TITLE The Bastich By Hart
PANEL 1 (BASTICH looks angrily at a bottlecap as FAITH enters the room.) BASTICH: Curses! Another, DUD!! FAITH: Hiya, Stich... What's up.? BASTICH: Oh, hey there, Fath...
PANEL 2 (BASTICH holds up a catalog.) BASTICH: I'm collecting "Stuff Points" so I can get that "Mtn Dew" Jacket from the catalog. Its taking FOREVER, though. FAITH: Gee... at one entire point per bottle, I wonder how that could happen..?
PANEL 3 (Close up under the bottlecap's which reads "YOU LOSE BIG TIME".) BASTICH: Point taken...still, one in every five bottles is supposed to have a prize-winning bottlecap good for 5 More points, but I've had 20 bottles so far, and they've all been losers... I must be under some kind of CURSE!
PANEL 4 (FAITH holds up her index finger to make a point.) FAITH: Well, 'Stich, you should try looking at things under a different light... The chances AGAINST you getting 20 losing bottlecaps in a row is almost almost 99%..! It seems to me you're BEATING the odds by being such a huge loser..!
PANEL 5 (BASTICH grins as he opens another bottle of soda.) BASTICH: Y'know Faith, I never thought of it that way. I'm a loser of a highly IMPROBABLE caliber..! Well, lets see it I can beat my own record with 21 consecutive misses..!
PANEL 6 (BASTICH puts his hond on his forehead in defeat as FAITH looks on.) BASTICH: Nooo..!! Its a winner!! FAITH: What? Isn't that a GOOD thing?! BASTICH: Five Measly Stuff Points in exchange for the Throne of Loserdom... Statistics is a bitter mistress indeed. FAITH: You're telling ME..?! What were the chances against my winding up living with YOU..?
CREDITS Bastich (c) 1997 Joshua Adam Hart
Commentary
This was the only web-only strip I got around to drawing over my second summer working at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto.
It was a crazy-fun summer with more roommates and more hijinks to keep me away from the drawing table. And that summer would live on as soon as school started up again, as I dove into a way-too-long thread based loosely on my experiences there.
Stuff Points was a Pepsi ad campaign where you collected bottlecaps and redeemed points for stuff in a catalog (just as Bastich says).
I leave it up to the reader to double-check my math from decades ago.