TITLE The Bastich By Hart
PANEL 1 (BASTICH stands before a judge resembling CHARLIE BROWN from PEANUTS who is seated at a podium labeled GREAT COMIC JUDGE.) JUDGE: Mr. Stich, you have been brought to the stand to answer to the charges brought upon you by the State that you have acted in gross violation of Comic Strip Law. How do you plead? BASTICH: (Raising his finger enthusiastically) Guilty as sin, Your Honor!
PANEL 2 (The JUDGE lowers the gavel in judgment as BASTICH disappears with a POP.) JUDGE: As you wish. Your sentence is to be relocated to another strip where perhaps you will be less able to cause further damage to our medium's good name. BASTICH: Hey! You cant do tha--! SFX: POP-!
PANEL 3 (BASTICH reappears in a new form resembling the main character from DILBERT. HACKER-LAD is there as well, in a form resembling DOGBERT from that same strip.) DILSTICH: OH NO. ANYTHING BUT THIS... DOG-LAD: HEY. DON'T WHINE. AT LEAST YOU'RE HUMAN!
NOTE: The rest of this strip is a three-panel strip in the style of DILBERT.
TITLE Dilstich
PANEL 1 (DILSTICH and DOG-LAD are on a walk together.) DILSTICH: SO. DOG-LAD. WHAT'S ON YOUR MIND TODAY? DOG-LAD: OH. YOU KNOW. THE USUAL...
PANEL 2 (Close-up on DOG-LAD.) DOG-LAD: JUST HATCHING A FOOLPROOF SCHEME TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD AND SET UP THE MEMBERS OF MY INTERNET MAILING LIST A5 THE NEW RULING CLASS.
PANEL 3 (View from behind of DILSTICH and DOG-LAD sitting on a log.) DILSTICH: YOU SURE DO HAVE A LOT OF FREE TIME. DOG-LAD: SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT TWICE BEFORE HAVING ME FIXED.
CREDITS (c) 1996 Joshua Adam Hart
Commentary
The Multi-stich saga continues!
Dilbert by Scott Adams was a huge influence on The Bastich (if that wasn't already obvious). Over time, Adams fell off an ideological deep end that I couldn't follow, but in the 1990s he was a rare voice of tech nerds in corporate America (like me). I eagerly devoured all Dilbert media, from paperbacks to desk calendars to TV Shows to hardcover books like The Dilbert Principle. I wore out the Dilbert Principle book-on-tape while commuting to work, where I posted the strips on my cubicle wall. In modern parlance, I felt seen. I outgrew it eventually, but I continue to have a soft spot for 1990s Dilbert.
I really tried to mimic the Dilbert style, including hand-drawn square borders and the all-caps text with just a line indicating the speaker. Even the scenario of Dilbert and Dogbert taking a walk and sitting on a log was often-seen in the Dilbert canon.
Dog-lad's "mailing list" is a reference to Dogbert's New Ruling Class, Scott Adams' mailing list where he joked (or so we thought) about a future where the elite geniuses (that's us) would rise up against our idiot oppressors (everybody else).
The "Great Judge" is meant to resemble Charlie Brown from Peanuts, but of course the real Charlie Brown would not be quite so mean-spirited. Charles Schulz was still producing Peanuts in 1996 and he would continue to do so for another four years. A quarter century after Schulz's passing, his old strips are still being printed in pretty much every newspaper that still prints comics. Not too shabby.