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Greetings, Fertilizer Spreaders and Tissue Matches!
A funny thing happened along the way to this week's cartoon...
We've never gone out of our way to be topical here at Minions at Work, though we've occasionally strayed across the line when there was a joke or a topic I just couldn't resist (as in last week's cartoon). But in general, we've always steered clear of anything too controversial.
But last week I was looking through some of our stats to see which cartoons had the most page views, and to my surprise, pretty much all of the most popular ones had some topical element to them. Which means my new philosophy here is that while I'm not going to seek out controversy simply for shock value, I'm not going to be quite as gun-shy about doing that kind of material if it suggests itself.
Now, don't expect "Minions at Work" to turn into "Doonesbury." My preference is still for irreverent and absurdest humor and for pop-culture references rather than political ones. But you may see a few more topical cartoons now and then, especially as we head into the election (which has already reached off-the-chart levels of insanity). And know that as always, we will always lampoon real-life's lesser-evils where ever we see them.
It was in this spirit that I was inspired to throw together a new Overlord this week, "Doctor Wallstreet." Really, in retrospect, I should have had a character to dig into Wall Street and corporate greed a long time ago. I have a family member who used to work in the legal department of a brokerage firm, and then quit in large part because they couldn't stomach the ethics of what was going on there. This was a long time before the economic collapse or the bail-outs started, so this has been on my radar for a quite a while.
Normally, when I make a new character, they sit around the studio here for a while as I figure out who and what they are before featuring them in a cartoon. But this time I felt I was already so late to the party, Doctor Wallstreet got shoved out there pretty much as soon as I'd put him together.
So I don't really know what his back-story is yet. All we know is, he's hideously scarred, wears a power suit with black gloves, and carries an aluminum brief-case. At the moment, he's also wearing a riot-gear helmet and an assortment of tear-gas grenades, but his accessories may change as time goes by and those cease to be relevant.
I don't know how much we'll see of him. Some villains like Doctor Coldblood, Doctor Funkystein, and Doctor Head-in-a-Jar show up all the time. Others, like Cap'n Rehab, show up regularly but less often. And others like Doctor Santa show up only a few times a year, or only as supporting characters or in Legion of Dread group shots. Only the future will tell. And
past performance is no guarantee of future results! There. The Legal Department told me I had to put that in.
See you guys back here next week!
- Minimally Topical Minion Master, Steve