Long John

I remember being flabbergasted when a reader said they liked Long John because it was funny.

I asked them to clarify because if Long John is actually a comedy then I’ve been doing it all wrong. They clarified by saying that it wasn’t a laugh riot, but when the comedic moments happened they really hit. While that’s nice to hear, I don’t think I ever tried to consciously create a comedic moment in the comic; to me, it just felt appropriate for the characters. That being said, Rich Jack’s childish glee in panel two made me chuckle from the moment I thought of it and continued to do so through every stage of the process. I mean, read the room, buddy.

The comic I did before Long John was explicitly a comedy. While it may have started as a place to make jokes, one of the things I learned from co-writing that comic was to find the comedy as it emerges from the scene, a situational comedy, if you will. Writing that way was something that made a lot of sense to me, especially since I don’t think of myself as a particularly funny person, but I think I’ve gotten okay at finding the comedy in a moment.

What’s most telling is that, for this post, I planned to include links to the pages that I think are funniest in the Long John archive, but nothing particularly pops into mind. Again, I think that’s more indicative of how I write––for the moment rather than for the laugh––which I’m okay with. I mean, Long John falls down a lot during Chapter 1? This page in Chapter 3 is pretty good. I don’t know! Let me know what the funniest Long John moments are for you in the comments! #engagement

Thumbnail for this page (with notes). Click for larger version.