The G-files
I recently attended the christening of my nephew, the fantastic Stan…
These days it’s quite rare for me to be found in a house of God. His furniture is hard, his wine is weak and I’m not really a big fan of his music.
As a non-believer I always find being in church a little strange – like I’m being hypocritical or somehow devaluing the beliefs of the people around me.
However, christenings are different.
When you take away the religious setting and the mythical basis for the ritual, what you actually have is a group of people – family and friends – all coming together to make a promise to partake in the upbringing of a child. That’s pretty cool.
So, I’ve taken it upon myself to be responsible for a secular role in Stan’s life. To some of the people at the christening I may be ‘uncle Adam, the one who’s going to hell’, but to my nephew, I hope to be ‘uncle Adam, the one who’s still going to hell but is happy to ask questions about why that should be’.
EDIT: Due to requests, I’ve made this strip available as a print in a cafepress shop : http://www.cafepress.com/Flowfieldshop
Any profits from the sale of these prints will be put into an account for Stan that can be used at any time to fund the buying of scientific texts.
This is your best in ages! Love it!
Thanks…
I think.
I know what you mean though. These last few months have been a bit of hard work. I’ve been working a silly amount of hours for my day job and I’ve been moving house several times…
However, that’s all over now and so I’m hoping to be spending a bit more time with the comics. I have some good ideas and now I have the time to do them. Hopefully I might be stepping up production again too…
I’ll second that – the meaning of your work is (almost) always clear and well laid out,but black and white drawings don’t always have the opportunity to be as epic as this one. It’s quite a powerful image, and a silly one, all at the same time.
All hail, Blake, Mulder, Scully and York Gregory!
(I think that’s praise, someone may have to correct me, but “well done” didn’t seem enough somehow…)
Thank you… I’m taking that as a compliment.
And I haven’t been hailed since I was a taxi driver (not true, I can’t drive).
I find when I’m in churches with my family (none of whom are religious) we can’t help but make fun of the thing and in particular I usually end up doing my fiery Evangelist preacher impression. Of course the only reason my family and I would be in a church would be for a funeral, so it’s a matter of keeping the jokes to ourselves and trying not to laugh too loudly.
What we’ve discovered lately with all the tragedies in my family is that we (my mom and myself mostly) tend to make jokes at inappropriate times.
.-= The Great Joe Bivins´s last blog ..SONG: Indelible =-.
Don’t feel bad, as a believer and having attended many funerals in my day, I find myself having the same problem. “This is supposed to be an ‘appy occasion!”
This is one of the problems I have with church. The solemnity.
I mean if anything, surely these places should be full of joy and laughter… and I imagine some of them are… but for the most part they have as many laughs as a rerun of [insert sitcom of your choice].
Oh, that wasn’t meant to be a veiled criticism, I always enjoy the comic and hadn’t noticed a slump. I just rarely comment on things and felt this one deserved a ‘bravo’. So yes… Bravo!
PS It’s my inability to word things so as to not accidentally offend that stops me from commenting on things.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable…
I guess that was more of a reflection to my sensitivity and belief in the fact that I can do better… will do better.
And thank you for commenting, I really appreciate it. If anything it keeps me going to the next strip.
That should be a real poster for you to get monies for. Because it is that awesome.
I can dig the story, too. I’ve only ever been inside a church for weddings, funerals, and one communion, so I get the same feeling of being there for the people we love and just letting that be the whole point and forget the little things like hell and all.
Thank you!
OK, I’ve made it so, available through cafepress. I’ve put a link in the post.
I decided that any money I get from that should go to Stan. I’ve made one stipulation that the money is to be spent on educational books only, preferably scientific ones, but also anything that has a high fact content.
I’d like to believe in humanity.
.-= sitting pugs´s last blog ..NFL 2009: Giants scrunch and munch the Cowboys =-.
We both know that that’s fictional
Have you seen what my hometown’s been going thru in the past 48 or so hours?
I know it’s made national news, not sure how international it’s gone, yet.
http://www.wsbtv.com/slideshow/weather/20925552/detail.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyJp08N_aMw
.-= sitting pugs´s last blog ..NFL 2009: Giants scrunch and munch the Cowboys =-.
Good grief, are you ok?
It looks like you are being smited… smitten…
I’m fine…the area where I live saw some big puddles yesterday, but they cleared up over night.
Other areas to the northwest and northeast aren’t doing so well.
.-= sitting pugs´s last blog ..NFL 2009: Giants scrunch and munch the Cowboys =-.
That’s good to hear… still… a lot of water.
Global warming? Bad city planning? Freak storm? Act of god?
I blame the weathermen… it’s a sinister plot to give them more airtime.
Lots and lots of rain. There are creeks, rivers, and lakes, but most of Atlanta’s surrounding suburbs is not in a flood plain. I’ve lived in Atlanta all of my life (28 yrs); I’ve seen snow many times and felt one earthquake. A tornado whizzed thru the house I lived in when I was a kid and a really tropical storm blew through the house I live in now when I was in high school.
Severe thunderstorms and tornadoes are characteristic of the city during certain times of the year, and though some lower lying roads and residential areas might see water getting into basements, I cannot remember a time in nearly three decades where subdivisions turned into lakes. And, Six Flags, an amusement park, is under water!
And this circles back to the interpretations of your illustration. Who are we to think that the climate and geology of the earth won’t continue to change (for the better or the worse) even if we do our best to treat the planet well?
.-= sitting pugs´s last blog ..NFL 2009: Giants scrunch and munch the Cowboys =-.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flplbYEOxCk
Sydney a few days ago. Some fairly apocolyptic imagery going on there.
.-= Ben´s last blog ..Unknown Bug =-.
That’s epic!
I picture a plague of amateur film makers desperately knocking out cheap zombie flicks whilst it lasted.
Epic indeed…almost sword-and-sandal epic.
.-= sitting pugs´s last blog ..College Football 2009: Virginia Tech duke nukems Miami =-.
[...] Five days of rain clamored through the city and left many counties seeing swollen creeks that sent rivers a gushing. I talked a bit about it on Flowfield Unity’s latest entry. [...]
Nice. Really nice.
I watched that movie, Knowing last night. It was terrible, this comic reminded me of it.
Not that this comic is terrible, but the movie was like a story about getting faith in a god you don’t really believe in. I was hoping that the giver of the numbers wasn’t going to be revealed, but, it was, and it was cheesy and very very christian. I really truly believe that Dan Brown may have had some thing to do with writing the script.
The comic does have an epic feel to it, I hope it raises a fair whack of moolah for your nephew education!
.-= Ben´s last blog ..Unknown Bug =-.
I was banned from seeing that film as I was told it would make me go apocalyptic.
Apparently it’s one case where knowing is not a good thing.
I don”t want to spoil it for anyone else (is that possible) but where did the numbers come from? Was it Mr god? Was it aliens? Was it a lame script writer with delusions?
Wow, can’t wait until 2012 comes out.
Erm, the numbers are supplied by dodgy looking angels that look more like a cross between a paedophile and a member of the trench coat mafia.
The numbers include the date of the incident, the number of deceased and the location. The location is long and lat, written as decimal degrees to two decimal places. As a surveyor, I don’t think that is very accurate. If you need to calc the location using only two decimal places and the location is in a city, you could be blocks out.
Also, it took him a fair while to work out the co-ords. He just thought that they were random numbers at first, which doesn’t make sense. He was looking for patterns, so it should have been obvious. It was also convienient that the vast majority of incidents were in America, because it would have been a long movie if he had to fly all over the world.
Not one of N Cage’s better movies.
Possibly, the script was written by Dan Brown (that is how bad I think it was) and the movie was directed by Michael Bay?
.-= Ben´s last blog ..Unknown Bug =-.
Huh. I’m on the verge of having an idea for a poster or something based on this train of thought…
.-= The Great Joe Bivins´s last blog ..SONG: Robot, Bitch, 2009 =-.
What is it? Go on…
It’s not fully formed yet. I’ll tell you when I’ve done the thing.
.-= The Great Joe Bivins´s last blog ..SONG: Robot, Bitch, 2009 =-.
I’m guessing there’s some not-so-obscure X-Files joke to this comic that I don’t quite get, yet I find myself really liking this one…
I think it’s because my faith is going through a pretty bad time at the moment. Despite most of my church experience being the happy, laughter filled type you seemed to have missed out on, I’ve recently struggled a little on my walk with God…stuck in a layby, if you will. The way I tend to describe this phase is that life is questioning my beliefs and I’m not bothering to answer. It’s painful when you get to this state, realising you don’t know what you’ve so firmly believed in for the previous majority of your life…so somehow, this comic strikes a chord with me…I do want to believe, against all odds, I’m worried I’m losing Him.
I realise this may mean nothing to you as a non-believer, and that I’ve just ranted on for a paragraph of nothingness, but you know how I like to ramble.
As my mother always says, “This too shall pass.”