Commentary from June 18, 2002

If you were a part of the online fan art scene a few years back, you’d know that there were quite a number of monthly online art contests or displays. One was just previously mentioned (in the commentary for #001) but there were lots more, especially for “stand-alone” pictures. What would happen was a character or comic/anime would be chosen, and people would have one month to draw a character or scene. The next month, a different character or comic/anime would be chosen. Beyond the previously mentioned M.O.M., the only other one I was interested in was M.A.H., or “Monthly Anime Hentai” run by Nosebleed. The current month’s theme was the works of Masakazu Katsura of Video Girl Ai fame. I felt it was a good excuse to do a couple of strips featuring the characters from that comic.

What especially irks me about many Japanese comics is that you have a guy who is essentially a loser, and can’t score worth beans. Suddenly, a hot chick comes from nowhere, and chances abound for scoring, yet because the guy is so nice, he STILL can’t score worth a damn. I don’t know about you, but if I’m sleeping in the same bed as a girl, I’m going to give it the ol college try. Maybe there’s something heroic about being spineless, I’m not sure.

So the joke behind these two comics is about how much of a loser this guy is — how clueless can you become before you are unquestionably pathetic.

It did well in M.A.H. and I got a lot of hits from it.

The other thing I should mention is that this is the first strip that has the word “FAP” in it. I never thought choosing that sound effect would be the comic’s most distinctive feature, but there you go. It wiggled its way out of this comic and into other comics and from there became a standard in internet vocabulary. But where did I get it? The VIZ translation of “Heartbreak Angels” of course. The Japanese have onomataepia for just about everything, including skin slapping on skin, so the translators at VIZ had to figure out an English equivalent for that as well. There are several different sound effects used but for some reason, I chose FAP for its distinctiveness. While FAP was used for many purposes where skin slapping skin was involved, including sex, I used it exclusively for masturbation and hence it stuck. I used it in subsequent strips, and somehow, I guess it caught on, and has a life outside of this strip. However, I can’t claim to being the inventor of the word, though I have a claim to being the person who whittled down its meaning until it was used exclusively for masturbation and hence became its internet popularizer.

What a thing to be proud of. Forever linked with the sound of male masturbation. Urgh.