Comments on: The Greatest Furniture in Fiction [Think Tank]

By: lee

lee — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:06:55 +0000

Some other suggestions from the OTI writers that didn’t make the post were:

Arthur’s round table
C.S. Lewis’s wardrobe
Cat in the Hat Credenza
Python’s comfy chair
The bed from Bedknobs and Broomsticks
Chairey from Pee Wee’s Playhouse
The table in Da Vinci’s Last Supper (is it fiction or non-fiction? Somewhere in between?)

All fine choices…but only one of them (sort of) rhymes with “Beretta.”

By: Gab

Gab — Sun, 03 May 2009 15:30:30 +0000

If I’m not stretching it by suggesting a TYPE (and if they aren’t just appliances), I’d say the televisions in the _Toy Story_ movies. Every time a TV shows up, one of the major characters has a pivotal self-identity revelation, one that drives the plot forward and without which no character development would occur; or it gives characters plot-driving clues without which the story would end.

By: lee

lee — Sun, 03 May 2009 06:58:55 +0000

I thought about the rug from Lebowski, but then I wondered if a rug really counts as a piece of furniture. It’s more of a home furnishing, no? I think part of the definition of furniture is that it rises vertically from the floor to provide utility.

But then again, as Donny often is, I may be out of my element on this one.

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 03 May 2009 02:47:07 +0000

The Dude’s rug from “The Big Lebowski”. It really tied the room together, you know?

By: Gab

Gab — Sat, 02 May 2009 06:25:52 +0000

Wait, it’s a devil face on the back of the chair? I always thought it was a cat.

By: fenzel

fenzel — Sat, 02 May 2009 05:58:11 +0000

I have read a bit of the old Tick – but most of my downward spiral of comic self-parody comes from a years-long reading of the ENTIRETY of Cerebus the Aardvark, which literally drove me to the brink of a mental breakdown — to the extent that I actually had to throw away most of my books (I think I kept Jaka’s Story), to avoid looking at them again and becoming phenomenally depressed.

You know what I was really surprised to see? The _American Splendor_ references in the early volumes of _Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles_ I read recently. My roommate’s girlfriend picked up a compilation of some of the earliest TMNT books from somebody who was throwing them out – and there’s a lot of reverence in there to other early independent comicsp, which of course TMNT surpassed in popularity by orders of magnitude.

Pretty funny that TMNT was name-checking American Splendor ten years before the first TMNT movie – and twenty years before the American Splendor movie.

History works in mysterious ways – especially when you’re dealing with artists who see the world as individuals, rather than the institutional creativity you see out of the corporate titles.

By: DK

DK — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:53:26 +0000

Monkey outta nowhere! Fenzel, your reference to the wonderful Tick cartoon warms the cockles of my heart. This has nothing to do with furniture, but have you ever read the original Tick comic books? I read them before I read Watchmen, and I didn’t realize until recently how very many Watchmen references there are in there. A very gentle and loving superhero parody parodying a far more negative superhero deconstruction? How meta!