She Clepes a webcomic
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Further

An interview of Clyde Pesh for Best-Webcomics

Do you have an alias?

You've likely seen my other work under the name of Jockbrothem Northurstide.

Who are the creators of this Webcomic?

I'm the principal creator of She Clepes, and there are no other creators of She Clepes. A number of local politicians and radio personalities claim that they contribute to the comic, but they are lying; I can't fathom to what end.

What's your webcomic's date of birth?

April 4, 2016. You can easily remember this date because four times four is sixteen.

By night you are a webcomic creator; what are you by day?

I'm a clerk, approving legitimization paperwork and by-and-large records for a transportation firm headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Where are you from?

I live in Stockton, California, home to the state's fifth busiest port and the epicenter of the 1937 Spinach Riot.

How would you describe your webcomic?

She Clepes is a barely pronounceable title for a barely comprehensible comic. Despite these hurdles, the comic thrives under a dedicated readership of lunatics who misconstrued a series of mid-century chewing tobacco ads as a prophetic (and purportedly alien-directed) declaration of The Sheclepes Pact, an upcoming treaty regarding the operation of general-conduct sensotemporal viaducts. I receive daily letters from these cranks putting forth detailed misinterpretations of my work and making vaguely threatening demands for answers to questions I can't parse. For example:

Dear Mr. Pesh (or should I say DR GIZ MOLOK III??!?!!!),

Operating with the princaples of TILE INTERPRETATION I am able to SEE quite clearly GREAT NUMBER of referrences to CLIENT-MODE hype in your fourth (004) comic. YET HOW DOES *SONDER* PLAY A ROLE IN CABLE THEORY (regarding plausibility of course)????? in lieu of re PERHAPS you consider being DEALT WITH !!!

Yours
Styles Peerer, 76

Why is your webcomic better than all the others out there?

She Clepes is meant to be read at a wide desk in a dark room where the early evening sunlight enters between the slats of the lowered venetian blinds, scattering off the smoke of a cigarette burning down in a crowded ashtray. The phone rings, and a muffled voice on the other end calmly reads from a list of betting odds over the static of a mistuned television set.

Why are webcomics your passion?

The woman in the Human Resources Department who allows me to lie on the mildewed sofa in her basement office and describe myself to her for an hour out of the week suggests that I keep a dream journal. Well, I told her, I would give it a go. But my dreams aren't keen on the idea, and they usually abandon me for someone less attentive. A night without a dream isn't worth the effort of sleeping through, so I allay my insomnia with equal parts tobacco and comics.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

During the slow hours of the day, I open a volume of Flaubert, Melville, Joyce, or a Russian, just as any self-respecting bureaucrat would. But, frankly, inspiration is incredibly inefficient compared to the other creative methods; I find plagiarism to be the most successful. Most of my material is transcribed directly from old seven-inch reel magnetic tape police recordings of the whispered conversations in Frisco opium dens.

If you could get rid of one country in the world, which would it be and why?

If you're anything like me, you're entirely dependent on the noisy fax machine in the corner of your paper-laden office overlooking the peripatetic harbor cranes. In this case, you'd wholeheartedly agree that the world would do well to rid itself of the Pacific island nation of St. Seever. Essentially all of the world's fax spam emanates from that tiny state, where most of the populace still receive the answers to their HTML requests in facsimile.

What's your main source of traffic (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Reddit)?

Oddly enough (cf. the recent mention of my fax activity), She Clepes gets most of its traffic through the post. Every day, I get between twenty to thirty letters in the mail from readers commenting on my work. Of course, I've been trying to establish an internet presence, but most of my readers aren't comfortable with anything more advanced than an electronic typewriter. I guess that some fan out there is printing my comics and mailing them around. I don't know how my readers found my address; I suspect there are spies.

God grants you one question during your life; which question would you ask him?

How is it that, when faced with the overbearing, and often sinisterly complex and mind-gutting (metaphorically speaking, although figuratively might be more appropriate given the current course, and modern wend, of things that come to pass in thoroughly surprising representations), way in which those that would do us tremendous, if not gargantuan, as in historical contexts as well as pastoral traditions including, but not limited to, recourse and strain to antiquated yet legitimate (but undesirable by most, if not all, cooperative institutions of grave and terminal purpose, when defined asymptotically in regard to collateral and coincident stress, in the caustic and casuistic senses) paths toward universal perusal, and tragically contemplative harm and injustice can be so foundational to the loosely defined mapping between categories of systematic involvement and the multiple closely related procedural understandings of revolutionary notions, things in turn lead to diametrically opposed circumstances in order to become those things which don't, in no uncertain terms, occupy underwhelming positions whether or not they feature their supposedly opposite qualities regardless of the manner by which they end up becoming, when entirely uncorrelated results determine why so many completely stolid assumptions undermine the point as evinced in numerous explanatory articles, absolutely and so unambiguously lost?

What would you like to achieve with your webcomics?

She Clepes isn't a comic for everyone and, honestly, rarely succeeds in being a comic for those it's for. Therefore, I recommend She Clepes to readers who seek unenthusiastic confusion and indifferent misapprehension, and it would certainly be an achievement to rally such a crowd.

How much time does it take you to create one webcomic?

To make one comic, it takes me about thirty hours. I begin some time after midnight by coming up with the words for the comic at the counter of a dive in Boggs Tract. When I eventually make it home, I storyboard the comic by arranging transparency models on an overhead projector and taking a photograph of the image displayed on my wall. I develop the photograph and submit it to the Port Censor, who inevitably requires major alterations. After satisfying this truculent man's demands, I fax the final photograph to my webmaster, who does his job very well.

Yoda walks in the door right now with a blunderbuss. What does he say and why is he here?

I believe I saw Yoda for the first time back in 1980 when I was on a motion picture date with a woman, now long absent from my life. I was under the impression that Yoda was the product of a skilled puppeteer, a class of individual that shouldn't be allowed anywhere near blunderbusses. In the posed hypothetical, I'm sure Yoda would give to me as inaccessible an account of his motives as he did to the theater audiences of 1980 who were curious to know why he was so brutish.

What's your biggest frustration as a webcomic artist?

I can't think of anything more frustrating than the ridicule of the stevedores. I go by their dockside gambling houses on my way to the office, and though my body passes largely unmolested (just one or two old dinner rolls thrown at my receding back), my spirit sustains heavy blows from their jeers and derisions. They would tear She Clepes to shreds were it not online; these hulking creatures disdain all graphic works but the cheap paperback comics they import in bulk from Japan.

Why haven't you liked any of our facebook posts so far?

My explanation is a little involved; bear with me. A number of years ago, tags of myself in photos on Facebook began to be replaced by tags pointing to a different profile named Psyched El. The profile appeared to belong to an enthusiastic Paraguayan girl studying abroad in the UK, whose friends called Elisa. I messaged Psyched El a few times, asking if she knew anything about the mysterious tag replacements, but I received only terse replies such as "dunno" and "ugh creep". I tried to ignore the problem, but after a few weeks passed, and the replacements only increased in frequency, my friends began to express their annoyance. One friend of mine in particular, who'd recently been married, complained that Psyched El was now tagged in many of her wedding reception photos. Since Psyched El wasn't very psyched to help and Facebook was even less communicative, my only recourse was to experiment my way to a solution. First, I tried retagging myself in all of my photos. After just a week, most of the tags had been replaced with Psyched El again. My second attempt was to change my own profile name to Psyched El, retag myself in all of my photos, and then change my profile name back to Clyde Pesh. Oddly, the tags didn't change back with me; they all pointed to the other Psyched El. While thinking about my next course of action, I received a barrage of expletive-filled messages from Psyched El, telling me to stop tagging myself in all of her photos. Sure enough, my name was now all over her albums. I told her about my experiments, but she didn't seem to understand. The next day, she deactivated her profile. Again, I retagged myself in all of my photos, and this time Clyde Pesh stuck, but there were no links on the tags, as if they pointed to a profile that didn't exist. To solve this new problem, I deactivated my account and then reactivate it. Doing this somehow changed my profile name to Psyched El, and, even weirder, all of my photo tags now read "null" and linked to a JSON file containing {'sorted':[]}. When I changed my profile name back to Clyde Pesh, the links still lead to the JSON file, but this time the file contained {'sorted':['p','s','y','c','h','e','d','','e','l']}. I feel incredibly stupid looking back, but it was only at this point that I realized Psyched El is an anagram of Clyde Pesh. After changing my profile name to different combinations of these letters, I found that the corresponding JSON file referred to a particular step in a selection sort beginning with "Clyde Pesh" and ending up as "Psyched El". When I changed my profile name in this particular sequence ("Clyde Pesh", "Pclyde Esh", "Psclyde Eh", etc.), I received a notification containing only "1". Reversing the order of the sequence ("Psyched El", "Psyched Le", "Psychedl E", etc.) resulted in a "0" notification. Curious, I decided to create these binary notifications in a sequence that corresponded to the ASCII representation of "Clyde Pesh". This took about an hour, but the result was astonishing: I received a friend request from myself. Of course, I accepted it. Soon after this, I noticed that when tagging myself in photos, two options would appear: my profile and a friend that was actually my own profile. Selecting this second option created the correct tag, while the first option still made those strange JSON links. So I finally fixed the tagging problem I'd long been struggling with, but unfortunately I was still very curious; I decided to friend myself again by repeating the profile name selection sort. This time, I received two requests from myself. After accepting these and doing it again, seven requests from myself appeared. Again, and I got twenty-six more requests. After the sixteenth repetition, Facebook had become extremely slow. This was likely because I was friends with myself over a trillion times, and each action I took was being repeated by each of my friend-selves. It took me almost a week to complete the seventeenth repetition of the selection sort and about six months to complete the eighteenth, after which time it became entirely impractical to do anything at all on Facebook. I attempted to remedy the situation by unfriending myself, but this only removed a single friend-self. I would have to unfriend myself about thirty trillion more times before Facebook became usable again, a task that would optimistically take me four millennia to accomplish. So, this is how things currently stand regarding my Facebook profile, and I hope I've given a convincing account of how I'm essentially unable to like any of your posts.

How can we help you reach your goals?

If you've read this far, you've done far more than your share. If you must do more, you could find one of my readers and light their postage stamps on fire.

Which webcomic artist should we interview next and why? What question would you like to ask them?

I highly recommend Lirk Keschder and her extraordinary line comics. Given the opportunity, I'd ask if the last panel on her website of her comic Progress As A Study Of Genetic Adaptation To Time is intentionally obscured by a banner advertisement for sunglasses. It does seem like a fitting conclusion to the piece, but I can't help remaining curious about how the thaumaturge answers the protagonist's question about Lunacharskian Imiaslavie.

What do you expect from Best-Webcomics?

Could you please italicize the title of Lirk's comic in my answer to the previous question?