Before we start to today I just wanted to give out a link to original Facebook where these comics where first posted. You'll actually get more info on the strips themselves here, but just in case you're curious and want to look it over here is the link:
Simon Says Facebook Page
I'd also like to thank everyone that's been coming over and checking these out. The page view for the other two Simon Says: Retrospects have been the highest view counts I've had all year. Not talking millions of hits here, but a lot more then normal. Glad to see there is still some intrest in the comic, even if the likely hood of seeing more is almost non-existent at this point.
Anyway, on to the comic. Ah the "The Slackers of Hazzard County." I have no proof, but I feel this comic might have been the one that killed the whole strip. This is also the one that was called "Not Funny". And I'd say that funny is all part of your perspective. Not everyone thinks everything is funny. If you don't get it, you won't think it's funny. And this was a niche strip to begin with. Unless you grew up watching The Dukes of Hazzard like I did, this comic would just be a "meh" for you. So it's not likely that anyone over forty five or under twenty eight was going to get this one, thus they wouldn't think it was funny. But 28-45 was audience I was shooting for, so that would be a good thing.
That being said, I do think this strip had it's share of problems. The idea is sound I think. That Simon, having watched one too many episodes of Dukes of Hazzard as a child, comes up with a way to get away from the cops. The same way the Duke Boys had hundreds of times. If done right that could have been really funny. The idea was sound, but the end product maybe wasn't.
When I wrote it I actually thought it was too long. I also didn't know if people would understand that all that had happened was all in Simon's head and that he was never actually running from the cops. Dwayne added the "Meanwhile back in reality" caption to make this more clear. I even think I put in a note with the script that if Dwayne couldn't make this work to just skip it. Now, I would have taken this one out to polish it more, or maybe deleted it and used elements of it in later strips. That is now, with a 180 strips I could work in to take it's place if I did that. Thing is when I wrote this we had maybe ten scripts and I was trying to churn out as much content as I could in a short amount of time. So I sent this one along anyway. I'd actually love to take another crack at this one and see if I could make it work, but since you see it above I doubt I'll ever actually do that.
At the end of the day I'm sure there are people that think everything I wrote was "not funny", and there are those that thought everything was "funny". Then there were those that thought this was funny and this wasn't. Like I said it all depends on where you are coming from. I write stuff that I would think was funny and since I can't read people's minds or make everyone happy, that's all I can do.
Lucky for me, the next strip "Lost in Translation" was much better received and actually started an upturn in the strip where people were really starting to like what they were seeing and talking about the strips themselves. Sadly this came just before the comic's all too soon end. But we'll talk about that next time.
-Matt
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