Year: 2013

Today has just been one of those days where I just can’t seem to get the strip I drew to work, so instead I’m putting up a comic that was previously only published in the Marine Corps Times newspaper. I don’t know what it is, but I was staring at the damn thing for like 3 hours and I forgot why I even did it in the first place.

You’d be surprised how many jokes actually go unpublished. Very frequently I find that I’ll think of a joke, write it down, then forget about it for weeks. When I come back to it, the joke isn’t funny to me anymore so I never do the strip–despite the fact that no one else has ever seen it. It’s a terrible cycle, but if you look at my notebooks, you’ll see probably hundreds of jokes that I’ve never actually used. Anyway, I know many of you might have read this in the Marine Corps Times, but I’m sure there are plenty of you that have not!

In fact, if you really want to catch up on the first 100 Marine Times strips you might have missed, you can buy “Head Call” for Amazon Kindle by clicking here.

As far as the comic goes, I suppose some people feel entitled to some grand send-off when they retire from the military, and perhaps they are; but I know that I personally wouldn’t like making 150 Lance Corporals stand in a field for 2 hours to watch my old ass leave the military. If ever I were to stay in the military for a stupid amount of time, I’d rather have the Marines remember me fondly by sending hookers, beer and pizza to the barracks on a Thursday night starting a 96.

That is how I’d want to be remembered:

The guy that bought you syphilis and Papa John’s.

Well I don’t want to delve into details, but I figured I’d do a strip about birthdays today because… you know… it’s sort of my birthday. Please don’t beat me. I think my favorite birthday memory from my time in came from Iraq, actually. The Marines in my platoon made me a birthday cake out of an MRE poppy seed pound cake, some tootsie rolls and matches. The tootsie rolls were morphed into a Star of David atop the cake, a reference to my Jewish heritage.

The typical time-honored tradition of celebrating birthdays in the Marine Corps usually involves beating the living shit out of someone for no apparent reason. This is a cruel and unusual cultural staple that I can’t really explain, but it’s a thing. Also a thing, are motivators like the guy in the 2nd panel here. For some reason I always sort of despised this kind of Marine, the kind that ends sentences in “oorah” and uses “Semper Fi” in a casual sentence. I’ve always had an aversion to being sucked into cultures that were not my own (hence the reason this comic exists), and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with adopting outside mannerisms, it always seemed kind of odd to me. It’s one thing to speak the language when you need to, it’s entirely another to absorb yourself into a new identity.

That is, essentially, what the “motivator” is. He is someone that has allowed his own identity to be supplanted by the Marine Corps’. I’ve mentioned before that my entire experience in the Marine Corps often felt like that of an outside observer, a spy of sorts, but I first noticed this in boot camp. A few weeks into it, I started seeing recruits just like myself adopting language and mannerisms that were not their own, picked up from the heavy influence of our drill instructors.

The said recruit would look at me and say, “Kill bodies, oorah,” a series of words that he never would have spoken prior to his arrival at the Depot in San Diego. I would look at him and think to myself, “No, I do not want to be like that. I like who I am.”

After Terminal Lance had first came out in 2010 and became noticed by the Marine Corps at large, I had a chance meeting in the Base Commander’s office of MCBH Kaneohe Bay. The Marine (now civilian government employee) said to me, “Semper Fi,” as I was leaving his office. I replied to him, “Thanks, you too.”

He asked me, “Do you ever say it?”

“Not really,” I replied with a smile.

Anyway, today is my birthday, so I’m going to go do what men do on their birthdays: measure their lengthening scrotum with a yard stick and put a notch on my thigh to mark the occasion.

I’m sure all of you are aware of the new barracks rules coming into play. If you’re not, you can read about it here. The new regulations are designed to improve discipline throughout the Corps and “crack down” on behavior problems found amongst salty Lance Coolies throughout the Corps.

Though, naturally, this seemed like a shady attempt at reducing the number of Marines re-enlisting by making every day life suck even more than it already did. I’m not entirely sure what these new rules will actually accomplish (if anything), it really just seems more like life for single Marines is about to get a lot shittier, while relative life of married Marines continues to look better. Just living in the barracks–as a general thing–is already a terrible experience. You’re surrounded by alcoholic 18-24 year olds all day that are pissed off with a lot of free time, in addition to the over-crowding, broken A/C and rarely working hot water; plus there’s always at least one asshole that wants to play his music really loud with his door open at 2100 because that makes sense.

If anything, this just seems like an effort to further the war against single Marines. God forbid you don’t want to get married, now you’re going to be punished even more–while absolutely nothing changes for the guys living in base-housing with their dependents.

The barracks might get crazy sometimes, but it’s because the barracks fucking suck. No one wants to live there. The Commandant sure as fuck doesn’t want to live there, which is why he lives here–nor does any other Staff NCO or Officer in charge of you. Shitting on the guys already being shat upon doesn’t really fix the problem, it just adds more shit to clean.

I’ve used the word shit a lot today.

Shit.

In other news, I moved into my new place this weekend and finally got my internet back up, which is great. I’ve been kind of out of it lately with everything that’s been going on, I don’t even have my Cintiq set up yet so I had to use my old Intuos to draw this comic strip–which is totally fine, but weird to get used to again. That last sentence probably didn’t make any sense to 90% of you, but the other 10% are nodding their heads with a half-cocked smile going “I know, right?”

I’m really trying to get the majority of Kickstarter rewards sent out this week, there’s still a lot of surveys to send out but I’m still waiting on the challenge coins to arrive–those things aren’t particularly quick to get made.

Anyway, I’m going to continue to unpack my life from boxes and try to settle in here so I can get full speed on The White Donkey. Until next time, you motivators.

So I’m sure most of you (especially those of you currently working for the US Government) are aware of the government shutdown currently in effect. I don’t really talk about politics, and I don’t really plan on doing it right now, if you want to learn more about it I’m sure you can tune into CNN or basically any other news outlet to get your fix on the situation.

Really, the only thing that anyone reading this comic needs to know is that active duty service members will keep getting paid, combat operations will continue overseas, and that veterans will keep receiving benefits for the immediate future.

The worldly issues really don’t matter much when you’re overseas. As it was gloriously noted in the film Jarhead, “The world back home don’t stop just cause we’re out here in the suck.” (Paraphrasing) It’s true though, unless it directly affects you, there’s really no need to worry about it. You’ve got enough to worry about out there. I was in Iraq in 2009 when Michael Jackson died. The entire world was talking about it. I remember sitting in the chow hall in Rhamadi, glancing up at the TV to see CNN reporting round-the-clock about the late racially bewildered pop star. My glance lasted maybe 30 seconds before it moved back to whatever crappy food was on my tray.

I just didn’t care, I didn’t want to care and I didn’t need to care. Granted, I still don’t particularly care, but it was apparently a big deal. On a random note, I first heard the word “Furlough” aboard Marine Corps Base Hawaii. On Fridays, there’d be hundreds of kids running around in the middle of the day, and when I asked what was going on, I was told it was “Furlough Friday” at the schools on base. My response was something like, “What the fuck is a furlough?”

In other news, my trip to LA was a great success. I got to visit the set of “Enlisted” and kick it with the main cast and crew for a day. I’ll write more about it later, I’m packing up this apartment this week and relocating to a new place. I’ve spent two years here, and I’m looking forward to moving onto new pastures. In the meantime, here is a photo of me and Keith David holding up the Terminal Lance hand signal.

I’ve covered before, numerous times, the many varied reasons that Marines get married so young. One of them, undoubtedly, is the unequivocally better quality of life that married Marines are entitled to. This isn’t just in the form of legal benefits or regular sex (though they are great), but also in how they’re treated on a daily basis. For instance, single Marines in general get the short end of the stick, as you see in the comic. Why? Because most Staff NCO’s are actually married, so when a married Marine asks for a solid, the empathetic Staff NCO is likely to… well… empathize with him.

After all, family life is important, and being able to spend what little time you have in the rear with your family is equally important; plus, single Marines are inhuman pieces of shit with nothing better to do. Am I doing this right?

But really, being single in the military just plain sucks. There’s a reason so many young men marry the first moist hole that crosses their path upon enlisting, whether it be that girl you just met at Nashville’s or that girl back home that you were never really interested in until you found out what BAH was.

On an admin note, I won’t be putting up a new strip on Friday. I’m going out of town to Los Angeles for a media event on the set of Fox’s new show “Enlisted.” I’m also staying an extra day because I haven’t gone anywhere in a while and I’m getting a little restless, so it’s no wonder I jumped at the opportunity when the show invited me along. I won’t be personally putting up a new strip, but I’m looking at options for putting up a guest strip. If nothing else, perhaps it’s time for another Terminal Lance sketchbook entry!

I haven’t done that in a while.

Oh, lastly, check out the forum. We have a thriving community of eclectic people. Tell some war stories.

I remember back in my days at SOI in 2006.

Smartphones weren’t really a thing back then. Well, they were, but they sucked. The pre-iPhone era of smartphones were clunky, ugly and hardly intuitive like the stuff you see today. I happened to have one of those shitty things, it was an HTC-something-something that ran Windows Mobile 5. I didn’t really care what it ran or how smart it was, I just knew it was smart enough to look at porn.

I mean really, I was probably one of the only guys who could sneak off to the head at night and rub one out to legit porn. It was fantastic, but still before the smartphone revolution took place. While I was in Iraq, I was able to accomplish mostly the same results using my PSP with a couple gigs of smut I had downloaded prior to departing. This was more than a suitable solution at the time, since the PSP fit in my pocket just fine.

Marines are going to jerk off, there is nothing that can stop this.

Nothing.

However, the advent of modern technology certainly makes it a lot easier. I always found it kind of ironic how the Marine Corps is literally a group of men and women that get paid to legally kill people, yet are extremely sensitive on the issue of pornography. It’s considered contraband overseas, but everyone you know probably has about 3 Terabytes of hard drives loaded with nothing but the most raunch of porn, including your Battalion Commander. Sure, there might be a couple photos of his wife on there, but it’s in the folder next to “Two Girls One Cup” and “Japanese Fisting Gameshow Bukkake Extravaganza.”

I don’t really know where I’m going with this.

I’ve got phones on the mind lately with the iPhone 5S launching today. I’ve had the 4S since the day it came out two years ago, I skipped the 5 and I’ve been due for an upgrade for months, impatiently waiting for Apple to take their sweet fucking time releasing a new phone. iOS 7 was launched on Wednesday, which I of course downloaded immediately, desperately craving the taste of something new. It’s actually really great, the functionality has been improved as equally as the design has. With that said, I worry it might be slightly too feminine for some. It doesn’t bother me, but I could see how it would turn off someone desperately trying to maintain a masculine demeanor with their phone.

Speaking of phones, have you noticed that phones are like politics these days? I swear to fuck, you can’t even mention iPhone, Android or Windows Phone without like seven desperate tryhards that swear their allegiance to their opposing digital god bickering up a dickstorm of specs laden with biased bullshit. It’s pretty sad when I have to be conscious of what phones I draw in a comic strip because I know there’s going to be like 9 retards in the comments on Facebook getting into an argument about which phone they think is better (or worse).

For the record, Abe has an iPhone and Garcia has a Galaxy S4 in this strip.

Reading the comments on Fox News and CNET are about the same. “OBAMA IS A MOOSLIM TERRORIST” and “THE IPHONE IS FOR FAGS” carries about the same intellectual weight in my book–which is to say: you’re a fucking idiot. Buy whatever phone you want, at this point they’re all pretty god damned amazing.

Seriously, have you ever stopped to think about how fucking amazing your phone is? I mean just stop for a second and think about it. It lets you talk to people anywhere in the world, video call, browse porn, stalk your ex girlfriends on Facebook, say stupid shit on Twitter, it’s less than an inch thick and weighs basically nothing. If you need to spend your time online bitching about why your phone is the best, you need to desperately visit a third world country, cause you’re suffering from a severe case of first fucking world problems.

If you didn’t notice from the barren wasteland that is society at the moment, Grand Theft Auto 5 came out today. I’m pretty sure the release of a new GTA game is similar in nature to national holidays or viral epidemics. Banks and businesses are closed, people are calling in sick, and parents are blaming the game for their kid’s behavior instead of their poor parenting.

Okay, that last part probably doesn’t happen in epidemics, but you get what I’m saying.

I’ve been wanting to do a gay/Navy joke for a while, and this strip is actually a kind of Frankenstein combo of another joke that I wrote a long time ago that I never did. I killed two birds with one stone here, however, including GTA V on it’s release date. I’m proud of that. I am.

Really, this strip is about jokes. It’s a joke about jokes. I know, we’re going deep here, this is the Inception of comic strips. I’m sure Corpsmen and everyone else that’s been in the Navy have heard the gay jokes, and I’m guessing they are due largely in part to an unfortunate song by The Village People back in the 80’s.

It might also be because everyone in the Navy actually is a homosexual… Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I’m joking of course, there’s plenty of straight guys in the Navy, I even met one once.

Relationships can be difficult in the military, very difficult. While pretty much everyone has had bouts of long distance relationships in their life, the military relationship offers its own sets of challenges unique to itself. For instance, being away for upwards of 6 months at a time can be a very trying thing. I speak, of course, as someone that was married during both of my deployments to Iraq.

The worst part is that, really, you never actually know what’s on the other side of the line. It’s very important to understand that you will never know, and as such, only the strongest relationships built on solid foundations of trust will actually stand the test of a deployment. Infidelity is a common instance in the military, on both the service member and the spouse’s side. For every wife that cheated, there was equally a Marine cheating on his girlfriend back home.

This comes down, mostly, to immature relationships. What the fuck do you expect? People fresh out of high school and spending long times apart from each other shouldn’t be getting married. It’s as simple as that. Everyone likes to think that a 19 year old Marine is a mature individual, but enlisting doesn’t grant wisdom instantaneously, it is acquired over the years like anybody else. But even so, deployments are hard on any relationship.

Bottom line, you need to trust each other for this to work. And relax, the other side of the line probably isn’t anything you think it is.

In other news, the Kickstarter stuff will be going out soon enough, I’m still waiting on a lot of replies to the surveys. Because people keep asking: No, I did not send out all of the surveys yet. I sent out surveys for backers under $50, and the rest will go out when I have coins in hand and ready to ship. I’m probably going to set a deadline just so I can get everything going, but fear not, if I don’t get you in the first round I’ll get you in the next.

Another thing I want to talk about is the general climate of the Facebook page lately. First off, while I made fun of the whole “holding up a sign against Syria” thing, I left my political views out of it. That’s my stance on everything. Terminal Lance is apolitical, and I don’t give a shit what you believe in. It doesn’t affect me, and I will not impart my beliefs on you, because it doesn’t affect you. Claiming I’m “not a patriot” or a “liberal” because I made fun of these idiots holding up signs is the dumbest, sister-fucking hillbilly bullshit I’ve ever read. You have no idea what I am, and it doesn’t matter. You’ve missed the point.

Another point on missing the point: lately the Facebook page has grown, and it always has. With new people come people that are unfamiliar with the comic strip and what it is that I actually do. For starters, if you’re someone that wants to tell me, “Get back to making dick and fart jokes,” I implore you to go fuck yourself in whatever way best suits you. If you’d like, I can offer suggestions on methods you can use to go fuck yourself. I don’t care what rank you are, what you’ve done, who you are, or where you’ve been; if you think Terminal Lance is nothing but dick jokes you can go fuck yourself. You have missed the point of this humble comic strip.

Not to toot my own horn here, but nothing like Terminal Lance existed before Terminal Lance. This little comic of mine paved the way for honest, blunt critiques of military culture online, widely available to the masses and designed for the real Marine. While you may see a plethora of military pages that post memes and such, those didn’t exist prior to Terminal Lance. You may not like me personally, (and I don’t blame you, I can be kind of a dick) but don’t come to me with your expectations and your failure to understand what this comic actually represents.

Lastly, I apologize for the lack of comic on Tuesday. There was some confusion and miscommunication regarding the upgrade of the website, which should be live in the next couple of weeks.

Otherwise, have a good weekend and eat a frosty. Or stay frosty. Or whatever.

This apple is a gift.

It is no ordinary gift, however. It is the gift of your master, the very one that put you in this situation in the first place. Your body aches, your mind wanders, your clothes are soaked to the boots with sweat; yet you are thankful, for this apple has been bestowed upon you in your darkest hour.

Okay that might be a little dramatic, but anyone that’s ever been on a long hump in the Marine Corps knows how amazing that stupid little apple is in the middle of your hike. You know what I’m talking about–those bits of delectable fruit scattered by the safety vehicle in milk cartons in the middle of your movement. The company police sergeant’s treat to you. Sometimes it’s an orange, sometimes it’s an apple; either way, you’ll eat the whole thing, skin and core (respectively).

I feel like there’s a poetic significance to eating an apple down to the core. It is a fact that apples actually contain minute amounts of cyanide in their seeds. You take this apple of sin from your green overlords and you bite down into it with the lust of hunger in your teeth. You bite and you eat until you swallow every last piece, seeds included.

As if to say, kill me now.

I’m sure all of you are aware of the news surrounding Syria over the last couple of weeks. Following the use of chemical weapons in their civil war, the President wants to launch an attack against the Syrian regime (in a nutshell). If you might have missed it, a few service members of varying branches have taken to anonymous online protest against the idea through the use of flash card signs and eerie, dark barracks rooms.

These sorts of protests should be taken with a grain of salt. Of course, no one wants to start another war in the middle east. While this all seems eerily similar to what was happening 10 years ago with Iraq, it is actually pretty different. From what I understand, the President is pushing for surgical airstrikes of military importance, not an invasion. This is a huge difference, as there probably shouldn’t be boots on the ground, which makes these silent, anonymous protests rather moot. It’s also important to note that these protests are mostly being done by the “Armed Forces Tea Party,” which is the same Facebook group that was under that Sergeant that got kicked out a couple years ago for saying he wouldn’t fight under Obama (and was shocked that he got kicked out for it), so your own political leanings will ultimately inform how seriously you take them.

I like to remain a-political, so I’ll keep my own opinion out of it, but it’s all certainly interesting to say the least.

In other news, 3,000 stickers just arrived at my doorstep.