This one was ridiculously fun to work on, but it was also very daunting. I wasn’t ready to work on a comic after such a long time of not doing comic strips, especially for Movie Slate’s blog, and having to draw not one, not two, not three, but four different backgrounds. It took me a good couple of days to get the comic ready and I hope the end result was to everyone’s liking. We’ve never seen Movie’s bathroom in the past, so I thought it could be fun for her to have movie posters themed around each room in her house. That’s why she has “Pyscho” and “Lethal Weapon 2” posters in there, since both movies have hilarious scenes involving bathrooms. Also that translucent effect for the hidden camera was a total pain in the ass to pull off. I spent about an hour trying to figure it out and making sure that Movie was still visible as well as the camera itself.

The Truman Show is another one of those movies that usually gets really hurt by the hype. It’s the “Citizen Kane Effect”, where you have so many people telling you how awesome it is, that when you get to actually watching it your expectations have reached unrealistic levels. I wasn’t one of those people, as I watched it when it first came out at the tender age of 13, and it blew my mind. I loved the storytelling, the visuals, and most important it broke the image I had of Jim Carrey, showing him in a more dramatic light unlike the buffoon that the 90’s built him up to be. I re-watched it recently to see if it still holds up, and I’m afraid to say it does show a few wrinkles and some flaws. There are a few plot holes regarding the competence of those running the show, and the moment Truman realizes that he’s in a TV show shows how fickle the whole project is (you could blame everything on that single spotlight that falls from the sky) could either be a clever commentary on the fragility of media and television, or just a massive oversight from the writer. But the flaws the movie has are easily compensated by all the good things in it. Like I said, Jim Carrey is unbelievable as Truman, so is Ed Harris as Christoph, and I quite liked how all the support cast ranges from vulnerable to cut-throat (special mention to Paul Giamatti). And also, there’s literally no other movie like it out there on it’s setting, execution and storytelling. It’s just a damn good movie.

“The Truman Show” is one of those rare examples where, while it does show its age and some flaws in its writing, every other aspect holds it up and makes it feel as both a time capsule of the nineties and a timeless movie that speaks about culture, media, and how we all have inadvertedly became stars of our own TV shows. Definitely give it a watch.

Perhaps this is not the most refined comic strip I’ve ever done, but it was a fun experience to boot.