Back again with a brief discussion of last week’s Episode (#2)
This project was many years in the making, which means some of the jokes were first written down a long time ago. Fortunately, bashing Republicans seems to be a perennial punchline, who knew it would be so very true today? Also, because this comic takes a bit of time to make (its drawn and watercolored by hand) the jokes and ideas need to be able to land as far as eight months into the future. The idea of a Troll and Monkey living under the Roosevelt bridge is actually one of the elements that has survived from the very beginning. The first element was, in fact, the bridge. I have worked in Arlington and lived in DC for over twenty years, and I often cross this bridge during my commute. It not only connects Virginia and DC, but it also flies over Roosevelt Island, Federal parkland in the middle of the Potomac. I wanted to speak to characters that were in DC but not an actual part of the DC political scene (that is, I didn’t want to do a straight-up political cartoon, nor did I want something along the lines of Doonesbury) In this “no-mans-land” underneath the Roosevelt bridge give the characters the ability to travel between worlds without going anywhere.
If you have a bridge, you need a Troll. Foggy Bottom is just the Troll for the job. He’s named after the neighborhood just south of the bridge. I think today we encounter Trolls more often than they ever did in ancient times. I like the idea that he is not up to speed with the times, he doesn’t have a computer, and he seems powerless to enforce tolls for crossing his bridge.
Foggy is so bad at being a Troll that he even has a companion (trolls usually being solitary creatures). Smithson is a monkey. He is named after the founder of the Smithsonian, James Smithson. We will get into his past a bit more in the coming episodes, but for now all you need to know is that he is the erudite counterpoint to the brusque and uncouth troll.
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Tune in next week for Episode 3!