When coming up with concept for this mini comic, I had been reading about the concept of the “anti-joke”, a kind of meta joke where there’s all the set up of a joke, but then the punchline is played straight, and I wanted to take my hand at coming up with a couple… I tried to tackle mainly the classic “jokes” of my childhood (one could pretty much argue that the Chicken Xing the Road is an anti-joke in it’s original form already), but the main impetus was to throw a curve ball halfway through with a long political rant  that could be played straight and still serve as a gag at the same time. Then the last panel joke I lifted straight up from a book of jokes for kids… I can’t even tell you why, except it seemed really funny at the time… It’s definitely either the strongest or the weakest part of the book, depending on how you look at it (the art for the final panel, by Cameron Forsley, is obviously awesome, I’m talking more conceptually).

The third panel, provided by Sy Wagon, was written first, and then Mikey realized Sy already had a drawing that would fit perfectly for it… I had to photoshop it together with the text and that abstract background, but I think it works pretty well. The double panel (splash page!) is something that has to be used really carefully in Mission mini comix (because some bad placement can fuck your shit up), but it was pretty expertly placed in this instance, if I do say so myself.

Anyways, this book was written by Rio, who drew the cover and the splash page, Justin drew the 2nd panel/page, Sy drew the 3rd panel, Audrey drew the 4th panel, Mikey drew the 5th panel and Cameron drew the last panel.