Geek Speak Comic

Things Best Left Unsaid

In order to support my comic strip habit, I’m often looking to find the funny in everyday circumstances. This is something that has been getting harder to do, of late, but that’s the subject of other comics, and (possibly) an altogether separate comic project. That notwithstanding, life does present the occasional gem, and many of those find their way into the pages of my comic strip. While most of these range between unrepeatable dad-joke territory to comedy gold, there are a few things that pop into my head that just cannot be said out loud in the moment. This comic is one such example.

The kids, Somewhat Wonderful and Moderately Amazing, are deeply afraid of anything that crawls, flies, buzzes, or requires more than one hand on which to count the number of legs. I’m fairly open about my dislike of spiders, and while I’m not particularly fond of six legged creepy crawlies, I don’t lose my mind around them either. My kids on the other hand…more than once I’ve run outside because my oldest was screaming like she’d just ripped out her own eye with the detached leg of a barbie doll only to find the source of the hysterics was an ant that had crawled on her. Why they’re so afraid of creepy-crawlies I can only speculate, and while it can be annoying it does occasionally make for some comic raw material.

The origin of this joke was pretty much what you see in the strip. We were eating dinner. In the strip the meal is a bunch of unidentifiable, semi-shapeless blobs. In reality my wife and I are both much better cooks. As we were eating dinner my daughter spotted something crawling on the ceiling and called my wife’s attention to it. It wasn’t a spider. It wasn’t a beetle, or anything else that would have been easy to identify. While they were speculating on it the script for this strip tumbled into my brain. I wanted, so badly, to tease the kids with this, but held my tongue. I like not being forced to sleep out on the back patio.