Goats: The Good Old Days

I used to read just a small handful of webcomics back in college. One of the regulars was Goats. Back then, it really was just a crudely drawn strip about two non-sequitur-spewing bar buddies who just happened to sync their thoughts together into a semblance of dialogue. They had a satanic chicken and some sort of violent mental defective named Gerald who spoke only a soup of hatred: "die kill die die 666". I miss him.

At some point, Goats got much bigger. New characters were introduced, the strip got a regular colorization treatment, and the satanic chicken reproduced. Pretty much everything between Diablo's comments on Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and the Chaos Pope arc are long forgotten to me. Nowadays, our two favorite alcoholics are trapped in another dimension where time goes screwy and I seem to remember something recent about Woody Allen controlling the universe with a PowerBook. Goats may have gotten bigger, but it also lost its original direction. There's always a line between "Ha, ha, that's weird" and "Maybe you need professional help". Goats crossed that line a long time ago going from playful non sequitur to just utterly baffling.

This recent strip illustrates a little bit of what Goats has been missing for years: the silly back and forth of the principles that is only tangentially related to the subject at hand.

Phillip: "Let's apply the usual standard: what would Kirk do?"

Jon: "Kirk would go boff the green Orion slave girl."

Phillip: "He wouldn't even stop to take off his girdle."

The great thing about this exchange, that which made Goats so much fun to read back in 1999, was the sincerity with which these words are said. In their own minds, Jon and Phillip aren't constructing a joke for your amusement. They are earnestly making statements of fact that, to them, are as plain as saying "bananas turn from green to yellow as they ripen." The joy in Goats isn't from the absurdity — this is evidenced by the fact that all of Oliver's escapades with the biker gang to locate a potato were wholly tedious and yawn-inducing. Goats drew its energy from the little things, the observations made by silly characters taking themselves seriously. I wish there was more of this.