Results of the Spot the Non-Dave Contest

I really loved drawing Pipe-Smoking 1950s Dave with Horn-Rim Glasses, to the point that I used him again in a later Sunday feature. I like the way Dave looks with visible eyes. Shame I ended up structuring the entire strip so I couldn’t draw him that way until the very end.

This strip comes out of my intense love for old instructional classroom films. I’ve got a bunch on DVD and multiple books on the subject; Mental Hygiene by Ken Smith is my favorite.

This was the greatest contest ever.

And now, in a Director’s Cut exclusive, James Rice explains his winning strategy:

How I won the “Spot the Non-Dave” contest. I had been reading Narbonic long enough by this point, to understand that Shaenon wasn’t above using her strip to “rip” on people, (look at the photo she included a few weeks ago of Dave Barker). I reasoned, rightly or wrongly, that she’d try that same thing with this contest. That led me to reason that that the non-Dave photo would be of a possible compromising situation, and that all the rest, sent in by readers, would be “relatively normal” photos. So rather than analyze the “Daveness” of each subject, I analyzed how each person in the photo’s might react to seeing their photo on the strip. Basically, I changed the contest to “Spot the Vendetta”, and that seemed to lead directly to photo #6. I may have been completely wrong in my reasoning, but hey, I got the original strip, so either way, it’s good. The strip I requested, was the one of Artie, trying to push Dr. Narbon’s box of wine. Unfortunately, Shaenon accidentally sent me the strip from 2 days before, of Artie hitting Dr. Narbon’s shoe. She offer to replace the strip, but I turned her down saying I’d get the correct original from her eventually. Sooner or later I did, and both are framed and hanging in my lab.

Yes, the secret to victory lay in the realization that I’m a cruel and petty person. Good work, James!

After this ran, the people who sent in the cow photo wrote to assure me that the cow was not actually named Dave. I made that part up.

12 thoughts on “Results of the Spot the Non-Dave Contest

  1. What’s really weird to me is that two of the people whose guesses were printed in this were named Cameron.

  2. I don’t think you can tell from the photo whether the bovine is a cow, bull or steer. Besides which, there is (pace Dave Gorman) no actual rule that you must be male to be called Dave. The Dave Conspiracy might disagree, but I stick to my argument.

  3. Actually, there was a best-selling novel about a woman who tries to become a Dave.  She feels that there is a Dave deep inside her, and seeks all over the world for the legendary secret that will bring out her inner Daveness.

    I refer, of course, to “The Dave In She Code”.

    Then again, that was written by a Dan, so it may be a subtle ploy to discredit all of Davedom.

  4. When a cow (or cow-like creature) is found wandering along the road where I grew up, the police refer to it on the radio as a “bovine”, presumably to avoid mis-classifying it.

  5. I think one of my favorite Sunday Narbonic lines has to be

    “Inspired! Well-argued! And wrong!”

    Also,  even by my admittedly pun-heavy standards, DAMN Ed Gedeon, that was slickly done.

    I would have gone for a somewhat raunchier, 2005-2006 era spoilerier (NOTE: not a word) joke, if I had thought of the same punchline.

  6. I’d have gone for the lady poking her head in at the left of the Cave-With-Cow picture, myself.

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