All The World ran for over a decade in Knoxville’s MetroPulse—a strip rooted in a very specific place and time, and one I still remember fondly, even if I can’t remember when I first wrote the original intro that appears below.
At its heart, All The World was my love letter to Knoxville, Tennessee. In the late ’80s and ’90s, Knoxville was a great town to hang out in—the music scene was lively, the clubs were hopping, and the beer was cheap. They say you make fun of the things you love most, and I thoroughly enjoyed poking fun at the city: its personalities, its bands, its politics. The strip was filled with local inside jokes that only made sense to people who were there—and sometimes not even to them. That was part of the charm, I suppose.
The characters were loosely inspired by my college theatre friends, and I shamelessly borrowed (okay, stole) names from other friends and acquaintances. The storylines drew mostly from local events, with the occasional national headline tossed in—hence the recurring (and now wildly excessive) O.J. Simpson references. Hey, it was the early ’90s. We were all talking about it.
Rather than dump ten years’ worth of strips online, I’ve selected 40 here—enough to give you the flavor. This batch was originally part of a syndicate submission packet. I didn’t expect much interest since the humor was so local, but I was pleasantly surprised to get a few personal responses with actual feedback.
So here it is: a little time capsule of Knoxville in the ’90s. Hope you enjoy All The World.
“All the World first appeared in 1992 in MetroPulse, Knoxville, Tennessee’s weekly alternative newspaper. Since then it has entertained a weekly audience of over 30,000 readers in the east Tennessee region with it’s irreverent look at life from the viewpoint of its regular cast of goof-offs.
All the World takes place in… well… All the World, a seedy little entertainment club located in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. Owner lan Braun books the bands, balances the books and makes sure too many beer bottles don’t get flushed down the toilet. Bartender Jonathan Ellers, the real heart of All the World, can’t decide which he really wants more: to be free from the confines of the bar and express himself in the theatrical arts as a great Shakespearian actor, or a date. His friend and militant-vegetarian roommate Julianna Webb refuses to help him out in the date department, but would love to educate him on the evils of eating our four-footed-friends if she can just get Jonathan to put down his bologna sandwich. Meanwhile, artist and wanna-be beatnik Houston Coltrane escapes from the realities of a non-artistic world with good jazz and a semi-reliable link to the internet.
Those are the regulars. Over the years All the World has also been visited by a strange mix of pro-athletes, actors, musicians, politicians, talkshow hosts, infomercial hawkers and other weirdos.
There are no rules so anything can happen. After all, it’s my club and I like it that way.”
—Riik, 1998
