The Consultant Mixer – Procrastination Power

I have been wrestling with the idea of a comic strip for a while now. However, it has been a while since I did any serious artwork. More than 15 years, in fact. The fact was amplified when I tried to draw a face from three different angles and I ended up invariably incorporating simian characteristics where I did not really need them. Eventually I settled for stick figures.

The particular installment of The Consultant Mixer is autonymous, since I started penciling it in August and I finished in October. A few words about an “autonym” – I had read in Richard Lederer’s excellent Crazy English, that an “autonym” is a word that describes itself. You can indeed search for “hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian” within this book in Amazon and find out that it means “a very long word”. The dictionaries don’t agree, though, or do not cover this definition of the word.

I am not particularly innovative with names. So I pulled an old trick here. IBM happens to be one of the largest Consulting firms today (if not the largest). In his famous 2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur C. Clarke had a computer named HAL, which people interpreted as a play on IBM (H before I, A before B and L before M), the founder of the ubiquitous PC. There is another school of though that believes, though that HAL is a “heuristic algorithm”. Nevertheless, I decided to use IBM as my source again, albeit the consulting arm of it. So you have JCN (J after I, C after B and N after M), or Jason.

Have fun!