When I was in college in the early oughts, my roommates and I had a short-lived three-panel comic strip that ran in the school newspaper. Its name was Inhaling the Aether. The concept of the strip — a Star Trek like spaceship where the crew was a bunch of screw-ups — was mine. Though I was watching a lot of Sealab 2021 at the time and basically ripped that off. Of course, I didn't draw the comic. The artist was one of my roommates. But after a couple of weeks he got lazy and quit on us. I had a backlog of ideas that never saw the light of day, and that experience has stuck with me and is a big reason why The Sloppy Life of Pixels exists.

I tell you all this now because today's comic is a remake of one of mine from Inhaling the Aether. I believe the original punchline was something like, "Oh no, Space Mormons. Hide!" I only truly remember one other comic that I had written. I may use it sometime, but it doesn't fit The SLOP as well, since it really needed multiple panels and relied on a consistent cast of characters.

One of my very first ideas for The SLOP was where a lazy artist gets fired from the comic strip in place of an image generation model. You now know who it was based on. But I thought it was more mean than funny, so it never got published. Maybe one day I'll figure that one out as well.

- Management