Mr. Squish, violent music critic.

If you don’t know who Milli Vanilli is, lucky you. They were a German pop/dance band which had a brief bit of popularity in the late 1980s. Their music was stupid, but as we all know, stupid sells; give it a good hook and strong bass, and people will instinctively hum along to it, and not know why. They even won a Grammy for Best New Artist, on the strength (well, sales strength, likely) of their debut album, Girl You Know It’s True.

The ironic thing is there wasn’t much true about Milli Vanilli. The band was fabricated by the producers. They hired session artists—the not-so-famous professional artists you hire to play what your band members can't—to play their tunes. Then they hired models Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus to be the frontmen; to look pretty on the cover, to make public appearances, to dance and lip-sync in the videos and concerts. Functionally this makes them no different than The Archies or The Chipmunks, but with live-action guys instead of cartoon characters.

When the news leaked out in November ’90 about the true nature of the band, it produced a huge scandal. Looking back, some of the outrage doesn’t make a lick of sense. We all know plenty of musicians don’t actually sing on their albums. They vocalize, and the “singing” is achieved through heavy Autotune. Like Henry Rollins says, if you gotta pitch-correct it, then you can’t do it. The only people legitimately singing on those people’s albums are the backup singers. But maybe it’s because the 2010s are more jaded than the 1990s. We know the music business is steeped in fraud, so we’ve come to expect it.

But some of it is because the frontmen went to great lengths to pretend they weren’t just singers, but really good, gifted singers. Pilatus starting comparing himself to Elvis Presley, Paul McCartney, and Mick Jagger. So, y'know, hubris. Always fun to watch it get punctured.

Fans sued to get their money back for buying the album and going to the concerts. Which I found stupid: If you actually like the rubbish, who cares who actually performed it? For that matter, where are all the lawsuits nowadays for all the lip-synced concerts? Britney Spears alone should be millions of dollars in the hole by now.

They were forced to give the Grammy back, and tried to release a second album with the real singers on the cover. Pilatus and Morvan tried to continue their career as “Rob & Fab,” but that went nowhere, and Pilatus died in 1998 of a drug overdose. Sad.

Anyway, the strip came out right after the scandal broke, which makes it topical.

I wasn’t just jumping on the anti-Milli Vanilli bandwagon. Like I said, I found ’em stupid. So it was just extra fun to poke at ’em.

Believe it or don’t, I hadn’t yet seen Heathers when I drew this strip, so I hadn’t seen the scene where Christian Slater’s character shot the radio. I was thinking, as I said in the strip, of the stories when Elvis Presley used to shoot his TV. So that’s what Leonard was doing: Shooting his TV, Elvis-style, for fun. Then things got out of control, and it always amuses me when dumb decisions quickly escalate to crazy levels.

I never did establish whose house was set afire. The idea—but it was entirely in my head; I never drew it elsewhere—was Leonard and Randall didn’t live in the dorms, but in a house near the campus. My original first strip had set them in the dorms, but it never ran. Since then I’d met some Sac State students who shared a house off campus, and I hung out with them one Friday night, and found you could be way noisier in a house than in the dorms, or even an apartment complex. So I moved Leonard and Randall into an off-campus house. You might recall that one party they held.

No, I’ve never owned a laserdisc player. Nearly bought one once—I found a used one at a Sacramento thrift store, and seriously considered it, but after the Dustbuster I bought from them turned out to have zero suction, I figured it wouldn’t be worth the $30. If you don’t know what laserdisc players are, imagine a 12-inch DVD, which only holds 30 minutes of video on either side, and you have to flip it over to play the other side. No foolin’. Film buffs loved them, ’cause of the high-quality widescreen picture and the special features; things we now take for granted on DVDs and Blu-Rays. The late great Tower Video rented laserdiscs too. But nah; never bought one. I settled for VHS tapes till I got my first DVD player in 1999.

The picture of Abraham Lincoln in the background, getting his brains shot through, was courtesy of one of my artists on the graphics staff, and my successor at the job, Michael Cosper. Some weeks before, I had photocopied a $5 bill to use in an ad. Mike drew a John Wilkes Booth style assassination on it. I was amused enough by it to turn it into a really distracting poster in the background of the first panel. I gave him credit with the title, “The Dead Lincolns w/Mike Cosper.” It was cropped a little too much though: You can’t see the significant spray coming out Lincoln’s right temple, which is part of the full image’s charm.

When you draw something like this, people inevitably ask, “So did you ever shoot your TV?” No. Once again, I am not Leonard. I don’t own a gun, or a bow, anymore. The only things I’ve ever shot were targets. I’m not against guns—I have no problems with the Second Amendment or gun ownership. I’m just not into guns. As Leonard aptly demonstrates here, guns don’t kill people. Irresponsible gun nuts do.