Far Out There Christmas Clash – page 16
Well, this is frustrating. I really, REALLY thought I was gonna have this page finished and loaded before midnight last night. I already had everything inked and scanned a day ahead of time, and I was already starting to color the thin in as early as 8. A done deal, right? Well, that whole “human need to sleep” kicked in, and if you’ve been keeping track of my various delays over the course of the past year, you know a LOT of them are because I don’t really have any middle ground between “wide awake” and “already unconscious” anymore. Once I start getting groggy, I’m just OUT. That, plus some unexpected layout problems that I really shouldn’t have been trying to fix while only half-awake, torpedoed any chance of this page getting done ahead of time. Oh well.
Anyway, this is my little “tribute” to all the weird gimmick matches where winning involves pretty much anything other than “pin the other guy” or “throw the other guy over the top rope.” Not a huge fan, in case you couldn’t tell. And we’ve got some more new character designs for me to ramble on about, too! Rumiko’s basically a shout out to the Red Rooster, the TERRIBLE gimmick that Terry Taylor was saddled with during his initial run in WWF. I’m not making up that faux-hawk, kiddies. That was an actual thing. As for Vashti, she’s Shinsuke Nakamura. Hey, if they character’s already a rock star, why not dress her up as a wrestler who’s basically a rock star himself? Granted, I could have had her be a Honky Tonk Man reference for the same reason, and actually that might have been a little bit funnier. But these references have leaned VERY heavily towards the 80s/90s side of things, and I wanted to squeeze in SOMETHING a bit more current.
Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that, after two plus weeks of trying to think up stupid Christmas-themed wrestling jokes, Real Life just went and outdid all of it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Macaulay Culkin using “Home Alone Tactics” to interfere in a wrestling match.
(Historical Notes: In retrospect, this particular “the stipulation doesn’t make sense” joke doesn’t really work as well as intended since we never see the wresting even in the matches where the rules DO make sense. This would need to be the one and only match we cut away from for that gag to land the way Past Me intended.)
So, the rules are: they beat each other up with Giant Cardboard Cutouts of Kurt Angle? Though I’m not entirely sure what part the Ginder-bread plays. There’s a writer and a general named “Ginder” on Wikipedia, but they don’t seem to have much connection to wrestling….There is a Jinder Mahal, maybe it’s an alternate spelling? So it would be giant cardboard cutouts of Kurt Angle and Jinder(Ginder) Mahal? Or maybe they’re made out of hard bread rather than cardboard. Yes, that must be it. They beat each other up with giant hardbread cookies modeled as Kurt Angle and (g)Jinder Mahal. Thus a “Ginderbread Men and Angles Match”. First to break, steal, or eat the others cookie wins. See, the rules are all right there in the name if you are paying attention, so it’s not like they didn’t tell you!
The rules are whoever squeezes the most typos into a panel where Present Me can’t change the text because of the background wins. Except actually we’re all losers.
…although, if Kurt Angle is doing something cookie-related, it could tie into that one time where he hosed the whole rind down with a tanker truck full of milk!
But if it was the whole Rind, wouldn’t that be more Pork related than Cookie related?
🙂
Sorry, it’s National-Pick-On-Blitz’s-Typos-Day today, so I had to.
Dude, if I’m making a typo in a comment specifically talking about other typos, then I DESERVE to be picked on.