TITLE The Bastich By Hart
PANEL 1 (BASTICH addresses a crowd of Star Trek fans from behind a podium at a Star Trek convention. The podium has a sign that reads BASTICH FOR PRESIDENT. A large banner is draped behind him that reads TREK-CON.) BASTICH: This date next year, if I'm elected, will be known as National Klingon Awareness Day...
PANEL 2 (Close-up on BASTICH as he waves his fist in the air.) BASTICH: In addition, I will push Congress to make access to the Sci-Fi Channel a Constitutional Right!
PANEL 3 (BASTICH continues to address the crowd as they cheer him on.) BASTICH: ...so, as you can see , as President I will stand on a Pro-Trekker platform... So when it comes time to fil out your ballots, think of the Future... Think Bastich! Make it so! CROWD: Yay!
PANEL 4 (After the speech, FAITH and BASTICH are speaking. Behind them is a banner that reads "TREK-CON 96: WHERE NO CON HAS GONE BEFORE".) FAITH: That went over pretty well. BASTICH: Yeah, I guess so... But somethings missing...
PANEL 5 (Close-up on Bastich speaking. Behind him is a vendor booth with a model of the original USS Enterprise, some books, and coffee mugs shaped like the heads of Spock and Geordi la Forge.) BASTICH: This hand-kissing and baby shaking thing is taking too long. I need to streamline my approach if I'm going to get enough support to get enough support to win this thing!
PANEL 6 (Later, in front of a sign that reads "BASTICH OPINION AUCTION," BASTICH waves a gavel in front of a crowd of bidders holding up "PRO" and "CON" cards.) CAPTION: Later... BASTICH: ...and the welfare opinion is SOLD to the shady gentleman on the left... This is almost too easy!
CREDITS (c) 1996 Joshua Adam Hart
Commentary
Two hacky jokes in one! The first half is a standard riff on Star Trek fandom and the second half is the old trope of a politician overtly auctioning policy positions to the highest bidder - a trope that sadly ages better than anything else in the Bastich archive.
There's a repeated sentence in panel 3 that's not in the print version. The "script" was most likely copy/pasted from CorelDRAW into PhotoShop, so somehow I pasted it in twice. This is evidence of the digital → analog → digital process for these strips (or DAD if this were an old CD) where I would do panels and text in CorelDRAW, draw the art and balloons on the printout, and then scan it in and redo the panels and text in PhotoShop. I did all of this cleanup because I wanted to eliminate unnecessary anti-aliasing to keep GIF file small. The printed text used a friendly comic-style font that would be unreadable without smoothing so the web version used a sans-serif font like Arial. So, sometimes I would paste text in twice. Oops!