bit
of rest and relaxation far from the mundane cares of day-to-day existence in bustling Indiana, exchanging those for the exact same day-to-day
cares in bustling Puerto Rico -- true, a lesser personage may have seen nine months of Toonbotlessness as a failing, a lapse, a lack of metacartooning
productivity, but the more discerning viewer would plainly see that the very Toonbotlessness of the past nine months has instead been not a failing
but a fulfilment of the essential promise of minimal metacartooning; just as minimal cartooning pares reality down to its core, its pith, its
essence, so does an absence of cartooning pare reality to an even more central core, the coral core as it were, so that instead of attempting to
bludgeon the reader with a surfeit of the metacartoonist's own insights (of which there are clearly more than the average reader could handle, so it's
good only the
coolest are here), the metacartoonist instead allows the reader to meditate for an extended period on a single cartoon, in order to perceive
not only that single cartoon in its essential pithiness, but even the reader's own state of mind and soul, the reader's own coral core in a manner
of speaking, thus ultimately bringing the reader to come to terms with the essential equivalence of the reader and the cartoon: in simpler terms,
the metacartoonist refrained from metacartooning, and the reader achieved satori.
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The script used to make this toon:
<cartoon height="1200" width="700" rowformat="1"> <panel> <character name="mao"/> <caption location="bottom left" size="12" fgcolor="red">Hey, Frances!</caption> <character name="frances" aspect="2"/> <caption location="bottom right" size="12" fgcolor="green">Dude! What's this stuff in my teeth?</caption> </panel> <panel> <caption location="bottom left" size="12" fgcolor="red">I believe those are the lesser Antilles.</caption> </panel> <panel> <caption location="bottom right" size="12" fgcolor="green">That's like, spinach or something, right? </caption> </panel> <panel> <caption location="bottom left" size="12" fgcolor="red">Frances, I'm not sure...</caption> <caption location="bottom right" size="12" fgcolor="green">What? Do my teeth look weird? </font> </panel> <panel> <caption location="bottom left" size="12" fgcolor="red">Do you know what a hurricane really, you know, IS?</caption> <caption location="bottom right" size="12" fgcolor="green">I always thought it was something like a rock star. </font> </panel> <panel> <caption location="bottom left" size="12" fgcolor="red">Have you ever considered a career in cereal sales?</caption> <caption location="bottom right" size="12" fgcolor="blue">WILL FRANCES SEE SAN JUAN? <br/>TUNE IN NEXT TIME... <br/>SAME BOT TIME, SAME BOT CHANNEL!</caption> </panel> </cartoon> @@ |
