Relationship Status: "It's Complicated"
with Buddy and Romeo
We (Frega + DiPerri) both deleted our Facebook accounts in 2013 (that reminds me… we should file claims for that class action lawsuit against Facebook that I saw on the news last week). Coming full circle, when I was first invited to join The Facebook (I forget if you had to be invited in the early days or if you just needed a college email address or both). When I first joined The Facebook, my thought was the same as when I left it eight years later: “What’s the point of this?” Real Buddy also made leaving Facebook look cool by doing so a few months before we did. As Real Buddy goes, so goes Real Romeo.
Why am I talking about Facebook…? Oh yeah! The title of this post! During one of my many Internet paranoia phases, I took all of my pictures down and made my profile picture a beautiful pizza that I had recently crafted. One of my then-girlfriend’s students at the time was sleuthing around to find out what he could about her life and asked her in class one day “How come your boyfriend is a pizza?” If memory serves, she was amused (at least I chose to think she was).
Not so when a while later she discovered I had taken my real name down too. Her ultimatum was this: “I’m not going to have my relationship status say ‘In A Relationship with Scrooge McDuck!”
By Some Miracle, we’ve been married for nine years.
I’ve told this story before in a previous post but see who signed this strip? By Some Miracle. That was the pseudonym we adopted for the last two years of the strip when the paranoia set in again.
Buddy and Romeo are obviously mirror characters but they are foils to one another as well. Certainly, as seen above, they delight in foiling each other’s plans. Mirrors reflect personality traits and goals of two characters and foil characters emphasize the virtues of the opposing character. These are literary terms but of course since I think in terms of movies, television, toys, and comics, here’s an article from TVTropes.org that explains this in a little more detail. Amidst the treasures in the dropdown folders, Scrooge McDuck and Flintheart Glomgold are listed as mirrors/foils. What better company could two guys keep?
The strip often visited the notion that Buddy and Romeo are fated to end up together because no one else will have them. Both characters react with violent opposition as, against all odds, they still remain hopeful that someone else is out there for them.
This isn’t far off. I had a very specific ideal in my head of who I was looking for — so specific it could only be the one girl! — and it was a couple decades of the dating equivalent of P.D. Eastman’s “Are You My Mother?” That could be a Buddy and Romeo book. “Are You My Wife?”
For a number of years, Real Buddy and I would have a lot of fun with what our opening lines were upon answering the phone. On more than one occasion, Real Buddy would lead with “Talk to me.” My favorite greeting was if we were went to each other’s houses, whoever answered the door would immediately slam the door in the visitor’s face and leave him to stand on the porch for a few minutes, even in the rain. Those were the days!
After college, my summer plans were always ridiculous. Cancun and hitting the clubs every night and poisoning my body with toxins that would be sure to start catching up with me in 15-20 years? Yeah right! My summer postcard was always “Greetings from the Middle of the Night at My Drawing Table in My Unfurnished Condo.” For years, I drafted overly ambitious summer plans of producing however many illustrations and sending promotional postcards, writing plays, putting a children’s book submission together, submitting comics to syndicate. I’d inevitably exit the summer disappointed due to my own unrealistic expectations. True to the comics, in those years, Real Buddy served as my compass for realistic expectations in life, art, and dating.
Not a compass but a sundial…
Buddy makes everything look cool. Even if it’s not.
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