the super nintendo
Monday, July 28th, 2008I’m in my new apartment! I woke up at 3am! I tried to watch the sunrise! I got impatient!
seriously though, “just put on another sweater” has to be a pretty prominent phrase in a lot of people’s childhood. Our old house is still always freezing even though we now have central heat, but my mom refuses to crank it up and when I go home, all I hear is “just put on another sweater.”
sweater…once you say it enough times it sounds ridiculous. I dont even wear sweaters! and why the fuck are they called sweaters anyways? it sounds gross.
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July 28th, 2008 at 5:40 am
this is so funny - has to be one of my favourite Fart Partys ever and quite cute too. Super Nintendos came out just before Christmas in Scotland, and having spent all of the year before wishing to get the old nintendo, I TURNED DOWN the Super Nintendo whe we saw it in the store (what a dick I was). When you were a kid, did your parents force you to complete a game before you could buy a new one? Not sure if that was supposed to teach me a lesson or just to slow me down a bit
July 28th, 2008 at 6:15 am
Haha yeah….good times! This well reminds me of the long gone early 90’s…*sigh*….
And (in response to Andrew) my parents always told me to finish a game first before getting a new one!! Tightwads….I showed them though…..I completed Sonic (I was a Sega fiend), and I was given Sonic 2….and they were the only games I had….(yeah, still haven’t completed S2 yet….)
July 28th, 2008 at 6:16 am
This is hilarious but you bring up painful memories. I remember watching my brother and his friend play that game. For some reason I always thought the feather was a fluttering Autumn leaf. It always just looked like a leaf to me. I admit that a feather makes more sense, but I digress… So instead of yelling for them to get the feather I kept yelling for them to “Get the leaf!” They both turned around simultaneously and gave me this queer look as if they just caught me playing with Barbies in the bathtub or something. They acted like it was the stupidest thing ever uttered. I was completely humiliated. I haven’t thought of that in a long time. Thanks.
July 28th, 2008 at 6:45 am
During the ice storm of 98′, we were without power for two weeks in the dead of a Maine winter, and we had to use our old wood stove for heating and cooking. The old thing managed to heat the bottom floor to near sixty degrees, and the top floors stayed mostly above forty, and the pipes didn’t freeze and explode, so all in all it worked out great!
July 28th, 2008 at 6:50 am
haha! This is one of your best flashback comics, Julia! I can really relate to both the videogame yearning and the lack of heat from my childhood. I grew up in the MW where the winters are 20 below and we only had a few heaters. we were told to put on another sweater, shirt and long johns! what a joke!…
keep up the great witty comics!!
-BC
July 28th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Me and my brother had a very similar experience with a Genesis. What a mistake that was though. I still wonder how different my life might have been had my dad got me and my brother a Super Nintendo vice the Sega.
July 28th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Haha! My mum totally played this trick on my sister years ago.. There are four of us, and one year we all asked for Gameboys for Christmas, except my sister.. As the time came closer to Christmas she changed her mind, but was told they were sold out and she couldn’t have one..
Christmas morning came, and the four of us rushed downstairs to open our presents.. Three of us got Gameboys as expected, but my sister thought that she’d gotten something else, which was in a huge box she was told to open last of all..
As we opened our presents you could tell she was a bit jealous that we’d gotten our Gameboys, but of course when she came to open the final box with a heavy heart, inside was a Gameboy
The look on her face was priceless!
July 28th, 2008 at 10:01 am
I didn’t get an nintendo until my 18th birthday when a kind girlfriend bought me an old one from a pawn store to make up for a childhood of video game deprivation.
What did my parents get me that birthday as The Big Present?
Hot pink fitted bedsheet and black pillow cases.
Grrrreat.
July 28th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Ha ha! I really like this one. Maybe this is why you are tough enough for Brooklyn?
My little sister and I used to take turns standing on a heat duct in the floor of our room. It was fun for two reasons: staying warm, and making skirts poof out around you like a Cupcake Doll.
http://www.ghostofthedoll.co.uk/Toys_CupcakeDolls.htm
July 28th, 2008 at 11:11 am
It’s even more gross when you put it with vest. Sweater vest. Blech.
July 28th, 2008 at 11:15 am
…but didn’t you grow up in California?
How cold can it possibly get there? Pssssht!
July 28th, 2008 at 11:18 am
Oh hell yeah. When I got a super nintendo, my mom was totally mad at my grandma for getting it and then my mom ended up playing it more than me! We had a student living with us for a while, and the three of us would stay up til 2 or 3 in the morning and I would fall asleep and my mom would say, “WAKE UP- it’s your turn!!”.
Good days.
July 28th, 2008 at 11:23 am
i can totally relate to the cold house dilemma.
i live in an old apartment building where the heat is regulated through computers, and for some reason the landlords think the only time people need heat in the winter is around 3 pm when no one is home. oh, and 3 am is popular too.
and nintendo totally rules.
i spent an entire summer in my basement playing super mario.
i got soo far in the game and soo behind in my social outings. haha.
July 28th, 2008 at 11:31 am
I remember Super Nintendo. I also remember when my parents sold it and all our games for my dad’s drug habit, but they told us it was because we “didn’t play it enough”, even though we played it everyday.
July 28th, 2008 at 11:57 am
I cannot relate at all. I grew up in the tropics with 6 super nintendos.
July 28th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
I totally enjoyed that strip. It *almost* made me cried.
July 28th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
I love the “wrong box” trick. My parents pulled this on me ALL THE TIME. They even went so far as to put a game system I wanted in the box of one I didn’t want (ie they’d get me a SNES but put it in a Genesis box). They’d relish the obvious disappointment as I pretended to be excited about the wrong gift, then the overwhelmingly real excitement when I opened the box and found the actual gift. I guess my parents are kind of sadistic?
If I ever have kids (and they track me down), I am going to do this shit to them constantly. Except maybe the other way around (a Playstation 5 box full of socks or Hepatitis B vaccines or something).
July 28th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
One of the funniest Fart Partys ever!..
Your parents must have a weird sense of humor. They bought a Nintendo and put it in a heat lamp box?.. The strip reads like a Calvin and Hobbes b-side.
July 28th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
We just got your book in at the comic shop i work at .
Its pretty good.
July 28th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
No one will ever know how much time it took you to draw the woodstove panels, and for that, I’m sorry.
July 28th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
MAN THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT MY PARENTS SAID except they never relented. And now I love video games but I learned too late so I suck at them. Your mom gets the prize!
July 28th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
I remember me and my brother had the choic between the sega genesis and super nintendo. We went with sega… yeah cant say it was a bad choice but the next year we got the supernintemdo. I was a lil game freak for a while. til i discovered Girls!!
July 28th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
If we wanted a new game system, we had to sell our old system and all the games at a garage sale. Fuckin’… argh.
All I know is that I shit my pants the first time I played Darius Twin. And that Super Mario World is the best Mario game EVAR.
July 28th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
yeah, i grew up in california, but in northern california. Not all of california is like san diego. in fact, it even snows in parts of california. mind boggling! (if you’re an idiot)
“If I ever have kids (and they track me down), I am going to do this shit to them constantly. Except maybe the other way around (a Playstation 5 box full of socks or Hepatitis B vaccines or something)”
hahaha! i’m going to give my kids a box full of aids and herpes and cancer and be like “just saving you some time.”
July 28th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
lil fart party flashbacks are so adorable!
July 29th, 2008 at 8:59 am
I remember seeing SMW on channel 1 (short lived grade school news channel)… it gave me chills and I begged the principal for WEEKS to get me a copy of the tape so that I could watch and hear the 5-6 second clip of mario in a haunted house. A friend of mine from Japan had the SNES imported months before it came out in America. The local newspaper had published a Genesis-glorifying 2-page article and at the time I was so pissed at Sega for their “Genesis does what Nintendon’t” ad campaign that I wrote a technical response to the writer of that article @ 6 pages long. I argued (at 12 years old)from ALL angles why the writer was an idiot, why you can’t compare apples and oil-based butter, thee difference in 8- and 16-bit, etc… and quickly got a response and a request from the newspaper for an interview. Needless to say, we were front page news trash talking the Genesis and hyping up the upcoming SNES. Best days of my life man… THAT was fun. Friends, games, and a common allegiance to the best console gaming system of all time. AH memories heh
July 29th, 2008 at 10:18 am
This is an especially funny and touching one. There’s really a lot going on in these 12 panels — very very nice!
July 29th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Ya this is now one of my more fav comics. Good job Julia!
July 29th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Poop
July 30th, 2008 at 6:57 am
I especially love the grass-is-always-greener moment of being disappointed it’s *not* the heater. So American - the second we have the Holy Grail, there’s another emptiness to fill. That’s real insight, economy, + a perfect choice of moment.
July 30th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
I love your comics, and I love beer & cheese.
I am moving to brooklyn next week, and have been making lists of things to do while I’m there. I stumbled across this place, and thought you might like it.
http://cheapassfood.com/eats/show/162-cheap-cheese
July 30th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
This is the most freakishly accurate portrayal of my childhood. Growing up in an old victorian in napa, my shrink parents wouldn’t buy me and my brother a super nintendo till my cousin mails us one, and because our house was drafty as hell we would drag our comforters into the den to play super mario until our eyes bled.
July 30th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Dude i had to save up my allowance for a year before getting my first game system, which was a gamecube. Now everyone is getting playstaion 3s and the good gamecube games aren’t as popular and they’re hard to find.
July 30th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Amazing how only a few years difference can add up to a complete generation gap. When I was 8 we got an Intellivision for Christmas. Two (crappy!) controllers divided by three kids equals chaos.
But I feel you on the coldness tip. We emigrated to Canada when I was 4, so my Filipino DNA made Toronto winters (think cold-ass Minnesota, minus a dozen degrees) seem like the the end of the world.
July 30th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
my sister and i got an atari in 1982. we were never allowed to get anything after it. my brothers came along later in the ’80s, and one of them barfed all over the console.
July 30th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Aw, I really liked this one.
My dad bought me a Super Nintendo the year it came out, but that was only because I was about to have a life-threatening surgery.
August 3rd, 2008 at 5:41 pm
being from a poor family in new england, just put on another sweater is a phrase that will forever be with me. my dad to this day does not put the heat above 62. once I think he put it to 65 and then had a small heart attack at the thought of it.
August 4th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
My parents had a similar no video game policy. But one Christmas I thought they had finally cracked–there was a big super nintendo sized package under the tree–I knew this was my year. Only, when I opened the package (the first one I went for) instead of a super nintendo, I found a speedo swimming backpack (for lugging all my nasty wet swim team stuff, NB: I hated swimming!). I couldn’t conceal the disappointment. still don’t think I’ve gotten over that (well apparently not since I am writing a post about it).
June 28th, 2009 at 3:14 am
Similar memories myself: Up in Northern Canada with a single wood stove for the whole house - everything happened around that stove in the winter lol.
As for video games - a similar policy, but I went out and made enough money to buy a NES right before the N64 came out, then I sold my NES to buy a SNES and by this time my parents were fine with me having games as long as I didn’t have anything else important to do. I then saved up and bought myself an N64 and my mom caved and actually bought me Goldeneye - TONS of hours spent every Christmas playing that for years to come … mmm memories …