I Recreated KC Green’s “This Is Fine” Comic Strip With LEGO Bricks

One of the most iconic comic strip turned into a meme, now made with LEGO bricks… 😁

Occasionally, I do more than just build LEGO sets and review them. Truth be told, for me, buying new sets and building them was always just half the fun. What makes LEGO, for me, the perfect form of artistic expression is the infinite potential it has, when you take those sets apart and build something new. Lately, I haven’t done many MOCs (my own creation), but when I do, I always like doing something a bit more exotic, like the synesthesia demonstration, the smart lock or the mobile phone stand. This time, however, I wanted to build something much more fun, that many of us can identify with. So, I turned a comic strip into LEGO.

The “This is fine” meme comes from a webcomic called Gunshow, by KC Green. In the first two panels of strip 648, a character known as Question Hound sits in a burning house, sipping coffee and saying, “This is fine.” As he continues to reassure himself over the course of the six-panel comic, he also begins to melt due to the heat. The particular comic strip was published on January 9, 2013, and is alternatively titled “On Fire.” The alternative text on the image says, “The pills are working,” which is used as its title, as well. — dictionary.com

I think there is barely a human left on this planet who hasn’t seen it in some form or another, so I thought it would be the perfect meme to convert to LEGO. Another reason I chose comic strips as a source of inspiration was that I don’t really see LEGO fans doing this.

I wanted something small, simple, but expressive and relatable that can be built in an evening.

The number one thing I needed to make sure, I had, were the transparent fire pieces. I vaguely remembered having some older sets that had them, and also finding some in the bulk purchase I made in 2022. Because in the last year or so I did basically no sorting, I had to dig through a ton of LEGO pieces in tubs. It certainly took a while to find them, but I did, and turned out I even had more than I actually needed.

The next concern was the billowing smoke. I had a few ideas, but I did not want to see studs in the smoke, so finally settled on the inverted round tiles of which I luckily had not just one but two shades of grey, and also black, which, I think, makes the smoke more realistic as it becomes thicker.

For the speech bubble, I opted to just use the cloud piece from the Postcard sets. Never thought I’d use them for much, but here we are, turns out — as always — with a little imagination, any LEGO piece can be reused. Looking at you grumpy LEGO classic nostalgics. 😉 Speaking of imagination, note the transparent orange chain I used to illustrate the spreading fire around the base of the table. Neat, ha?

All in all, I used about 100 LEGO pieces, all of which I already had, and about three hours to figure out and perfect the build. Not bad for a first attempt!

The individual frames…

I did not create four different frames for this strip, as I would have not had the necessary pieces to duplicate everything. I have over 100,000 LEGO pieces, but a huge variety, meaning of the same pieces, I will often have just a dozen or two. So, to work around the limitation, each frame is the result of modifying the original build, adding or removing elements, then taking several photos. So without further ado, let me talk about some of the details in each frame.

In the first frame, there is no speech bubble. We just have our character sitting on the chair with some smoke gathering at the top. His coffee on the table in a yellow mug. I have so many of these mugs, mostly yellow and red! For the minifig, I chose something fairly generic, and for the face I actually made sure it’s the classic LEGO head. In terms of the torso and legs, all I cared about was that the colours match, and they fit chromatically and contrast-wise well into the scene. I think the green works really well. The hat isn’t ideal, but I did not have a smaller one, so I used Indiana Jones’ hat from the latest set I reviewed.

The second frame is fairly similar to the first. One additional mention I would make is the wall. I was debating adding actual doors and a window or picture frame (not sure what the comic is actually depicting), but in the end, I decided that it was unnecessary and just used different coloured bricks to give the impression of a door and window. In this frame, we have the first speech bubble, the most iconic one, where our character says, “This is fine.”

The third frame changes the scene quite a bit. Now we have extra smoke, so there’s black, dark-grey and light-grey inverted round tiles used to illustrate the variable thickness of the smoke. There is more fire too. At this point, our overly relaxed protagonist is taking a sip from his coffee and far too calmly says, “I’m okay with the events that are unfolding currently.”

The fourth and final slide (because I skipped the two others where he doesn’t say anything), he’s properly on fire. In the comic strip, the last frame shows him decomposing, so I decided to combine the two frames into one, and now we have our main character looking like a skeleton, with a hat on, surrounded by lots of fire and smoke. The mug has also melted into a yellow puddle on the table. This is not in the comic strip, but I thought it would be a nice detail.

At this point, he’s still in denial and says, “That’s okay, things are going to be okay.” Spoiler alert, nothing was OK. 🤣 The house was on fire and everything burnt down, as an alternative version of this comic strip clearly illustrates.

All in all, I am very pleased with the outcome. I sent it to a few folks I know and everyone instantly recognised it. I also created a comic strip version out of it with Freeform — a really cool, free Apple app, I am using more and more. You can also find it on my Instagram.

This little MOC makes me want to build some more in the future, and I already have two other ideas in mind. Hopefully, I’ll find the time, and the pieces, to build them all soon and share with y’all here.

Until next time, stay creative and play well! 😉

Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe and/or become a member for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.