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floating henry rollins head haiku


Webcomics were huge in 2000, and I decided I should start my own.

Why haikus? Why Henry Rollins?

It's currently 2024, so who knows what was really going on in my stupid head two decades ago, but I do remember purposely limiting myself to a three-panel haiku template and the same image of Rollins' head as a means to a) not have to actually draw anything, and b) spark a little creativity. Henry Rollins was chosen because my metalhead friend had recently introduced me to Rollins' spoken word, I think specifically Human Butt.

I don't know that these jokes are all that funny. Most of them were written and Photoshopped in a fit of deadline panic before going to bed. I find most of them to be more smirk-inducing than anything else, though the cumulative effect of reading a bunch in a row builds to a chuckle every now and then.

Eventually (fairly quickly?) I was running out of steam and switched to limericks. I thought this would be more of a challenge, but it turned out to be fairly easy to come up with them while on my lunch break at work. I finally went back to haikus before quitting shortly thereafter. I made 292 of these dumb things.

Re-reading these so many years later is such time capsule of what popular culture I was consuming at the time, as evidenced by celebrity jokes and references to other webcomics. I would like to have it put on the record that I made a Count Bakula joke in 2001, 20 years before it was used in an episode of What We Do in the Shadows.

And on that note:

Start at the beginning...

...or hit up the archives.


PS:

Henry Rollins came through town during the run of this comic, and I attended his spoken word performance. After the show he was kind enough to sign some comics I had printed out. He seemed bemused about the entire thing, but was very gracious. Behold!