Day 37: Stapler

Should have made his head wider...

Still trying to get myself back into the swing of daily updates, and I spent all day yesterday feeling inexplicably crappy.
Anyways, this prompt was to use staples, or even the stapler itself, and for some bizarre reason my brain leaped from making a picture out of staples to the ridiculous phrase 'stapleface'. It sounds to me exactly like the kind bad guy of name you'd hear in the Dick Tracy comics.
If all you know of Dick Tracy is from the wacky early 90's movie, you probably think it's full out campy stuff.
That's what I expected when I picked up a collection of the old comic strips at the library a while back, and I was... surprised.

Stapleface

The villain names are sometimes pretty goofy, and some of the plot stuff is too, but a fair amount of it is weirdly straightforward. The villains commit a lot of very real-world type crimes, and there's a fair amount of villain and sometimes even innocent bystander death. When the latter happens, the characters usually pause to ponder what a horrible shame that is. It makes for a really bizarre blend of serious crime drama and cartoony art and monikers. Sometimes it's a little jarring, but it's definitely worth reading at least once, and I do wonder what it says about the era it first came out of.
For the record, it's very hard to make a straight line with staples. The nice curves you see are staples I bent by hand and fed into the paper, folding over the backs with my pocketknife. I only jammed the stapler up once, which is kind of amazing, especially since it happened when I was mostly done and just trying to get out a few loose staples.