Posted June 19, 2014 at 1:01 am

"Dan, we need you to write a comic in which a character attempts to talk to someone they don't know very well and it's totally awkward."

I'VE TRAINED MY WHOLE LIFE FOR THIS MOMENT.

And now, MAJOR SCANDAL. It turns out that Mr. Tensaided did NOT properly quote Ivan Drago in the previous comic. The actual line is not "I will break you", but rather "I MUST break you", as many have pointed out to me. After I acknowledged this on ye olde social media, I received this response:

Google "I must break you" please. Tensaided got it ALL wrong, and I can't believe a guy like him doing it. It wasn't even yelled like he's doing. It was low and collected and promised.

To which I replied:

Calm and collected, yes, but it was being said by Ivan Drago. I have a deep voice, and I lower it when imitating that line. Granted, one might have read it as being said too loudly, but then they were reading it WRONG! There is a precise proper way to read that font at that size in that position in that panel within a comic with that number of panels being posted on a Wednesday by a guy named Dan who wishes he had bishonen hair that people should just intuitively know and feel bad if they don’t, darn it!

Now, I could have simply said that I never meant for Tensaided to be yelling and indicated as such with the lack of an exclamation mark, but that would have been too easy.

After posting that response, it was pointed out that Tensaided does have a history of paraphrasing quotes. This got me thinking and tweeting, so here's me quoting me again:

Based on previous quoting mistakes, I think it's in character for Tensaided to slightly misquote. I actually think it humanizes him a little.

I mean, yeah, those were MY mistakes, but it does. He absorbs all this pop culture junk, but his memory isn't flawless, darn it.

In my experience, it's extremely rare for people to get quotes 100% right all the time. It's usually a paraphrasing.

One might counter that last point by saying "someone as hugely nerdy as Tensaided would get it right", but to that I say "HA!" I've known some super huge nerds / geeks / etc. in my day, and none of them have had a flawless quoting record.

So yeah, I think I'm going to stick with him not getting the quote 100% right. A lot of pop culture quotes get messed up, or were never said at all. "Play it again, Sam", "Beam me up, Scotty", etc. Heck, I might not have sat through Rocky IV start to finish yet, but I've seen the "I must break you" clip many times, and I remembered it wrong. I've also since confirmed that I'm not alone in that regard.

In any case, what's truly important is this: I don't have to edit and reupload yesterday's comic. SWEET!