TITLE The Bastich By Hart
PANEL 1 (Over-the-shoulder view of Bastich as he sits on a couch watching a show called "Chunky & Jorky" on a television) CAPTION: Meanwhile... TV: It's the Chunky & Jorky Show! BASTICH: Allright!
PANEL 2 (Focus switches to the TV show. Two characters are sitting at adjacent school desks: Jorky, a giant furry head with stick-figure arms and legs, and Chunky, who looks like a wooden marionette without strings.) JORKY: Chunky! You're late for class again, I see! CHUNKY: Shaddup, Jorky! I really tried this time!
PANEL 3 (Chunky is speaking with his hand out) CHUNKY: I even went so far as to set my alarm clock ahead five minutes so I'd get here early... But then my roommate, Mr. "All-Clocks-On-The-Premises-Must-Be-Synced-With-The-Bell-Tower," switched it back without telling me! So I overslept...
PANEL 4 (Jorky is speaking with his hand up) JORKY: That's too bad, man! But it doesn't explain why you're TEN minutes late! What happened to those other five minutes?
PANEL 5 (Chunky scratches his head) CHUNKY: TEN minutes..? REALLY..? Let me se...
PANEL 6 (Chunky lifts up a dismembered arm and looks at a watch on the arm's wrist.) CHUNKY: Hey, you're right! I wonder, where did all the time go?
PANEL 7 (Focus shifts back to Bastich sitting on the couch and excitedly pointing at the television) BASTICH: HA! This show has friendship, drama... temporal and mathematical humor... and of course... VIOLENCE! Everything a growing boy needs! Except, no Counselor Troi.
CREDITS CAPTION: "Please Recycle all of your jokes." Bastich (c) 1995 Joshua Adam Hart
Commentary
The last of the web comics to be recycled for publication in the Orion. By this point, I was definitely backing off from having Bastich be actively sociopathic (as opposed to just generally antisocial/awkward/weird) so I shifted the violent "joke" to a TV show starring Chunky & Jorky, two old characters I had been drawing since high school. I thought I would use these guys more as part of the Bastich landscape, but this was pretty much it.