Cast of Characters

While many Mayday strips include one-off characters and storylines, those of you who’ve been reading since the beginning will have recognized the regular appearances of an emotionally stunted soda bottle, a Giada DeLaurentiis-obsessed coffee mug, an annoyed chair, and a guy with a bemused expression and wildly varying hair size. These characters, and a handful of others I have yet to become able to draw yet, form the nucleus of the strip. For reference, here’s a bit more about each of them:

Theodore Thursday

When Theodore Thursday was young he smoked all ten of his fingers down to the yellow knuckles every night and woke up every morning able play the piano with lip quivering innocence, breath-borrowing skill. When he was young there was no such thing as too much fun. On three hours sleep Theodore could melt more hearts before morning than all the romantics of Latin American poetry combined could in a semester, and then after lunch he would re-emerge from his mother’s table, where frequently dumplings were served, into the welcoming world without the slightest sense of just how remarkable and fleeting his capacity for self-regeneration was. How wonderful he was. When Theodore was young – oh, when he was young! – teachers fell in love with him like gassed doves falling from a telephone line and who can blame them, for he was a four foot tall slice of sex on loan from heaven itself.

But then he grew up and the world changed dramatically. Once the universe had been his sidekick, his confessor. Now it was an indifferent jailer. There were months in his late adolescence when Theodore would spend hours standing before a mirror, watching his once awesome smile lose its power by the second. He went to college, majoring in humanities. Humanities! And now, and now, and now he works in a large city in a job that confuses him and robs him of his hope, and he shares an outer-borough apartment with sentient (but just barely) objects and a growing sense of having been trapped by his lucky beginning into a disappointing end.

Bottle and Mug

Lacking ambition, moral sense, or even hands, Mug and Bottle bravely make do with what they have. Which is to say: a shared addiction to nicotine and terrible jokes as well as, in Mug’s case, a deep, unquestioning love of Food Network biscuit Giada DeLaurentiis, and, in Bottle’s, a demented creative impulse.

Bottle and mug are much easier to draw than Theodore, and look the same in profile as they do facing the reader, which contributes in no small part to the frequency to which they appear in these strips.

 

Chair

It was a rough war for Chair.

Hovercat

It is easy to dismiss Hovercat as an ordinary housecat who for some reason allows Bottle to dangle him from a fishing rod every once in a while, thereby attaining some thin relief from his otherwise entirely inconsequential cat life. But to do so within Hovercat’s earshot is ill-advised, as he has laser vision and holds grudges like nobody’s business.

Interrupting Penis

To the extent that this strip has a moral center, Interrupting Penis (IP for short, teehee) is it. He doesn’t lie, nor does he fully grasp the complicated social realities that make, for most people, lying a part of life. He cares passionately about any number of important issues, and feels stifled by Theodore’s dull life, the boorishness of Mug and Bottle, the negativity of Chair, and pants.

Caroline Overfelt

Caroline Overfelt has small, gray hands that she is ashamed of and keeps hidden whenever possible, either under gloves or within her pockets. The hands are too small for her arms, too obviously unmagical and untalented for the kind of person she wants herself to be. She is right, incidentally – her hands are small and childish and without character. But she is wrong to hide them, to talk deprecatingly about them as often as she did, because it prompted people to compliment them – falsely, she thought – while secretly agreeing with her negative self-diagnosis. And so her hand shame wore itself into her identity deeper and deeper, a pensive thing pacing about on the shag carpeting of her soul.

There’s a cruel shard of something sticking out of Caroline’s personality, a hazard to those who draw too close. This is something which most clearly manifests in Caroline’s bitter sense of humor and also the fact that sometimes her breasts change size and position from panel to panel. I’m working on that, y’all.