March 3rd, 2017
Cartoonist’s Commentary:
This is the very first NBNW strip that I drew back in early 2016, at a time and a job where I could feel my creativity and soul withering away. I was stuck spending my work days in a high security work environment and in an office with no windows, no personal electronics allowed, no internet, and work tasks that were most often dull and routine. The only distractions were BS’ing with fellow coworkers (one of the few positive aspects of the job), an FM radio which only received a few stations well (and not any really good ones), and a handful of streaming cable news stations available through the gov’t intranet we used (it being election season at the time I learned to hate Fox News and CNN even more than I already did).
So without my podcasts, internet, and nothing entertaining to look forward to other than catching a glimpse of some Fox News anchorwoman’s cleavage, I brought in paper and pencils and started drawing. By the time I left the corporate world in the summer of 2016, I found myself with a handful of roughly drawn strips and a bunch of ideas for more.
As for the strip itself, it’s simply poking fun at the “image” that Alaska and Alaskans tend to be given in popular media. The unimpressive reality is that at least half of Alaskans live in the cities and are often ALMOST as pampered and soft as any other American. Anyway, to me it seemed like an amusing enough way to introduce the setting and the main characters.
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