Finally, after more than a year of trying to get Tom Brazelton, creator of the popular web comic series Theater Hopper, to post one of my guest strips, he finally does!

This is a happy day for me, indeed.

Tom and I have been friends on the Digital Pimp Forums for several years now, and I finally got a chance to hang out with him at Wizard World Chicago 2007, and plan to hang out with him again this year for Wizard World 2008. I have previously created two guest strips for him, neither of which has ever seen the light of day on his website - and with good reason.

The first one was made upon the announcement that Heath Ledger would be playing the Joker in the upcoming Batman movie. Of course, at the time of the announcement, Ledger's last movie had been "Brokeback Mountain," and I made a comic about a gay Joker hitting on a very uncomfortable and perplexed Batman. Tom thought the comic was funny, but because his audience tends to shy on the younger, told me that he couldn't post it. Obviously, after the announcement of Ledger's untimely demise, it's now a very inappropriate strip, so I will not link to it (sift through my sketches section, if you're really curious to read it).

No problem. I made another one.

However, around this time I became the subject of some controversy on the DP forums, where some internet bastard was flamming my revised guest strip for Tom pretty hard-core. Almost flattering, really, because he actually re-did all of the text in the balloons that I had put into the comic. Unfortunately, interest in the comic was therefore lost and Tom never posted it. To be fair, it wasn't very funny, either. :P

Which leads us to this latest attempt, involving Tom's hatred for actor Shai LaBeouf! Years ago, Brandon J Carr had made a guest strip for Tom that dealt with a Theater Bouncer that had a crush on Tom - in fact, he had a room full of Tom's pictures that he liked to retreat to. Other guest comics followed that also called out a homo-erotic interest in Tom's character, culminating with Tom himself having a room dedicated to his prestine vistage.

I decided to revived that theme, focusing on Tom's latest hatred for the (sometimes) annoying LaBeouf. Knowing what kinds of movies that Tom liked, and seeing a correlation between that list and the list of movies that Shai was in, it was just too perfect an opportunity to pass on. So enjoy the guest strip:

Theater Hopper Guest Strip