TITLE The Bastich By Hart: Summer "Vacation" Part 2
PANEL 1 (BASTICH walks through the front door of his apartment precariously carrying a stack of boxes.) CAPTION: "After picking up a few odds and ends at Fry's, it was time to return to my new home for the summer... BASTICH: Hello, hello, Summer Nerd-Pad! Is anybody dwelling here..?
PANEL 2 (A blur suddenly jabs BASTICH from stage left, sending his armful of purchases flying.) CAPTION: "I was greeted by the first of my summer roommates, the infamous BAPPER..." BAPPER: Huungh--! BASTICH: Hey, what's the big IDEA!?
PANEL 3 (BAPPER smiles as he speaks to BASTICH. MTN. DEWD can be heard from off-panel.) BAPPER: Uh, sorry bout that. I always get in a mood for extreme carnage whenever I try to get Windows NT to do something useful. BASTICH: You should know better than that! MTN. DEWD: HEY FREAKS!
PANEL 4 (MTN. DEWD approaches holding a newspaper with the front page headline "APPLE DAYS NUMBERED".) CAPTION: "Then came roommate #2: MTN. DEWD. Aside from his inexplicable passion for a certain sime-colored caffeine-enriched soft drink, he was also an insanely dedicated Apple guru*..." MTN. DEWD: Check it out! It's yet another article in the "Merc" bashing Apple! What a rag! NOTE: (*) more on gurus in p. 5
PANEL 5 (BAPPER opens the newspaper an reads the article while MTN. DEWD points a finger at something on the page.) BAPPER: Hey, it's an actual photograph of Steve Jobs licking Bill Gates' boot! MTN. DEWD: Yeah, but Jobs is still in control. See how vigorously he's licking the toes?! That'll ruin the varnish!
PANEL 6 (BASTICH puts his head in his hands while BAPPER and MTN. DEWD continue their argument in the background.) BAPPER: You just keep telling yourself that, Dewd... MTN. DEWD: It's TRUE! Someday Jobs will be tipping Gates generously for parking his car in the executive space at MacinSoft(R) H.Q.! CAPTION: Only 10 more weeks... 10 more weeks...
CREDITS Bastich (c) 1997 Joshua Adam Hart
Commentary
In this installment, we meet Bastich's new roommates for the summer: Bapper and Mtn. Dewd. This is Dewd's first appearance and Bapper's third (after The Bapper and ECT Party).
These guys were based on two good friends and fellow CSU Chico students who were my real-life roommates one summer in Silicon Valley. After Bastich's run ended at The Orion, the three of us teamed up on a sporadic web-only follow-up called Icon-Based that is also preserved on this site.
It took a while for me to adjust Bapper's design after the real Bapper shaved off his healthy beard (I even have a little fun with it in Part 7). As you can tell, he was more of a Linux guy, and wasn't particularly fond of Microsoft or any flavor of Windows (even the more stable Windows NT).
Mtn. Dewd is brandishing a copy of the Mercury News, ostensibly the newspaper of record for the Silicon Valley.
It's funny to look back at the mid-nineties when most tech pundits assumed Apple's downfall was imminent. When this strip was published, the company was still mainly shipping beige MacOS boxes and not much else. Steve Jobs had just reasserted himself as interim CEO and blockbusters like the iMac, iPod and iPhone were still years away. While so many predicted doom, Mtn. Dewd never lost faith.