A Grinning Handbag

ages and ages ago, in the early paleolithic era, when i first moved to san francisco (1996), there was a comic strip.

it was in the SF Weekly. every wednesday as i trudged down montgomery street to my job flacking for the devil, i'd look forward to grabbing the new weekly so i could read savage love and this comic.

it wasn't a particularly fantastic comic. it was just very very san francisco. some guy wrote these weird little stories up which were more or less true. sometimes he just drew a simple picture with an odd caption. he didn't take himself very seriously.

reading it made me feel comfortable and happy.

it was called Smarter Feller and the guy who wrote it was Dave Eggers.

eventually Dave quit to move to New York and we wuz all sad. then he wrote books that i never read and became really popular and i was forced to ignore him. (although Spy Magazine pretty much rocked, so maybe i'm an idiot).

now he's back here in San Francisco selling eyepatches and other crucial pirate fooferaw.

anyway, yesterday at work i was talking to lynn about the proper consistency for ginger snaps: not too crunchy, not too soft. this reminded me of Smarter Feller because there were many many many strips focused on the delights of Iced Oatmeal Cookies. i tried to find some Smarter Feller online to show lynn, but there were none. not a single smarter feller online.

tragedy, my friends. gobsmacking tragedy.

it was like the mona lisa of free weekly comic strips had been strapped to a rock at low tide and covered with delicious algae. for the barnacles to eat.

luckily, i'm a smart feller and i downloaded a bunch of Smarter Feller strips off the web years ago. they're not such great scans. some are all dirty. some are a bit hard to read unless your monitor is big. nevertheless, i have them.

one might ask, why are there no Smarter Feller strips on the web? is eggers not proud of them? is he waiting for the nostalgia value to make publishing a book of them a brilliant strategic move? (doubt it. he could sell a collection of stuff found on the back of cereal boxes now and make it profitable.) does the Weekly own the rights?

the answer is: who the fuck knows?

so, to celebrate my immenent departure from this city with some nostalgia for my arrival, i share now with you -- the sullen, pants-crapping, lice-ridden readers of Troublonia -- the half decayed remnants of the once proud Smarter Feller.

.

or at least until someone threatens to sue me.

(click the "open image in a new window" captions to make 'em large enough to read)