Isis

The hieroglyph depicted in the “punch panel” of this strip represents a circular struggle many of us are grappling with right now. We want to knock it off with the political shit, but we also want a valid excuse for indulging in our baser urges.

Lookit, I count both pot shots and cheap shots in my repertoire. The core philosophy of the strip has always been gratifying the fickler compulsions. The vile and pernicious disease of identity politics has infected the body of entertainment so deeply, people have lost all critical perspective of government and media. I had to burn some old resentment byproduct off the thrusters.

Anyway, on November 11, 2011, Skyrim was released for the Xbox 360. I stopped playing it sometime around May of this year. Not because I’d grown tired of it; because my new computer took priority, as far as monitor use. So yeah. I would guess seven years of play from a role-playing video game is a resounding endorsement. It was certainly worth buying, more than once, when the disc broke or stopped working.

As if Skyrim wasn’t customizable enough, the Xbox 360 console allowed you to download music CDs onto a detachable and upgradeable hard drive, so you could listen to your own music while you played. That meant if you’d wearied of Skyrim‘s spectacular musical score after nineteen straight hours of play, you could replace it with something like Pantera, or Sepultura, or Isis, and get sick of that instead.

I was familiar with Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls franchise from spending countless days on previous offerings like Morrowind and Oblivion. I had Skyrim from day one. I lent it to my friend and roommate Chay, and he got even more hooked than I did. I brought no less than four Xboxes back from the Red Ring of Death just so that one or both of us could continue playing. We bought every available expansion. That’s him on the right in the first panel. He had a hard drive loaded with metal from some unknown previous owner, including every Isis album.

That’s the song playing in the first panel- I’m almost positive it was Chay’s favorite. Isis and Skyrim fit together so well that I still get surprised when I hear the game with the default music, and realize that they have no association at all outside of my own head.

This is the other big one from Isis (the berserker is bellowing it in panel three). If you’re waiting for a recruitment tune, this is it.

This particular strip is the first to be born outside of the first “Twenty Years”. [Click this link to see it being drawn!] I don’t know that it means the strip will go for twenty more. I would file that under “unlikely”. HOWEVER!

If you look around the site, you’ll see the first of the new changes here; mainly, that I can now sell you comics directly through this website, signed. Also, there’s a link to my Patreon in the sidebar now, and I’ve added all sorts of new stuff there too. Soon you’ll be able to direct order from Ceaseless Fables and Meddler Games, as well. I have another move in progress so your patronage is greatly appreciated as things are expectedly stressful.

Another heavily-Nordic Isis track:

I tell ya, Chay and I must have played every class of character in Skyrim, even the desert cat people, and the lizard people from the marsh. Enemies would taunt you based upon your race. If you were one of the aforementioned feline desert-dwellers, your opponent would growl “You’d make a fine rug, cat”. This is a hilarious phrase to utter at house pets.

I would without question call Skyrim the greatest video game of all time, alongside Grand Theft Auto V. The sole reason I’m not playing it right now is because this computer is using the monitor. Also I have a never-ending list of shit to do in the next two weeks, and I can’t be wasting time fiddlin’ about with some vidya game. Bad enough I’m writing this article.

My point, theoretically, is that a significant percentage of what made Skyrim so much fun to experience came from a band called Isis.

As for the parts of the strip where I bust on Obama and McCain, if you have a problem with it for whatever reason, you’re not even reading this. If you were, I’d ask you to consider the politicians that you do make jokes about, and what your motivation is for doing so. Because wowee zowee, a bunch of loud-ass Americans are all following the same list of Saturday Night Live targets. The enemies of those impersonated play along, and voilà; social and political ideals have been manipulated through comedy. Politicians become heroes and villains. People forget how to critically analyze an incident, if they were ever taught how in the first place, and they regress to basic dynamics they absorbed from fantasy movies they saw while growing up. They never once question where their thoughts come from.

I saw an opportunity to draw Obama and take a cheap shot at him, and I took it. If you use Facebook, take note of how many times someone will- out of the blue and completely unprovoked- take a shot at Trump in the replies of any humorous posting. The original joke will have NOTHING TO DO WITH TRUMP, but someone will without fail stick one in, like a nuisance parrot, invoking the following concepts:

• His TINY HANDS! SO TINY!
• ORANGE CHEETO HITLER!
• MUSHROOM PENIS!

If you can deal with that shit, which has refused to die and is more than likely mostly bots, just like the shit that was pulled last election, and you know goddamn well by whom, and whahey funny thing there’s elections comin’ up, what a coinky-dink, then you can deal with me ragging on Obama and McCain once in 120+ strips. 

I mean, say what you will about Obama getting elected with that Arabic middle-name of his, but there was no way in Hell that a dude with “Cain” in his name would see high office in the U.S. of A.. See, there’s this really old book, and… oh, you know how names tend to stick, right? And need I even mention McCain’s disastrous VP pick? Or his highly suspicious-