Another Sunday feature that’s been missing from the archives for a long time, now fully restored and out of the Disney vaults. It’s a shame it was lost in the server for so long; it’s pretty funny, and I did some decent art for it. I watched “Blade Runner” and grabbed a bunch of screencaps off Google to get the illustrations right, which is, sadly, more effort than I usually put into these projects. I also found a nifty “Blade Runner” font for this page. (And no, I don’t have it anymore. I had to get a whole new set of fonts when I switched from a PC to a Mac.)

Because it’s such a visually distinctive movie, it’s a lot of fun to try (and mostly fail) to draw. I recently heard a Pixar lighting director say that she likes to work lighting and color schemes from “Blade Runner” into the movies she works on. So if there are scenes in “Ratatouille” that make you think of replicants, that’s why.

HOLDEN
You’re walking in the desert. You look down and see a tortoise. He’s playing FreeCell. You begin to move cards. You’re not helping. Why is that?

BLIMP TRACK
A NEW LIFE AWAITS YOU IN THE LINUX COLONIES! THE CHANCE TO BEGIN AGAIN IN A GOLDEN LAND OF FRESH CODING SYSTEMS! OPEN SOURCE! EASILY CUSTOMIZABLE…

I think I was supposed to draw a PC in the top illustration, but I drew an iMac instead. It’s the computer I had at Viz at the time. Artie is cast as the analyst, making this a pretty weird illustration, out of context.

The horrible collage of hand coloring, Photoshop fills, cut-and-paste, and lens flare in the second illustration almost looks appropriate for a cyberpunk story, actually. I’ll just pretend that I drew this in 1994 or so.

I’ve retained this strip’s original alt-tag dedication, “This strip is dedicated to Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo,” because I think it sounds cool. It’s a band name from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, although I notice that this page on narbonic.com is one of the first things that comes up in a Google search for “Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo”. That’s pretty impressively tenacious, especially considering that, as I mentioned before, this page hasn’t been directly accessible from the archives for several years.

DAVENPORT
Replicants are like any other machine. They can be a benefit or a hazard. If it’s a benefit, it’s not my problem.

MELL
Have you ever reformatted a human by mistake?
Davenport blinks……hesitates before answering the question.
DAVENPORT
Just Regis Philbin. So far, no one’s noticed.

++++++

DAVENPORT
She really doesn’t know?

NARBON
She’s beginning to suspect, I think.

DAVENPORT
Suspect! How can she not know what she is?

NARBON
Well, we began to notice in them a strange obsession. In Mell’s case, she keeps wanting to play Quake.

DAVENPORT
That doesn’t sound too bad.

NARBON
She’s been using real ammo. We lost half the marketing staff earlier this week. She thought they were bots.

MAC
I’ve seen things…
(long pause)
Seen things you little people wouldn’t believe… bug-free programs that were user-friendly… I surfed the web and found sites with rich content that glittered in the dark near the Geocities sector… I even found a decent script for a movie starring Tom Green.
(pause)
All those things… they’ll be gone.
DAVENPORT
I watched him die all night. And he fought even up to the end. And as he lay there, clicking away his final CPU cycles, I could only think, “If only he had a floppy drive…”