Here are some of my contributions to today’s Twitter meme, #greatquoteswithdear. You can probably figure out how the game works…

  • “Damn it, dear, I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer!”
  • “Damn the torpedoes, dear. Full speed ahead!”
  • “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes, dears.”
  • “Hello, dear. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
  • “I aim to misbehave, dear.”
  • “I came, I saw, I conquered, dear.”
  • “Kneel before Zod, dear.”
  • “Madness? This is Sparta, dear!” ← (this one’s my favorite)
  • “More weight, dear.”
  • “Something wicked this way comes, dear.”
  • “The same thing we do every night, dear: Try to take over the world!”
  • “Why so serious, dear?”
  • “Yippee-ki-yay, dear.”
  • “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, dear?”

Myth Adventures, Phil Foglio’s comic-book adaptation of Robert Asprin’s fantasy/comedy novel, Another Fine Myth, is being serialized as a free webcomic [Edit: no longer available.], in the same format as Girl Genius. I remember spending a lot of effort tracking down the mid-1980s books on eBay, before they finally reissued the collection.

The title of that first novel was originally going to be Another Fine Mess, from the Laurel and Hardy catch-phrase, but someone misheard it and Robert Asprin decided he liked that version better. It turns out that “Another fine mess” is actually a misquote itself, according to this the New York Times article on why we misquote movies (via @johannadc). It was originally “Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”