#973; The Perfect Imitator

Comic Transcripts

[[Man at easel, has brushes in hand, painting on stand. Friend standing behind him.]]
Friend: That’s a heck of a landscape you’ve painted there!
Artist: I know! Isn’t its banality hilarious?

Artist: I hate landscape paintings so much. So simple and trite. “Oh, look at nature, or some crumbly old barn. Don’t you wish you were THERE instead of whatever dumb place you are?” SCREW you Landscape! You don’t OWN me!

Friend: It’s a super good painting, though.
Artist: Super good at mocking the tropes of landscape painting, maybe! It’s got all the dumb dappled light and everything. I spent two weeks making it look exactly as dull as a real landscape.

[[A woman has entered to the side, is talking with Friend.]]
Artist is still ranting: I even went to an art fesitval and sold limited edition Giiclee prints on Strathmore paper. It was Hilarious.
Friend (to woman) At what point will he realize that he’s no longer doing this ironically?
Woman: On, don’t tell him, it’ll break his little heart!

{{header: it’s totally WONDERMARK.COM}}
{{alt-text: I’m doing a gallery show called ”These Things Are Bad And You Shouldn’t Come.” You should come!}}

#973; The Perfect Imitator transcribed by in

The past few weeks have been a frenzy of assembling the very laborious, very bespoke first print run of NOODLE BATTLE, the puzzle game I am releasing this weekend at PAX West in Seattle!

PAX has an event called the PNW Tabletop Game Market (Saturday night ONLY), which is a curated selection of short-run games from local designers. As I’ve mentioned in this space before, I applied for a space in this fall’s event mainly as a way to force myself to finish a new game. And here it is!

The drawings are all by Jason Poland, good pal and cartoonist of My Dad Is Dracula. Jason played an early version of this game at Alaska Robotics Comics Camp this spring, and really liked it!

So I said, “Do you want to help me make it?” And so he has! It was his idea to make all the characters fun little animals, and I think it adds a ton of charm.

Because this edition is limited-run, it has been incredibly labor-intensive to make! The boxes and cards were made by a game factory in the usual fashion, but separately. The blank tiles were made by a woodworker dude out of Connecticut. For each game, we have had to:

Cut a piece of plastic and install the box window
Paint all the tiles, hundreds at a time
Apply a sticker to both sides of every tile
Apply stickers to the box (we couldn’t get the box back printed in time, so the whole back side of the box is a sticker too)
Apply the “Nutrition Facts” sticker, which was a late suggestion by my kid that I just had to run with
Fold up the rule sheet (they come from the printer as big strips of paper)
Put all the components into the box and seal it all up

I knew it would be a lot of work and would require some inefficient, expensive compromises AND I WAS RIGHT. But the final product is turning out great, which is the important thing!!

I will have 50 copies with me (if all goes well) at PAX, and then between now and the holidays we will be putting together additional copies to round out this first edition.

I will announce additional copies on Patreon first, once they are available online!! And here too, naturally, before long.

You can also sign up here if you’d like me to email you once the game is available online!