Early days

John McPherson's Close to Home

Close to Home rage

So over the years we've posted a few examples of John McPherson's Close to Home, It's a comic that I used to follow closely, though it didn't ever deserve my attentions.  I had expectations about it that were never met.

Well here's a post by one Tom Pappalardo who is a professional graphics dude where he absolutely destroys McPherson's work by detailing the complete crapfest that it is. In that post he provides several examples, two of which are map-related.  I'm just gonna let his commentary explain these two...  though by the time his post got to these examples he was in quite a state so I'm going to edit the expletives.

***** ****, McPherson. Can’t you draw a ****ing car? Do you know what perspective is? Is that supposed to be fire in a trashcan? Is that an Asian man in that broken window? Is that rat the same size as that man’s head? When did car manufacturers stop producing vehicles with hood ornaments, exactly? Is that a knife on the ground? Do most brick wall dead-end alleys have floor trim along the ground? ***** ****ing ****, LOOK HOW ****ING TERRIBLE THAT CAR LOOKS. Is it 40 feet long? Is the front tire bigger than the back one? IT IS REALLY REALLY BAD.

So the rectangle that a comic is drawn in is called a border. The border defines what the comic panel is. Here, the artist has bisected his panel into two. Now, a clear-thinking person might go to the trouble to make the added borders match the existing borders. Maybe, oh I don’t know, use a ****ing ruler. Maybe even get extra-fancy and use a little white-out to erase the ends so the two panels look like two distinct boxes. But no no no. That would look too good. McPherson has no time for such things. He’s going for the lumpy line look. And he’s going to lazily slap it on at a jazzy angle, to highlight the blank wall above the computer monitor that has no keyboard. Other things to note: What is that woman supposed to be driving? a ’62 Ford Pickup? Look at those ****ing seats! The steering wheel! The copious headroom! I’m almost jealous. Also, what visual cue exists to let the reader know the woman in the top panel can hear what the man in the bottom panel is saying? He is not speaking into anything. She has no cell phone, no headset, no made-up dash-mounted speaker-thing with noise-lines emanating from it. She’s just a dead-eyed woman looking through a windshield that’s two inches away from her face, holding a shaking steering wheel with the skinny little deformed arm that is growing out of the top of her thigh.

Melancholy migration

John McPherson's Close to Home with a migration/Mapquest joke... We also have the first time Ohio is specifically mentioned in one of these posts.  That brings the total number of states mentioned to 18.

Birthmark

John McPherson's Close to Home. Does the SAT even have a geography section?  I wonder if this kid has the same condition as this cow, or these cows.

Random McNally

"Close to home" by John McPherson. The irony is pretty intense. Rand McNally does seem to have lost out to the likes of Google, Mapquest, and Microsoft in the modern revolution in consumer-grade mapping. But they're still in that that game... though they're making a bigger play in the trucking navigation business... making this comic even more poignant.

Lost puppy

Close to home. by John McPherson. I don't think there's any extra meaning behind the name of the puppy or the location where it was found.

NapQuest

Mapquest has certainly changed how people go about their lives. And it has become such a part of every day life that it invites parody.

There are actually apps and websites devoted to helping people find unusual or even silly things, such as public restrooms (complete with ratings/reviews). One of the ones I heard about recently was a site that lets people know when might be a good time to run to the bathroom during new movies so as to not miss anything important. It's more of a chronological map than a geographic map, but still useful.