056 “The Danger Trilogy III”

The last of the Danger Trilogy. I’ve always found that if you try to talk sense into anyone’s head, it’s always frigging useless, so this strip was a homage to that. I basically thought to myself, if I were Mark, what would I say to Mike if I could be perfectly blunt about it? Note that in a later strip, the roles are reversed, and it’s Mike giving the speech. For a strip about jerking off, everyone is particularly verbose.

Concerning sitcoms, I always hated those episodes where the character has a flaw through the episode, and by the end everyone has a big hug and the character tries his best to fix the flaw. One of the best characters ever created for a sitcom was Dan Fielding (“Night Court”) who was the most lecherous character EVER. He was a district attorney who had absolutely no morals whatsoever in his own personal life, and in a rare comic twist drew the humour from him being SUCCESSFUL rather than the obvious comedic route of him failing all the time (much like my strip draws on failure). However, he had a change of personality and his character was ruined — he turned into a nice guy who gave up his old ways. Sickening. The best characters don’t have to change.

And that’s my goal with Mike — he won’t change. He totally misreads Mark argument and twists it in a way that he can have his cake and eat it at the same time. And I think those kinds of characters make the best characters… not the ones who repent, but the ones who can’t repent because they are just following their own nature.