TITLE The Bastich By Hart
PANEL 1 (Bastich is wearing his jacket and backpack as he prepares to leave the apartment. Faith is sitting at a table reading a newspaper) BASTICH: Urr... time for class. FAITH: The weather's pretty bad out there, 'Stich! You might want to consider staying home today.
PANEL 2 (Bastich pokes through the front door, his index finger indignantly raised) BASTICH: Storm or no storm, Faith, I must go. You see, there are chains that bind with more strength than steel. Chains of...duty! FAITH: (Facepalming) Oh gawd!
PANEL 3 (Bastich walks on the sidewalk as rain falls and leaves fly all around him) BASTICH: (Thinking) Hurm... a little wind, a little rain. A few Autumn leaves. Nothing I can't handle.
PANEL 4 (A large leaf flies into Bastich's face, covering his eyes) BASTICH: (Thinking) Okay, a LOT of Autumn leaves. But they are no match for - The Bastich!
PANEL 5 (Later, a large monster made of foliage is lumbering down the hallway of a school building as students flee. One student, wearing an H.R. Giger T-shirt, seems unimpressed) CAPTION: Ten minutes later, in the halls of the O'Connell Technology Center... STUDENT 1: It's the Human Tree! STUDENT 2: Run for your lives! STUDENT 3: Gimme a break! If you want to see REAL freaks, there's a Net-Trek tournament in 133a!
CREDITS (c) 1995 Joshua Adam Hart
Commentary
This one was definitely for the locals. Like a lot college towns, Chico is beautifully arboreal and the CSU campus in particular was covered with trees and all manner of biomass that would break away and whirl through the air when the wind picked up. I was probably tracking a soggy boot full of leafy mush into O'Connell when I came up with this idea.
Speaking of which, the O'Connell Center (OCNL) was the brand-new home of CSU Chico's engineering department, having just opened in 1992. It was my home away from home, with its four floors of computer labs, machine rooms, faculty offices and even some classrooms (not to mention the only soda machine on campus that dispensed Pepsi products). Most of my tech classes were there, and it's where I worked after hours sitting at the Helpdesk and patrolling the labs.
The two students in the foreground of the last panel are based on two of the regular ECST lab crew. I ended up working for the one in the H.R. Giger T-shirt years later building crazy web stuff back when nobody knew what they were doing.
Netrek was insanely popular in the computer lab at this time. It borrowed the ship designs from classic Star Trek, but was really more of a multiplayer war game where players would destroy each other's fleets across a giant interstellar space map. I would frequently see these battles played across entire rooms of huge X11 CRT terminals, along with the constant clicking and complaints about "butt torps" (shots fired back at the enemy while you're running away).
The cheesy "chains of duty" line was lifted directly from the read-along storybook that came with the He-Man Talon Fighter toy. The quote is best when read aloud in the cackling villainous voice of Skeletor. I still use this one all the time, if only in my own head, for all of the times I have to power through some unpleasant task.