Stephen Notley’s Bob the Angry Flower is a weekly alternative strip about a walking talking flower who feels ALL the emotions, not just rage. Debuting in 1992, Bob has battled Gamera, bad punctuation, Dick Cheney’s disembodied heart, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, hamster-dropping villain Hamsterfall, US Senator Ted Cruz, vengeful Geat Rothgar, celebrated mathematician Roger Penrose, his own narrator and, of course, the clanking, failed mechanisms of the human heart. Taking on such disparate topics as pop-culture sendups, religious contradictions and the inadequacy of soy milk to those truly devoted to the real thing, Bob’s never-ending quest to get super mad at stuff shows no sign of ending or even slowing down.
Bob the Angry Flower by Stephen Notley debuts at GoComics today.
The GoComics blog interviews Stephen about the new Bob.
The strip is over three decades old. How has it evolved over the years?
I’ve had a few different characterizations of Bob over the years, but it is really an autobiographical script with this very thin veil of metaphor. Whatever grinds my gears that week is something I draw a comic about. But I still try to keep my interpretations separated out by a level of metaphor that readers can apply more generally to these ideas.
As for how the strip has developed visually, I have to confess that Bob has kind of followed the trajectory that is not completely uncommon: In the early days, you do a lot of crazy experimentation and tend to put lots and lots of detail into characters and backgrounds. Over time, you tend to remove what you consider to be unnecessary details because it’s more work. Sometimes you kind of justify it by saying, “I don’t know if this work is getting the attention of the reader.” Sometimes it’s actually interfering with the content.
Bob the Angry Flower is regenerated weekly on GoComics!
