Dear Mr. Sarcasm,
Where the hell have you been? Last time we saw you with any significant regularity, you had just gotten married and were helping us all deal with the tragedies of September 11. Sure, you’ve popped up from time to time, but never like you used to. Is the Voyage over? Did you finally go and lose your edge? What the hell happened?
— Missing You in Montana
Dear Missy:
Shame on you. In this age of ‘round-the-clock news coverage and ‘pedias edited and maintained by the noble and unwaveringly accurate denizens of the Internet, I’m tres disappointed that you managed to lose track of me. I might even be quatro or cinco disappointed. Who can say for certain? Math is hard.
Here’s what I do know: in the time that you accuse me of being missing in action, I managed to become the singlemost successful Internet phenomenon ever. (In fact, Internic is apparently considering a “.aal” suffix just to handle the extra traffic generated by the various sites devoted to the worship of me and my material, and the sale of merchandise relating to me.) I’m only in my early thirties, but already I’ve achieved more than I ever could have hoped for in an entire lifetime.
Perhaps you heard about the books I published: Fish Stories (my novel) and The Sarcastic Verses (a “greatest hits” compilation from the first five years of the staggeringly successful column you’re reading right now). Unsurprisingly, the one-two punch of those tomes catapulted me beyond the need to generate additional material, setting up a juicy perpetuity of royalties checks, movie and merchandising rights and licensed sequels. (Nobody writes their own sequels anymore. Just ask Tom Clancy.) I could easily have retired at that point and followed the lead of Kevin Smith, who proved definitively that you can coast on a few early accomplishments via cameo appearances and the lecture circuit. But, as the longtime reader might realize, that just ain’t my style.
My next move, as I’m sure you know, was into the lucrative world of comic book publishing. My childhood love of Spider-man and Batman was pretty irrelevant — this was strictly a financial move on my part, and a brilliant one at that. (Think of all the successful comic book entrepreneurs out there. It’s a no-brainer, really.)
I floated my Tales of the Odd as an anonymous web comic at first, just to be certain I wasn’t coasting on my name alone. Any lingering doubts I may have had about my own abilities were utterly obliterated by those early numbers. TOTO, as it came to be called (following successful lawsuits against both the rock group and the estate of L. Frank Baum), was an unqualified hit among connoisseurs of both art and entertainment. Art critics praised my use of negative space and the verisimilitude of my underlying metaphors. And your average joe loved the running jokes about the two supervillains who might be gay. Clearly my previous success had been no fluke, and I was overdue in the world of publishing again.
I’m sure you recall the staggering success that was TOTO’s first issue — the lines around the block at every major comic shop, bookstore and convenience store in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. The constant reprintings (my publicist tells me we’re on our thirty-first printing this week). The whirlwind tour of conventions, lecture halls and even Madison Square Garden, which resulted in an unavoidable 2 week hiatus while being treated for fatigue at Sycophant Hills in upstate Pennsylvania. Speculators claim that a first printing of TOTO issue one, properly preserved, could fetch up to $15,000 in today’s market. And it’s only been a few years.
You may not know this (I didn’t), but most comic books suffer a bit of a decline in sales following the first issue. Not the case with TOTO, which has maintained over a million copies per issue — more than the top three books at both DC and Marvel combined. But then, I don’t need to tell you this — odds are, you have or know a child with a Canopenerman action figure, or a Doctor Nudity Bathtime Fun Set.
Most of my top advisors told me that a move into video games — particularly the nearly dead genre of point-and-click adventure games — might not be the smartest, but I didn’t get to the top of this empire by playing it safe. The result was Brain Hotel, the most extraordinarily lavish adventure game ever produced. (I told the creative team that I wanted to make Monkey Island 3 look like Monkey Island 1, and — god help them — they did it!) Put it this way: PC Gamer UK magazine doesn’t call just anyone’s writing “brilliant.” And they don’t call just any game “a five-star masterpiece.” It takes a certain level of genius to earn the respect and admiration of such a prominent force in the world of gaming.
And so, with two books, six comics (including a trade paperback collection of the first five) and a video game under my belt, I did the thing I’d been attempting to do for my entire adult life: I left southern Maryland and moved to Seattle. The media likes to say that I built a compound 20% bigger than Bill Gates’, practically in his own back yard, just to taunt the man. I, of course, deny every word of this in the press. But between you and I, longtime reader, that’s exactly why I did it. The world of dorky, self-made billionaires is not, despite outward appearances, all that different from our primal roots. And the alpha male must assert his dominance if he ever hopes to maintain his position. It’s not arrogance, in other words. It’s just nature.
There are, naturally, rumors around the Internet and elsewhere that claim I’m living in poverty in a suburb of Seattle known as “Rat City,” friendless and desperately unemployed. They say the “edge” that I feared losing years ago has long since been smothered by unattractive layers of fat and unsightly body hair, and that it’s only a matter of time before I go on a little one-way swim into Puget Sound, or perhaps (even worse) crawl back to southern Maryland in disgrace.
My attorneys assure me that the best tactic there is to ignore these claims and they’ll fade away. Pursuing legal action will only serve to call attention to them.
And so, here I am, ready to return to my roots and resume the Voyage. I’m older, I’m wiser and I’m richer than God. (Remember when John Lennon pissed all those people off saying the Beatles were bigger than Jesus? I actually got a consortium of bishops, rabbis and monks to buy off on that preceding statement as not conflicting with any of their holy texts. Still waiting for a call back from the new Pope, but hopes are high.) Despite my success, I remain, as always, your humble provider of knowledge and advice. It’s good to be back.
Thanks for writing!
P.S. You want a solid, contemporary example of my power and clout in the modern media? Check out last week’s tabloids, with the pictures of Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston and the title “Peace Talks.” I happened to idly mention that my dream Hollywood three-way would involve these two Brad Pitt castoffs, and almost immediately, the two are in peace talks. You can’t possibly believe that’s a coincidence.