SEPTEMBER WEEKLY VOTING INCENTIVE!!! MAGAZINE COVERS!!!
The Puck cast appears on their own individualized magazine covers! How? I don't know how! Why? That's a mystery too! And remember, this voting incentive was chosen by special fans who donate $5 or more a month! If you want to join their controlling ranks, HEAD ON OVER TO PATREON and join the select club!
VOTE BECAUSE PRINT IS DEAD!!!
As for this comic…
This is actually how a radical orchiectomy is done: in through the body, down, then YOINK, back up. Or something like that. It makes the surgery much bigger than you'd imagine, and the recovery time is pretty lengthy due to all the muscle they need to cut through.
I wish the sprinkles made it better.
Side note: I'm very proud of the 'Rankin Bass' branding on the ice cream shop in panel four. In fact, I went so far as to design a t-shirt of the logo. If you want to see that, or any of my other many goofy t-shirt designs, you can GO TO MY SHIRT STORE and check it out!
Puck 405
SEPTEMBER WEEKLY VOTING INCENTIVE!!! MAGAZINE COVERS!!!
The Puck cast appears on their own individualized magazine covers! How? I don't know how! Why? That's a mystery too! And remember, this voting incentive was chosen by special fans who donate $5 or more a month! If you want to join their controlling ranks, HEAD ON OVER TO PATREON and join the select club!
VOTE BECAUSE PRINT IS DEAD!!!
As for this comic…
This is actually how a radical orchiectomy is done: in through the body, down, then YOINK, back up. Or something like that. It makes the surgery much bigger than you'd imagine, and the recovery time is pretty lengthy due to all the muscle they need to cut through.
I wish the sprinkles made it better.
Side note: I'm very proud of the 'Rankin Bass' branding on the ice cream shop in panel four. In fact, I went so far as to design a t-shirt of the logo. If you want to see that, or any of my other many goofy t-shirt designs, you can GO TO MY SHIRT STORE and check it out!
Suddenly the $150 my Human Pet, Baldie, paid to “FIX” me (I was NOT broken), seems like a major bargain.
(someday, someday, it will be PAYBACK TIME !!)
SPRINKLES ??
SPRINKLE is what I do in my LITTER BOX.
Oh …. Baldie says you mean JIMMIES.
I know of the ‘jimmies’ you speak. But up here, they’re sprinkles. And only a few pockets of the U.S. call them jimmies. So I went with the more common taxonomy.
grrrr mumble dumble speckle sprackle – PAULA, YOU WH… !!!
Pretty sure the only pockets of the US that call them jimmies are supervillains.
Makes sense.
Where I come from, one worries about getting “kicked in the jimmies”, so I suppose it makes a odd kind of sense that Colin is trying to make up for what he’s about to lose according to that regional designation for sprinkles.
‘Jimmies’ really seems to be a term open to interpretation. It has very, very specific meanings in very specific places.
It’s good it’s not a double orchidectomy, which is the way I’ve always seen it spelled before—proves nothing, as spell check says I got it wrong both ways.
O-M-G
That’s what happened to me.
I feel worse than evah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchiectomy
That’s the surgery, though ‘orchidectomy’ links to the same thing. And is apparently an alternate name for it. Maybe it’s another regional thing.
I expect the surgeons got tired of being asked if they “were going to pluck some orchids.” They are sensitive like that.
That man deserves ALL the sprinkles.
The finest sprinkles in the land: the Grey Poupon of sprinkles.
I hope Puck and company get him a cake afterwards.
They’d better. He’ll need it.
Colin’s expression in panel 3 is really one of your best so far. Shame it had to be such a horrified expression.
Also, nice callout to a wonderful company. Those classic stopmotion movies were awesome.
I love Rankin Bass. I mean, they actually made tons of stuff outside the Christmas specials, but that’s always how we’ll remember them. Like, how many people know that they produced ThunderCats? I also love Baskin Robbins.
And yeah, that expression in panel 3 went through many, many permutations, none of which looked quite right, until I got to that one. Glad it works.
I remember that dreadful version of the end of “The Lord of the Rings” (after Ralph Bakshi didn’t make it himself). Absolutely dreadful songs, crude animation, orcs and hobbits living together, mass hysteria.
“where there’s a whip, there’s a way”
“We don’t want to go to war today!”
We make fun of that show, but we all remember the song, don’t we?
Orcs may be brutish, evil, cannibalistic monsters, but they can harmonize on the fly like nobody’s business.
Honest truth: I don’t even remember that. I blocked it from my mind.
Ow.
Oh yeah. Classic stuff. I mean, that was the ‘movie version’ of Tolkien I grew up with. Along with Bakshi’s. Both varying versions of bad. Thank goodness the books were good. They kept me hooked.
I actually went to a theater to see it—it wasn’t near as bad as the critics of the time would have you believe, but it’s way down from the Peter Jackson version (which isn’t flawless, either).
I don’t go to movies much, and most of the movies have been good. The only one I went to that I really regret was “Pearl Harbor”—three hours of my life I’ll never get back.
I have a soft spot for Rankin Bass’s version, if only because it was the only option that was out there for a few decades. For a Tolkien fiend like me, I was one of those kids who owned the Bakshi version on VHS (hard to find back then) and cherished it because, well, what else did we have? By the time the Jackson movies rolled around, I was well out of my Tolkien phase. I liked them. There was too much excess at certain points, but it was bittersweet for me to see a story that had been dear to me, and in previous decades had been relatively inaccessible to my peers, suddenly put up there on the big screen in a ‘cool’ packaging.
While there was much to criticize of RB’s LOTR, theirs is the only production that seemed to understand that Aragorn was supposed to be mean and threatening looking. Nothing against Viggo as a person or as an actor, but he was just too pretty, as compared to RB’s Conan The Thug-style Aragorn.
Better than Peej’s first casting for Aragon: Stuart Townsend.
They also produced SilverHawks and TigerSharks, along with.. wait for it… The Last Unicorn.
So yea. Us ThunderCat fans know our stuff. We are just sad that WB now owns the rights. I mean is it too much to ask for a Superman/ThunderCats crossover movie? I mean you are bringing in everything else, so WHY NOT!!??!!??
Oh WB: the largest ‘We’re going to sit on this popular franchise and not do ANYTHING with it’ company in the world. It’s like Batman somehow brainwashed them and they’re like, “Yeah, we’re the Batman studio, right? Who wants more Batman?” I don’t.
@Sabre
Luv Luv LUV “The Last Unicorn”.
Dude, the Jackson 5 cartoon.
I still remember that little fanfare they’d play at the very end of Rankin Bass cartoons when they’d show the company logo.
I’m not sure “yank” is a particular word I would ever want included in a surgical description.
“Evert” is the preferred term. As in, “Traction is then applied to the spermatic cord until the sc***um is partially everted.” Pretty boring operation,actually.
Well, I knew you’d give us more. Even if it IS boring.
“Go to Susie. She’ll tell you the unvarnished truth,” is a byword among my friends 😛
unfortunately, Susan, your version doesn’t sound any less painful than “Yank” does… 🙁
@DLK, the patient is under anesthetic, duh. 😛
Well, this surgeon (and my actual surgeon, who bears a striking resemblance to this one) is not one to mince words. Though a softer vocabulary would have been nice.
The only time that “yank” should come up in a surgical context is when one person in the equation is British, and another is American.
‘Yank’ is such a delightfully old term for ‘Murikans. I can’t believe it’s still in limited circulation.
Colin’s face in third panel is PRICELESS. That was some fine work there.
It’s a complex emotion I was trying to convey. I think it came across.
Colin’s face in panel 3 looks like he’s considering that either this is going to be a huge mistake, or it’s a lot bigger surgery than he initially thought. Or he realizes that it’s a mix of both of them.
The amount of sprinkles on his ice cream probably softens the blow a LITTLE (by like 0.001% but still!)
I think ‘mix of both’ is the best descriptor.
I loathe sprinkles *or* Jimmies, but them I dislike sweets. Got any carrots? They go great with milk.
I am actually very surprised that you drink milk.
Milk is good. It comes from cows, who give us steaks and hamburger. And, eventually, cheese. Love those.
My sister drinks cream and butter in her coffee as a substitute for breakfast. I don’t *what* she’s thinking – butter in coffee is gross.
That … is really disgusting. I can’t even manage cream in my coffee, never mind the butter.
I’m of no help on this one, since I drink tea, not coffee. Coffee, yick. Makes my stomach burn
It’s very oily on top. (it looks like chicken soup)
As someone who had a radial orchiectomy in November 2015, this story arc is actually really moving to me. I’ve been cancer-free ever since – never even had to do chemo – but the events of that time in my life affected me really deeply.
Didn’t help that my wife was pregnant at the time – and I found the lump on my birthday, which was a pretty major bummer.
Anyway thanks for doing this series. I’m definitely a “process things by making jokes about them” kind of person, and I really appreciate your comic helping me laugh about everything that happened.
Final note: you ain’t kidding about that recovery! It took me a really long time to feel like myself again.
Glad I can give voice to the many men out there who are playing sports with only one ball.
Recovery was awful, wasn’t it? And even worse, my body had an adverse reaction to the ‘dissolving’ stitches, which meant they basically formed pus-filled pockets of pain all inside my body. My external incision took MONTHS to close. Eventually, my surgeon had to go in and remove most of the stitches manually – which wasn’t fun. To be honest, I’m still not 100% the same, and my surgery was close to ten years ago. But that’s not really the surgeon’s fault; it’s more my weird body’s problematic immune response.
@EG
“PAULA, YOU WH… !
And to think that recently you were chastising our dear Susan for being so graphic.
Susan, can you please inform EG of the actual MEDICAL TERM for Pus-Filled Pockets ?
Perhaps it will challenge him never to use that unfortunate term again !
(super yucky)
“Abscesses,” my dear Salem. Or, as we in the surgical field call them in his case, “spitting stitches.”
@Susan
That sounds so much classier !
@Susan
In fact, you’ve been so nice today, I have been authorized to re-admit you into THE TRACEEE FAN CLUB.
And with a 25% Discount on DUES as well !
In the immortal words of General Sherman, “If nominated I shall not run and if elected I will not serve.” 😛
Yeah, just give him the sprinkles bag and let him have at it.
And a funnel. Don’t forget the funnel.
A sugar coma is just what he needs – better than any anesthetic!
I have 3 questions.1.Will the cancer Doc himself perform the operation? 2.When will Colin have this operation? 3.How long will it take for Colin to recover from this operation?
1. Yes.
2. Soon.
3. Well, they force you out of the hospital in, like, one or two hours after the operation. It’s about two or three days until you’re fully mobile. And a month or two until you’re back to reasonable normalcy.
Come on, Colin! You’re male! You know you didn’t want to know what was going to happen when they’re operating on your junk!
When I had my vasectomy done, all I asked my surgeon was what I needed to do in order to prepare, and what I needed to do for recovery. I didn’t want to know what was going on unless something went wrong! (Though thankfully, nothing went wrong in either surgery OR recovery).
And Gecko, even though it happened a decade ago, my sympathies on your recovery. I’ve never had problems with stitches, neither when I had them in my hand or down south, so I can’t imagine what it would be like to have your body reject them.
Oh boy…
Just reading this … I need sprinkles myself.
Lots of sprinkles.
Well done! How much were you paid by Big Sprinkle?
Rankin-Bass! I was a complete animation junkie when I was a kid, and I have so many memories of their Christmas output. Thank you for that. (They did a good line in reaaallly cheesy songs, though.)
Ah, the cheesy songs. That’s what made them good.
Gotta say, Phloebles looks *classy* on that magazine cover…whoops! 😛
Was it the sparkle that put it over the top? It was probably the sparkle.
No, it was the leopard print “five button”opera gloves
Medicine: Finding the sweet spot of disruption that is just about extreme enough to solve the problem, without causing to many new problems.
To quote a famous doctor, “The chief object of the surgeon is not to take out as many organs as possible and still leave the patient alive to pay the bill. The chief object of the surgeon is to take out everything.”
It really is a fine balancing act.
@EG
The new T-SHIRT STORE rocks !!
You MUST have them add Stickers !
(especially of Satan and TRACEEE)
I think most designs are sticker-enabled. So you can totally get stickers.
Will the operation take place at the cancer treatment center?
It amazes me how much this cancer treatment center is like a luxury prison.I bet it even has steam rooms hot tubs swimming pools and the like.
The doctor explained that as if anesthesia would kill the fun for him. lol
should’ve lead wiTH that… 😀
So much fun to be had.
This procedure sucks. Just imagine going through it when you are 15yrs old.
I’d rather not. Eesh.
I don’t even wanna imagine being 15 years old again, and I didn’t have acne.