Jaws

Jaws was a comic illustrated by Ted Phillips on or before August 27, 1998. It was first released on Ted's Fun Site around that time and re-released on Thingamabob.com2 two years later.

The Jaws comic features two interconnected tenets of late 1990s Ted Phillips humor, irony and violence, as well as his absurdism.

First, he believed that irony was humorous if expectations were thwarted as extremely as possible. This comic borrows its name from the 1975 film of the same name, which features a man-eating great white shark. Therefore, the irony is that the same shark from the movie would be eaten by a turtle.

Because of the unlikelihood that a turtle could even accomplish this feat, the extreme violence that the turtle inflicts further subverts expectations.

Apart from the irony, Ted's absurdism is further evidenced by both the shark's having vocal cords and their depiction. In the vernacular, vocal cords are referred to as a "voicebox." As a radio is technological equipment that allows the transmission of voices, Ted depicts the shark's voicebox as a radio.

There were two versions of the Jaws comic, the first released on or after August 28, 1998, on Ted's Fun Site.


A second version replaced it March 18, 1999, after the rebrand to Ted's Web Site, with lower compression, richer colors, and alternate color choices, but had some color bleeding, especially around teeth and bones, as well as smaller, alternate speech.

The second version continued to be used, including with the re-release at Thingamabob.com2 on December 11, 2000, until the comic disappeared from the internet when that site closed in 2009.

Both versions reappeared when the Cracked Egg Studios web site re-released Ted's Fun Site on March 19, 2024.