F***ed up Friday Commentary

F’ed Up Friday, much like Full Contact Golf, is a chapter I hadn’t planned to do until a couple of weeks before I did it. However, unlike Full Contact Golf, I improvised pretty much the entire thing on the spot.

Much like Full Contact Golf’s scene where Nina uses Clyde as a human shield, I had a specific gag in mind that I built the rest of the chapter around. In this case, it was Nina trying to light a cigarette. Funny as this was, it had to be prefaced by this conversation, which was pretty difficult to write. I’ve never smoked enough to have an actual nicotine addiction, so I had to guess what one feels like based on descriptions from people I know that do. It’s probably inaccurate, but I figured without first-hand knowledge, I might as well err on the side of a boob joke. Since this is comedy, I figured such a minor transgression would be forgivable.

This chapter was hard for me because, like most male writers, I sometimes have a difficult time writing female characters. I try to get around this by basing them on real people I know (various girls I met in school) and imagining how they’d react to a given situation. However, the situation Biff and Nina find themselves in during this chapter is completely bizarre, and I was drawing a blank using this tactic. I tried doing research on how body-switching type stories are handled in other fiction. Unfortunately, material I found was useless for a variety of reasons. The original Freaky Friday film involved switching between a mother and daughter, which was too different from what I was doing to be helpful, and most stories I could find that were between two people of different gender were either downright obscene (which I don’t want Moron County to be), or had a romantic subplot between the two characters. Since I don’t write romance very well, and don’t want Biff and Nina openly interested in each other this early in the comic’s run anyway, that was out. As a side note, an intriguing story I found during my research was a guest comic in Sluggy Freelance where Torg and Zoe were switched for a week but, due to the nature of the technology, can’t remember it, and the story is told via flashbacks as they try to find out what happened. I briefly considered doing that, but decided not to because:

a.) I wouldn’t be able to without pretty much ripping off the Sluggy Freelance story entirely, and
b.) There is another chapter I’m going to do in the near future that’ll be told via a series of flashbacks, and I don’t want to overuse that gimmick.

What I ended up doing was simply having the body switching be a background element, and the chapter’s main focus turning out to be something else, in this case, the Vandesdelca project. This was another last minute decision. Up until a week before the Vandesdelca project was revealed, Fred and Bobbes were originally going to make their way to the giant robot wing. They’d accidentally activate one of the experimental ones, it would chase them outside, find Cartoon Billy’s drill, immediately fall in love with it, and start humping it vigorously, much to Billy’s terror and dismay. Then Clyde would have fixed the toaster. While I admit the robot bit would have been pretty funny, the chapter would have become pure filler, with no real purpose to the overall story other than reminding the audience that Cartoon Billy exists. This is important because I plan for him to be the main villain of the next major story arc, but it shouldn’t be the only reason for the chapter to exist. So, I decided to reveal a little bit about the big mysterious project Connor’s looking for. Not a lot; just enough for it to serve as a deus ex machina that raises more questions than answers.