Half the Battle!

#18 — Beachheads

Sor­ry this one took so long.  As you have prob­a­bly read from count­less peo­ple who try to put up some­thing semi-reg­u­lar­ly on the inter­net, my actu­al life took over, and I just did­n’t have the time to keep this going.  I’ve been work­ing close to 14 hour days for the past two months, and blah blah blah.  Like I said, you’ve prob­a­bly heard all this before.  I’m going to try to get back to a week­ly sched­ule for this when I have a lit­tle more time in August…

On to the strip above, this is actu­al­ly the impe­tus of start­ing the Half the Bat­tle strip.  My friend and I were watch­ing an episode of GI Joe (specif­i­cal­ly, “Once Upon a Joe”), and at the end of the episode, Life­line and Beach­head were talk­ing.  It was basi­cal­ly the dia­logue from the first two pan­els of this strip.  Now, one of the things that I love to do when I watch GI Joe is to talk over it.  There is a lot of things that are gen­uine­ly good about the old car­toon, but there is just as much goofy weird­ness, and it is that mix­ture of the two ele­ments that makes it such an enjoy­able show to watch.  I riff over the show when I watch it with my friends, and dur­ing this episode, we basi­cal­ly said, word-for-word, what you see above.  I wrote it down, and talked about mak­ing it into a com­ic strip.  Soon, oth­er ideas came to me, and I decid­ed to make it into a reg­u­lar thing.  This strip nev­er seemed like a good first strip, so I kept putting it off, but here you have it — the first Half the Bat­tle strip I ever wrote…

One last thing to note: this strip heav­i­ly implies that Beach­head is com­mit­ting war crimes of a pret­ty high order.  Obvi­ous­ly, war crimes in real life are not fun­ny at all.  In the GI Joe world of my strip, Beach­head likes to pull pranks on Life­line (see strip #1), so let’s just call this anoth­er (much more involved) prank.

Now you know…

UPDATE: Spelling error on pan­el 5 is now fixed.

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