Monday, October 5, 2015

Hey! It's my first thing for Splitsider!

A tense moment from The Ren & Stimpy Show.

So far, I've been incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to write for websites that I personally read and enjoy. I'd been a daily visitor to the A.V. Club website before I became a contributor there. In recent years, Splitsider -- a site specifically devoted to the comedy world -- has become another favorite of mine. And now I've gotten a piece published there, too, which is an honor. It's an essay about the underlying themes of The Ren & Stimpy Show called "Ren, Stimpy, and the Horrors of Manliness," and it's one of my favorite things I've ever written. The idea for this article has been bubbling in my mind for at least a year or so, and now that Ren has returned to TV via TeenNick's late night programming block, The Splat!, it seemed the right time to do it. Maybe I'll write other pieces for Splitsider in the future. That would be nice.

Actually, given my hyper-verbose style of writing, this piece could have gone on literally ten times longer than it did. I was writing about masculine archetypes on The Ren & Stimpy Show, and I thought about discussing the role of female characters on the series. But I stopped myself from writing about that because it would have made the story too long. It was a personal sacrifice to actually make the article a readable length. I never had to do that with the Ed Wood Wednesdays articles, which is why they tended to stretch on to 5,000 words or more apiece. I think, if you added them all up, my articles on Blood Splatters Quickly are actually longer than the book itself. What can I say? When I care about the stuff I'm writing about, the words just pour out.

P.S. - In case you missed it on Twitter or Facebook, here's my mashup of the Spider-Man newspaper comic and Futurama. I swear, the dialogue is taken verbatim from the comic.

Gaston and LeFou could have this exact same conversation.

And here's a Spidey parody I don't think I ever posted here before:

Admittedly, this joke is stolen from one of those G.I. Joe public service announcements.