Fun With Baby’s Clubfoot
Shaenon: Yeah, I’m drawing baby comics now. Deal with it.
Channing: I love how adorably surly Robin looks.
Shaenon: Since I drew this Robin has graduated from casts to braces, so I have to make up a whole new set of lies.
And hey, Jeff’s birthday was this past week! Kay Gilbert threw a webcomics mascot party in his honor. Check it out:
Writes Kay: Artie and Helen felt that Jeff deserved some serious props for helming Skin Horse in Shaenon’s absence, and thought they’d throw a combo birthday and congratulations party in his honor. To that end, they consulted party planner extraordinaire Pinkie Pie, who put together this blow-out.
Here’s a picture of the crowd, captured in the process of singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” (which nobody can deny): Wanda the Wasp Eater (Girl Genius), Pintsize (Questionable Content), Pinkie Pie herself, Liz the Lizard of Guilt (Oglaf), Helen, Winslow (QC) and Artie. Oh, and of course, Artie’s BFF Albert Einstein, who seems to show up whenever there’s an open bar.
The one downside: Pinkie Pie accepted Helen’s offer to provide the punch. I leave to your imagination what the group looked like an hour later! (Hint: Picture lemurs with wings and fangs.)
Thank you so much! I’m just sorry we don’t have any Skin Horse plushes to round out the party.
(TUNE: “Notre Dame Victory March”, Michael J. & John F. Shea)
Rumble, son of Garrity!
Winner of the UBFC!
Rated at number one,
He is the cham-pi-on!
Fighting so forcefully!
Taking names and kicking butts,
He’s got strength, endurance, and guts!
He is a terror, so
Watch out for Farago!
Now, on the count of three …
FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!
Cheer, cheer for Robin the Champ!
His fists are fierce, his bottom is damp!
Got his knee joints in reverse …
Poor other kid looks even worse!
What though the odds be long or be short,
Robin excels at vi-o-lent sport!
He’s the Vegas fa-vo-rite to pull out a VIC-TO-RY!
How do you come up with these every day? Seriously, they are always timely, appropriate, and fairly good. I’m impressed, and can’t fathom how you don’t seem to have an off day
If you mean me, it’s because the voices in my head work double shifts inventing this stuff. If you mean Shaenon, it’s because she’s from an advanced race of interstellar artists.
I think in both cases it might be dain bramage. My dain bramage I blame on too much Monty Python in my teen years in the ’70s. SQUIRREL!
I have to admit, I’m impressed at how long you have kept singing.
There is no such thing as “too much Monty Python”.
Oh, hey, happy belated! And good gods, that’s hilarious.
Robin’s poses are perfectly accurate, as only someone with a baby that age can draw.
I recommend telling the next nosy parker you’re stretching the baby’s legs because studies show taller people earn more money.
Hilarious comic. I had no idea your little one had club feet. Here’s hoping the treatments help remedy them.
Ha! Reminds me of a similar story about myself.
My Dad was pushing me through the park (I was only a few months old at the time) and a stranger came up and said “Aw, he looks just like his father.”
So my Dad replies, “Oh, you know his father then?”
I laughed way too hard at that one.
In a double stroller, “Oh, are they twins?”
“No, brothers 3 months apart”
That was my mom’s response.
I got the “Are they twins?” line as well… and my children have 19 months between them. People just don’t look before they say something daft!
My younger child’s really tall for her age; I foresee the twins question happening again, less implausibly, when they’re around 12 and 13 and she’s got her growth spurt and her brother hasn’t yet..
Aw, thanks for the mascot party, Kay! I’m really touched!
Well and truly deserved.
I concur completely. Well done Jeff. Hip hip hooray!
That is so awesome. 😀
Oh, That reminds me, (I’ve been really busy lately), I had dinner with Jeffrey a week ago. He’s pretty nice in person, and looks a lot like how he’s drawn in the comic. We talked about on line comic in general, and about Shaenon behind her back, (well it might have been in front of her. I don’t know which direction she was facing, she was hundreds of miles away). Anyway it was fun. I highly recomend taking Jeffrey or Shaenon out to dinner if you get the chance.
Is it just me, or has Robin filled their diaper in panel 3?
Last panel: “How about I count ’10 mississippi’s and give you back lunch?”
Re: panel #3:
Maybe Robin is taking performance enhancing drugs that contain testosterone.
Well, now I’m picturing the high chair from The Far Side… But you can tell people never to take a baby to a Brahma Bull Petting Zoo, or buy cheap Baby Bungees…
Make sure you get pictures – they will be essential at some point in your efforts to convince a skeptical 8-10 year old Robin that he’s a cyborg.
Personally I’m hoping that he won’t catch on to your being professional artists (or at least the subject matter) until he discovers the SH and Narbonic on the bookshelves – then realizes what cool parents you are. I discovered SF & Fantasy about 6th grade – the world has never looked the same to me since.
My dad has a big ol’ sci fi and fantasy collection, so the first book I remember was sitting on his lap as he read The Hobbit to us, and I’d happily spend days going through every Asimov I could find (the robot short stories are really little logic puzzles, which was amazing once I’d discovered what logic was).
Shaenon and Andrew, I love how you handle this. As an adult with a birth defect (Spina bifida), I have been asked so many incredibly rude questions by well meaning adults that I have come up with some wild and weird tales myself. Now with kids I’m straight. And I always let kids know they can’t get what I have. But adults…let’s just say there are a few tales out there…
Bravo
“Since I drew this Robin has graduated from casts to braces, so I have to make up a whole new set of lies.”
Bionics. Definitely bionics.
Polio. Blame Jenny McCarthy.
You make it really hard to come up with a sarcastic comment for this…
*bloodthirsty chanting* CA-ME-O! CA-ME-O!
Put the baby in the main comic!
(Just… don’t give him to UNITY… Or let him hear Nick… And Tip would probably give a baby-makeover… And Chris and Marcie are lovely but should not be trusted with children?…
… Gavotte. And Mustachio. Give the baby to Gavotte and Mustachio. And so yeah the baby will be used in some incredibly intracate conspiracy, but at least he will probably be safe.
I think the Cobras seem like they would make wonderful baby sitters.
Didn’t Hera try that with Herakles? Robin, start your mythic accomplishments early.
No! No strangling of the huggy cobras!
Actually, the real problem with the baby hug cobras is that they’re barely older then the baby.
The read reason robin is in casts is that Shaenon pulled hir legs too hard.
You know it’s a him, right? Even says so in the dialogue?
I noticed that *after* I hit ‘post comment’.
I like the cobras idea, haven’t seen ’em in far too long. And babies and cobras both need Huggies…
Wow, I wonder if my folks did that. O_O
I doubt I had the same cute expressions though.
Technically Artie would be a Skin Horse plushie, though I can’t help but notice that he hasn’t appeared in gerbil form at all in Skin Horse…
I had a similar birth defect and the same correction procedure. My parents say that everyone just assumed that they’d beaten me or broken my legs themselves or something. I don’t think they were snarky enough to come up with joke responses.
I had a club foot as a baby, and I turned out fine, aside from being deeply nerdy, obsessed with the culture of decades prior to my own birth, having a warped and odd sense of humor, and reading more webcomics about the love/sex lives of nonhumans than is probably healthy.
Kid should be fine.
That is wrong on so many levels!
I love it!
(Golf Clap!)
What does he mean by “count mississippi and pull” someone please explain this to me. I thought the middle plushie was Agatha Heterodyne and the far right one was Othar Tryggvassen.
A common way of counting seconds is “one mississippi two mississippi three mississippi” so the implication is the kid was tossed out of the plane and expected to open its own parachute when a safe distance (ten seconds) away.
1. Similar to counting “one-one thousand, two-one thousand,” etc. to approximate seconds. If you want to wait ten seconds after you jump before pulling the ripcord on the parachute, you count “one Mississippi” to “ten Mississippi,” then pull.
2. Middle plushy is Jenn O’Keefe’s “Helen Narbon, Mad Chibi” from the Couscous Collective store (http://couscouscollective.storenvy.com/collections/212985-merchandise/products/1269947-helen-narbon-mad-chibi), but the resemblance has long been noted. Albert Einstein wishes he looked like Othar Tryggvassen!
When my mom got tired of people asking if my brother and I were twins she’d say “no, they’re four months apart” and escape in the confusion.
Bruceski, did your brother post further up in the comments?
Man, does every generation of doctors go hunting for an excuse to put babies in casts and/or braces? For me it was being “pigeontoed”. Mom tells a story of tiny-baby me freaking out the trick-or-treaters during Halloween just by crawling around in the casts. I still have the baby shoes with the holes in them for the braces. Don’t remember any of it, and now we have no idea if I really needed it at all.
Welcome to the “Those Parents” club. Just so you know, disciplining your preschool child by singing show tunes, loudly, in the grocery store will generate some interesting parent-teacher meetings when they get into high school choir.
As a guy name ‘Robin’, I am 100% in favor of you two having made one; there aren’t as many of us as there are ‘Dave’s, but we tend to have more fun.
-robin
A bit late, but I didn’t have time to look up what this reminded me of until this morning…
http://thisisnotadvertising.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/wilkinson-fight-for-kisses/
I just assumed criminal negligence on your and/or Andrew’s part, such that dropped him, resulting in multiple compound fractures.
Well, I hope that little Robin’s legs have healed properly since this was first put up, and I can offer my own bit of snark for the next time you need to mess with people’s heads: I dislocated my right knee years ago (LOOONNGGG story!), and had to walk around in a leg brace for several weeks while it healed. One person asked if I’d injured my leg (duh!), and without missing a beat, I replied, “No, this is just a loaner. Dr. Frankenstein says mine should be just fine once he gets the parts to fix it up, and then I can have my original put back on.”
And then there’s one that a M2F transgender friend of mine used once when asked if his mustache was real: “No, it’s an iron-on.” -_^
When someone asks a question that dumb, it’s like they’re BEGGING to have their tiny little mind messed with, isn’t it?
Sounds like you had the Ponsetti Method. I used to work for him before he died. I still work for UIHC. Given that its been a couple years, I hope youre all doing well now!