New Year’s Eve, 1999. The world is teetering on the brink of collapse. At least, that’s how I remember it. Something about Y2K. That night, perhaps tipsy on Belgian beer, and champagne chugged hastily from a paper cup (I was 26, and so, so classy), I made a New Year’s Resolution that I ended up keeping for exactly 10 years: to make a weekly webcomic.
From January 2000, until January 2010, I made 519 episodes of my comic Teaching Baby Paranoia (the title came from a single panel comic I did in college; something about parenting technology teaching children to fear that little blinking light next to their bed). It started as all comics created by 26 year old white guys do: autobiography. Eventually, as I discovered that I’m really not that interesting, it mutated into weird fiction. With footnotes. (The footnotes thing came from an old issue of The Red Herring, a humor magazine at McGill University that I was an editor of, in the ’90s. There was one issue where every joke and reference was meticulously annotated, which I thought was funny as hell. I added footnotes to Teaching Baby Paranoia as sort of a meta-humor commentary about authorial credibility. I don’t know… again, I was in my 20s.)
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to make a new episode (strip?). Honestly, I’ve been wrestling with the comic’s legacy a bit. I basically made a comic about lying with a straight face, which after the apocalyptic presidency of 2017-2021 feels weird.
Anyway, here you go. No footnotes this time. Maybe I’ve outgrown them, or something.
Bryant Paul Johnson 