011 “The Seduction of Madame X Part III”

This is one of the strips I would redo completely or trash if I were to do again. The first is the crappy attitude about pregnancy like only the man suffers as it appears in the header in the strip and the older commentary below. The second is that the punchline is that the partner used to be a man. Well, someone being trans is not only unoriginal as a punchline, but yeah, shouldn’t be a punchline anyways. Something more clever could have been done, like to have a final panel with the guy cleaning the house and the woman sitting on the sofa drinking beer and watching football, and the guy thinking, “USED to be …?” I don’t know. Someone being trans shouldn’t be a punchline and I did it a couple of times. I should have done better.

Wow, I was struggling with nudity back then. This is a pretty straight up joke, and I actually repeated the theme a couple of times. I do like the last panel through.

Looking at the commentary from 2002, wow, that’s a self-absorbed thing to say, as if pregnancy is only scary for the guy. There’s going to be a lot of this where I look back on my own work and regret some things, but instead of erasing or ignoring it I’m going to point out where I was wrong to think that. This is one of those cases. Maybe there are individuals who do use pregnancy to manipulate people but it’s really wrong of me to make a gross generalization like that. Also, the comment in the header of the strip is kinda gross, like I’d rather die than take responsibility. It was said to try and invoke humor, but fourteen years later I look at it and think, whoa, that’s really not the right thing to say at all.

Wow, do these early punchlines seem tame now.

Heck, everything seems tame in these early strips. I used blankets to cover up the naughty bits, something I wouldn’t have restrained myself from doing now. It’s funny when you look up from how deep you’ve gone down the slippery slope to see how innocent it really was when you started.

The inspiration? Well, besides it being a pretty standard set-up and punchline, I had my share of partners who used the “my period is late” manipulative ploy when things in the relationship were going sour. It worked too.