Blog P.I.

For no reasons other than my own demonstrated affinity for the works of David Foster Wallace and recent fixation with the alleged pseudonymous works of Mike Murphy, I would like to present an excerpt of a limited panel strip drawn in 2005 by webcomic artist Mike Russell¹.

The following is based on one brief passage from “Up, Simba!”, Wallace’s not-so-brief 2000 Rolling Stone article about his time aboard the Straight Talk Express with the “anti-candidate” and the traveling press corps, recently republished as a short book with the dreadful title “McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope”²:

1. Oh, all right. As long as I’m talking about Wallace, you’ll have to excuse the use of footnotes. Anyway, I asked Russell if I could use this, and he pointed out that because he drew it on spec using copyrighted material, he couldn’t actually make any money off it, so I was free to “go nuts” with it. However, he did want the point made clear that he is “totally unaffiliated” with Wallace or any publishers of the text wherefrom he derived the above-printed comic excerpt. And I’m happy to do so.
2. Thing is, most of Wallace’s titles are far better than his editors’. For a (very long (and very funny)) comic essay about a week on board a luxury cruise, which of the following sounds like a better title: “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” or “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise”? Yet the latter is what Harper’s called it, and the former is what Wallace was able to call it once he published the full-length version (approx. 100 pages) in his eponymous (the essay, not his name) first collection of nonfiction.
3. I don’t actually have a third item, and there’s no corresponding third footnote above, I just thought w/r/t footnotes, three would be a nice round number.