What does "Nuts to This" mean?

The phrase "nuts to this" is one of my grandmother's favorite things to say. Whenever she gets frustrated with something, or if she realizes that someone's pulling her leg or yanking her crank, she'll wave her hands in a dismissive gesture, look away, and say, "Oh, nuts to this!"

I personally try to use this effective and commanding brush off as much as possible in my daily life, but I just can't nail the same attitude and power behind it that my grandmother can. Plus I've learned that bosses and people with more authority than yourself apparently never like it when you repudiate them with a "Oh, nuts to this!" in the middle of a tense and critical business meeting. It just makes me realize that my grandmother is awesome.

History of everything else

It all started, back when I was a wee laddie, with Berke Breathed's fucking hilarious Bloom County in the early 80s -- back when I first started reading the comics in the local newspaper with any real interest. This was also back before Berke went on to the ill-thought-out Outland, and way before he sadly settled on Opus. Bloom County was, and forever shall be, king. Milo, Bill the Cat, Opus, Steve Dallas, the Anxiety Closet, Dandelion Sniffing... Pretty much everything about Bloom County was comedy gold. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all comic strip artists (and I use that word loosely in regards to the vast majority of them) say "Calvin and Hobbes" or "the Farside" when asked what comic was their favorite and most inspirational... but mine was the County. Yes, I did draw heavy motivation from Larson's twisted view of the world at large, and I like to think that I still rationalize my life like a whimsical and dreamy six-year-old... Yet my heart belongs to Breathed's caustic creation.

Since that time I began drawing friends and classmates in silly (and sometimes really fucked up) situations. Like when I made that giant, poster board, Halloween collage of my entire 6th grade class with everybody in the form of witches, vampires, mummies, and zombies in various stages of decomposition. The teacher hated it, and thought my whole experiment in scholastic freedom (in testing the limits of what she'd hang up on the message board in the back of the classroom) was "tasteless and over-the-top in its portrayal of violence and carnage..." Rightly so, but she was forced to keep it up when the rest of my class threatened to either walk out or throw milk cartons at her or some such lame 6th grade-styled intimidation tactic. The point is I knew then and there that I had an audience of whom I could twist to my perverted whim. In hindsight I think it was the part of the drawing where zombie Tony was reaching into victim Angela's skull in search of tasty brains that caused Mrs. Gerdes to shit herself and the rest of the class to worship my visually-poetic skills, but I guess I'll never know for sure.

Then came high school. I moved on to bigger and more intense projects at this point. I started making (really gay, but still awesome [wrap your brains around that one]) political comics... starring RHINO, the REAL American Hero! I used the image of a super homicidal and pissed off rhinoceros to show how much the US rocked, and how much the faggy Soviet Union sucked Lenin's commie cock. I think I made a total of 85 separate chapters in the Rhino series all the way through my senior year (and well past even the fall of communism in the Eastern Block), but the image of Rhino continuously fucking Commie Grizzly up his commie ass (both figuratively and literally) was still my most requested piece of art during that time.

The last few years of high school and college allowed me to start up The Rossman School of Art -- the brand name for all of my loose-leaf paneled adventures that I would sketch out for my friends (mostly Chi-Chi, the Wolfman, and Just Kidding) during math classes (seriously, kids, you'll never need that shit in the real world -- that's why God invented calculators) and any free time I could scrounge (which was a whooole lot). I would eventually construct long, convoluted letters to my friends (who ended up going to different colleges) with a piece or two from The Rossman School of Art being the cornerstone of each postal package. This is where the adventures of the Rossman, Catsy, Batina and whatever girl I was banging at the time began.

The letters eventually turned into the online Rossman Chronicle, but the comics ultimately climaxed beautifully in the epic nine-part finale that I sent to Just Kidding as her graduation present under the title "THE END" chapters I - IX. God I hope she didn't burn them when she eventually dumped my ass two years afterwards.

Anyway, where the fuck was I?... Eh, eventually I stopped dreaming of making it big as a comic strip artist (all the greats were dead or dying, as Calvin had ended, the Farside was on permanent sabbatical, and Berke himself lost his greatness [though he tried to go on after Bloom County with the previously mentioned and sucky Outland... Ack!]), seeing as the only way to do so was apparently to be NOT funny, a sucky drawer, and to NOT use any kind of fucking profanity in one's strips... But along came the world wide web, and the freedom to actually write and draw for an audience of your choosing without having to worry about catering to editors or other visually, humorously, or mentally impaired persons. Unfortunately web comics also meant entertaining the masses for free.

After entertaining the masses for free for over a decade on my original site, I decided that it was time to start from scratch and start gratifying for gratis in a more visual, and much more demanding way... mostly because I was bored. And thus, Nuts to This! was born.

Why web comics, and why such a genre-specific based humor?

Jeezus! Are you actually still reading this? Why aren't you looking up porn right now? You just taking a breather?

My main inspiration for taking this step was the great web comics that have been running for years with no hint of stopping anytime soon: Penny Arcade, SinFest and Sexy Losers (you know, the only really FUNNY ones out there). It is my belief that a comic strip should make its readers laugh... Unfortunately I seem to be in the minority of artists who think in such a way. I firmly maintain that if you read ten... no, make that five strips (random or in a row, doesn't matter), and you don't even crack a smile (let alone shit your pants in fits of uncontrollable giggles), then a comic either isn't for you or just plain sucks.

That of course goes for me as well. If you, random reader, peruse any five of my comics and think I am absolutely unfunny... Well fuck you. But beyond that, this ain't for you. Yeah, a writer shouldn't wall off any potential audience from the start by niching him/herself into a relatively small genre right off the bat, but I chose to do just that. Nuts to This is primarily focused on anime, manga and movies because that's the kind of shit that I like. Bloom County made fun of pop culture and politics, Penny Arcade has video games, and Sexy Losers has porn... And seriously, if SL didn't do everything so perfectly in the first place I would have chosen that as my main satirizing point too.

So there you go.

Now go read and piss your panties in laughter. Or go back to looking up HCG... I'll be here when you're done... In about two minutes.

-the Rossman