If you’ve been visiting this site for the last four years (and bless you if you have), you might remember the storyline where I introduced Charlie as an additional female voice to the cast.

If you were REALLY paying attention, you might have remembered an exchange between Tom and Jimmy in the story line’s B-plot where Jimmy revealed something very personal about himself: He’s afraid to go into the women’s restroom.

I inserted that personal detail into that story line for a specific reason and with the intention of revisiting it in another story line sometime later.

Well, four years later, here we are.

It’s been a while since I’ve attempted a longer story line or made an effort to flesh out the characters a little more.

It’s kind of hard to flesh out Tom, Cami or Jared because they’re avatars for real people and I don’t want to dive into some kind of backstory inconsistent with their actual lives. It just causes confusion.

So Jimmy, Victor and Charlie become the tools that I experiment with and, in the process, you get to learn a little more about the background characters.

One of the reasons I wanted to tackle a longer story line again was because I’ve really been enjoying Questionable Content and Anders Loves Maria lately and, frankly, I’ve been jealous. Writing an engaging story is one of my weaker muscles. I have to flex it every now and again before it atrophies.

But probably the biggest reasons I wanted to give it another go is because I recently wrapped up work on Theater Hopper – Year Three.

The book covers my work from 2004 to 2005 and during that period I wrote both the “Jimmy Loses His Job” story line as well as “Meet Charlie.” That was a very successful period for me both in terms of the site’s popularity and my satisfaction artistically. So I’m going to see if I can’t try and put lightning in a bottle for a third time.

What can you expect from this story line? Well, obviously, we’ll explore the reasons why Jimmy is afraid of going into the women’s restroom. But the reasons why will shock you. In revealing his past, you’ll come to understand more clearly why he is the good-natured doormat he is today.

On that note I’d like to mention that Theater Hopper – Year Three is now available for pre-sale in the store. The book has not yet been published. To gauge demand, it is available for pre-sale until February 28. My goal is to have them printed up to take to the Emerald City Comicon in the first week of April. So if you order a book today, you can expect to see it by then.

As I mentioned before, the book has two of our my most prominent story lines as part of its collection of nearly 150 strips. Every comic includes brand new commentary that explores things behind-the-scenes.

The book also features 139 original sketches – collected here for the first time – and a forward from Joe Dunn of Joe Loves Crappy Movies.

I’ve prepared a 10-page preview of the book that will give you an idea of how the comics and commentary are laid out along with the front and back cover.

I am selling the book for $15.00, but if you are looking to save money, please consider bundling your purchase. Order and two books and receive $5.00 off the cover price. Order any three books and receive $7.50 off the cover price.

This book has been a long time coming and I’m pleased to finally offer it to everyone. I think it represents some of my best work and hope you enjoy it.

Click here to pre-order Theater Hopper – Year Three today!

Finally, Tom and I were able to catch an Academy Award-nominated film: Slumdog Millionaire. And, it didn’t disappoint. I felt myself biting my nails, crying, laughing, turning away in disgust (at the jumping in a lake of poop scene) and cheering for the main characters of this movie. One thing that amazed me was the director’s unapologetic snapshot of the human condition of the Indian people over the last twenty years. The child actors in this film were outstanding. Their performances made me want to hold Henry just a little bit tighter when I hug him each night before he goes to bed.

Speaking of Henry, we’re entering a phase of Time Outs, him asking “why?” and for some reason, jumping on furniture every chance he gets. Instead of sitting and participating in his regular Saturday morning music class, he announces “I’m running away!” and hightails it out the door. Is this a sign of things to come or merely a phase? Judging by the perpetual twinkle in his eye, and his bionic-man energy level, I’m guessing we’re going to be dealing with things like this for a long time! We can’t believe he’ll be two years old next month, and I don’t know about you all, but I’d love to see him appear in the comic once in awhile.

What do you think? Would adding Henry to the comic mean it’s finally jumping the shark? Or did it scale the heights of sharkdom years ago?

As Cami pointed out, we finally got around to seeing one of the five Best Picture nominees this weekend: Slumdog Millionaire.

I’ve been kind of wrestling with this movie a little bit. Like Cami, I thought the performances were winning and the child actors in particular were amazing. I thought it was well directed, tense at times and very engaging. But it didn’t quite make my heart soar like all everyone said it would.

It was difficult for me to get caught up in the movie’s tale of star-crossed lovers because the film does not pull any punches in it’s depiction of India’s poverty, squalor and corruption. Maybe this is the wrong thing to focus on, but it left me feeling guilty for accepting the story as entertainment. I left the theater thinking about what I could do to help.

I’m not completely naive. I have heard about orphaned children being maimed and put on the street to beg. But later I became conflicted and started to wonder if the movie was promoting some kind of stereotype. Isn’t India one of the largest growing business centers in the world? What about their advances in education?

Turns out I’m not alone. Time Magazine recently published an article that tackles the same question.

I know it’s not fair to ask one movie to provide a thorough examination of the social and economic strata of the entire sub-continent. Especially when it only wants to tell the story of two people. I mean, I doubt non-American audiences watch movies like Goodfellas and assume that the country is overrun by gangsters. I’m just saying it was a distraction, that’s all.

Slumdog Millionaire is a good movie. Experty assembled and told with an effective time-bending narrative. Will it make you shoot rainbows out of your eyes after you see it? Well, in my case it didn’t. In that respect, it didn’t live up to the hype. Ignore the critics and commercials and see it with reasonable expectations and you’ll have a good time.

EDIT: Here is a another article written by Slate’s Dennis Lim that confronts Slumdog Millonaire’s confounding moral compass. Lim says a few things more acutely than I could in my review.

“If Slumdog has struck a chord, and it certainly seems to have done so in the West, it is not because the film is some newfangled post-globalization hybrid but precisely because there is nothing new about it. It traffics in some of the oldest stereotypes of the exoticized Other: the streetwise urchin in the teeming Oriental city… And not least for American audiences, it offers the age-old fantasy of class and economic mobility, at a safe remove that for now may be the best way to indulge in it.

Slumdog has been so insistently hyped as an uplifting experience (“the feel-good film of the decade!” screams the British poster) that it is also, by now, a movie that pre-empts debate. It comes with a built-in, catchall defense—it’s a fairy tale, and any attempt to engage with it in terms of, say, its ethics or politics gets written off as political correctness.

A slippery and self-conscious concoction, Slumdog has it both ways. It makes a show of being anchored in a real-world social context, then asks to be read as a fantasy.”

Food for thought.

It’s probably not good form that I’m talking about Theater Hopper’s site traffic with you, but I thought this was a funny story that you might enjoy.

Last night when I got home from work, I settled down at the kitchen table and was checking the site’s traffic while Henry was eating dinner. Looking at my logs, traffic to the site was on par with an average Monday. Refreshing the logs a little later, I saw an insane jump in the number of hits. About half of Monday’s traffic gathered in the time span of about 15 minutes.

I was checking my referrals to see where the traffic was coming from, but using my real-time counter, could only see they were coming from StumbleUpon. I couldn’t see where on my site they were landing.

A Henry finished eating, I folded up my laptop content to wait for Google Analytics to pull the landing page information once it had time to log the traffic a few hours later (Google Analytics runs on a delay).

I gave Henry a bath, put him to bed and left to get a haircut (while Cami was still at home) before coming back to check on the traffic logs. I logged in to Google Analytics and saw that it had been populated with the new data. I checked on Traffic Sources, I went to Referring Sites, I identified StumbleUpon and I filtered the results by landing page.

What was the comic everyone was going so crazy about? This one. A guess strip by Clay and Hampton Yount of Rob and Elliott from 4 years ago.

You probably found this story underwhelming. Imagine how I feel!

In all seriousness, though – Rob and Elliott is an excellent comic and their guest strip from 2005 is actually one of my favorites. If people are checking it out, all the better. Because that means not only are they visiting the site and boosting my numbers, but they’re seeing that link back to Rob and Elliot and hopefully checking out more of Clay and Hampton’s stuff, too.

I’ll just be damned if I can figure out exactly how StumbleUpon works!