Season One of Kiwi
cartoonist Sean Molloy’s web comic Two Pedants has now been published in
book form, available in selected Kiwi bookstores now.
Two Pedants Season
One collects all the
strips from the first season of this web comic about two pedants saving the
world one correction at a time, which has attracted more than thirty thousand
hits so far, and continues to grow. The book also contains character profiles,
deleted strips, and a special preview of Season Two (now being released at www.twopedants.com).
Two Pedants features two self-styled 'linguistic
superheroes', Blonde-haired Pedant and Black-haired Pedant, along with their
sidekick Curly-haired Guy, who, in a somewhat meta twist, also draws the comic.
Other characters who pop in include their ever-cheerful nemesis TXT SPK GRRL:),
a time-travelling Shakespeare, the supercomputer Deep Blue, Frankenstein's
Monster (or Adam, as he'd rather be called), and various kinds of punctuation.
Reviewer Matthew Codd
says: “Hilariously humourless protagonists, plenty of jokes about grammar … Two
Pedants is all about shining a light on just how ridiculous pedantry is …
it’s a comic written for a particular kind of person – and if you’re that
person, the title alone will have caught your interest. But even if it hasn’t,
this is a book that’s worth a look, because you just may find something special
in Sean Molloy’s quirky sense of humour.”
Author Sean Molloy
says: “This is a book for people who like Oxford commas, hate Oxford commas,
don’t really care about Oxford commas – and people who don’t know what an
Oxford comma is. Two Pedants is a tale of love, time travel and
punctuation, for grammarians and all those corrected by them.”
Molloy’s previous
writing has been in film and TV. Hopeless, his first film, co-written with Steve Hickey, was released in 2000. Lovebites, its spin-off television series, aired on TV3 in 2002. Since then Sean
has worked on a variety of projects as a writer and script editor.
Molloy says the inspiration
for Two Pedants came from conversations with, and corrections by, two
pedantically inclined people very close to him (who shall remain nameless (but
one of them may possibly be married to him)). Sean pitched them the idea of a
comic strip about two pedants who would correct anything that anyone ever said
to them. “The real two pedants then starting correcting my ideas for the comic
strip. That’s when I knew I had something.”
Molloy says Two
Pedants is a perfect project for him. “I enjoy writing comedy and
entertaining people. And as a writer I naturally like playing with language. Two
Pedants is about the comedy of language, so it’s a project that appeals on
a meta level for me.” There are plenty of self-referential jokes in Two
Pedants. “Curly-haired Guy is definitely based on me, as I have curly hair
and I’m often corrected by pedants. So we have a lot in common.”
Molloy says he
decided to become the ‘artist’ for Two Pedants when he realised that a
minimalist stick-figure style would suit the playfulness of the language in the
comic. “I saw that a minimal style worked well for great intelligent web comics
such as XKCD, and my hope was that some of that greatness and intelligence
might rub off on me.”
Like many writers,
Molloy works as a public servant by day. He lives in Aro Valley, Wellington,
with his wife (poet Helen Rickerby) in a loved but rickety old house, looking
forward to finally feeling responsible enough to get a cat.
- Two
Pedants Season One by
Sean Molloy is distributed by Seraph Press (contact@seraphpress.co.nz). It
is available to purchase from www.twopedants.com or
from selected NZ bookstores now.
- ISBN: 978-0-473-30842-1
- Format: Paperback, 178 mm x 311 mm, 100 pp
- RRP: $25
No comments:
Post a Comment