Church Says:
I got an email this morning with a link to the latest Extralife, prescription one of the sea of gag-oriented, click nerd-friendly webcomics out there, and in which our Admiral Snackbar gag from three years ago was echoed. Frankly, it’s not such a massively original joke that I’m going to claim any kind of plagiarism charges; it’s just a funny combination of sounds geeks like slapped together haphazardly.
Edited to add: And it looks like somebody else came up with the gag in 2002, too, so there’s that.
Extralife’s use of the idea, though, highlights the difference between The Rack and other webcomics out there: for Birdie and myself, things like that are background gags, the sort of thing that our beloved 30 Rock tosses in while the main story moves forward in any given episode. It’s an approach we’re happy to take because, frankly, I’m not a strong reference-gag-as-punchline writer and there’s already a plethora of strips out there that do that kind of joke for the kind of people that like that sort of joke. I’d rather write about people, and it’s what I’d rather read most of the time, too, and that’s what makes The Rack, The Rack.
So, no, no legal action, no injunction, no anything is going to take place. Besides, they’re much more popular than we are and they’d likely end up owning Agreeable Towers once their vicious, eel-like attorneys got involved.
(However, here’s a note to the “Comedy Referee” commenter over there: congratulations on being exactly the kind of person I want to hate with bricks.)
that’s the thing, that strip is a one-panel gag about a thing (Admiral Akbar) which is already being overused, I mean hell, ESPN is running segments on that school mascot thing. Your strip not only uses Akbar to great effect, and tells a story and introduces Nate, who is awesome.
So, in summation, fuck those guys, keep doing what your doing because it’s good.
Also, are you re-coloring the old strips? I don’t think that one was in color originally.
A chunk of the original strips were in color before we shifted formats, but appear in black-and-white in The Rack: Year One and in the upcoming mega-collection of our first three years, just to maintain some kind of cohesion before we work on our idea for reprinting the color nu-era strips. (Large-format, full-color strips are a great way to burn out an artist and boy can I do a run-on sentence.)
this is funny because ackbar sounds like snackbar and he looks like a squid of course he sells seafood
also Lydia has lots of opinions about comics
I have read half of this stuff already (currently buying one Pluto a week, for example), but thanks anyway. The other half I shall certainly check out.