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themarginalthinker · 1 year ago

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For Jack: 23, 18, 13 58. For Kenzo: 56, 51, 43, 37. For Cole and Jay: 1, 19, 21, 32 :>

OKAY HERE WE GO PEOPLE all of these are ocs for oc projects! If you have any questions, please feel free to ask!

Jack:

23. What do they feel guilty for, even if the other person doesn't remember: Jack as a character both feels a lot of guilt, and almost none at all, at times. I think Jack tries to justify his actions to himself, and will usually do the right thing, but when he messes up, moves on fairly quickly. There are times when he does feel guilty, and it's usually when the other person is doing something for him, but he's not reciprocating. (Such as telling truths, or revealing deep secrets.)

18. Who do they love, 100% unconditionally, if anyone: Kenzo :3 of course. Though, it certainly didn't start out that way. First it was just 'that weird friendly book nerd with the cute but annoying spirit cat, and then became...well, spoilers, but they ended up together, and let's hear it for ace attraction, baby! Jack will also kill for his friends. (pleas ask him to kill for his friends......)

13. When do they fake a smile, and how often: Usually when he absolutely must - Jack HATES playing politics and trying to play nice for people in positions of power. (I apologize for the alliteration). His fake smiles fail most charisma and bluff checks, to say the least. However, he's very good at hiding his real emotions, or at least obfuscating them enough to put people off the trail.

58. How many hobbies have they attempted? Is there a common theme: Ehhhhh Jack, despite being my slightly adhd baby, doesn't pick up hobbies that much in my mind? The most I can see him do is whittling/little carving projects when on long trips. He makes little sphere shaped animal trinkets for the funsies, and often just leaves them random places. He does like to tinker though, so I can see him, after the events of Quillguard, getting more invested in combining magic and mechanical creations. Jack seems to like small, intricate parts - he'd probably like puzzles or Rube Goldberg marble-track art pieces.

Kenzo:

56: If they're scared, who do they want comfort from? Does the answer change depending on the type of fear:The first person he goes to isn't actually a person at all! It's Yuna, his little spirit cat! She's been with him since he was a young child, and has acted as his guardian, helper, and companion for well over a decade now. Yuna isn't just a friend, either, she's also capable of some serious offensive magic (though, to enact it, Kenzo must be pushed to the limit of his own abilities, and she's acting more like a flight/fight response.)

The next runner up would probably be Articulate the wyrm. As Kenzo's legal guardian, he knows that if he's got a big problem, he can always turn to the old dragon for advice, and Articulate will usually offer an amount of comfort where he can. Though, given his age, his own duties, and his lack of...human...ness, Articulate is sometimes a tad awkward, and is more like 'pat pat, there there, boy' with Kenzo.

The newest person this list is...Jack. :> Though, for Plot Reasons, Kenzo finds some things difficult to discuss fully with Jack.

51. What's a phrase they say a lot: I'm not actually sure lol. I don't think we've written enough of him to say with that specificity, (a crime!) however, I do think something he starts off his sentences with a LOT, is "You know..." bc just like Articulate, he's a little reader.

43. What do they commonly misinterpret because of their own upbringing/environment/biases? How do they respond when realizing the misunderstanding: Kenzo, despite his usual calm, serine nature, is actually a fairly anxious individual inside. It doesn't come out a whole lot thanks to his various coping skills and strategies, and also tendency to be one step ahead BECAUSE of that anxious nature, but sometimes, he encounters something or someone who will take him back to a very, very bad time in his life, and it spooks him. He will then avoid the person or situation, and sometimes this causes conflicts. There is also, despite Kenzo's general intellectual abilities and objectivity, a very small proclivity for being TOO objective. Or. At least thinking he is. Once he believes he's got an answer for something, he usually thinks it's the RIGHT answer for the thing, and it will take a very large shift in evidence or justification to change that.

He also has the tendency to completely remove himself from the situation if he learns he is, in fact, wrong about it. He won't engage with it anymore, choosing the total opposite of thinking he's completely right - simply not acknowledging the thing At All.

37. What's a secret they haven't told serious romantic partners and don't plan to tell: Wouldn't you and the rest of the cast love to know ;) But, one that's a little less plot-spoilery is that he knows a bit more about Briar's identity than he lets on.

Cole and Jay!

1.What is a lie they say most often: For Jay, it's literally "I'm fine." Jay is not fine. Jay is the opposite of fine. If 'fine' were the sun, Jay would be in the Oort Cloud. But he's sitting on it though. He can be Not Fine once they're out of this fucking mad-scientist test tube lab.

For Cole, it's "She'll never forgive me." Yes, this is still a lie. Because in reality, it's him who will never forgive himself.

19. What would they do if stuck in a room with the person they've been avoiding: Cole would attempt to just not speak, look-at, or interact with the person in any way, shape, or form. Mostly because he knows the moment they try to interact with him, it's over. They're Having a Conflict, because he can't not respond, which is WHY HE'S BEEN AVOIDING THEM.

Jay would try to keep interaction to a minimum, but also can't take the fucking silence, so he may actually try and resolve things, but is so fucking awkward about it. He'd keep testing the door handle just to see if it magically opens this time.

21. What common etiquette do they disagree with? Do they still follow it: Cole will not take his shoes off indoors, unless he's in his own room, or staying for longer than an hour. You can vacuum the carpet, his shoes aren't dirty, what's the fucking issue. He will be made to take them off if you hit him WITH a shoe first.

Jay stands too close to people in lines at stores and the like. He doesn't seem to know he's doing it.

32. If they committed one petty crime/misdemeanor, what would it be and why: You assume either of these boys have only ever committed one crime lmao. I suppose the LEAST of the Things they have Done, would be something quite small. Jay has stolen from the store before, though usually nothing very big. (Mostly because he knows he can get away with it, and even if he IS caught, the penalty would match the value of the item, and he's not willing to potentially pay more for something he didn't want to pay for at all.)

Cole has - done graffiti in the lab, stolen and snuck back to his cell everything from pipettes to whole pieces of equipment that cost more than a good car, stolen a car, ATTEMPTED to steal a car, attempted homicide (not a misdemeanor, but he didn't manage to do it, so it counts), faked his own identity multiple times, and changed the gender signs on the restrooms.

He does it because are YOU going to stop him?

#oc #ocs #oc projects #quillguard #equipoisal in glitch #answered asks

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myfriendpokey · 7 months ago

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Talking About Some Horror Comics

(Image: Richard Sala, "The Bloody Cardinal")

On Cohost a while back i wrote a little bit about comicbook inspirations for Anthology Of The Killer - I might repost it when that site goes down at the end of the year, but until then you can read it here: https://cohost.org/thecatamites/post/7154072-i-wanted-to-write-so

For part two I wanted to talk more about horror comics in particular.

I probably wouldn't have gotten into horror at all if it weren't for comics. Horror comics can feel like a "cold" take on a very "warm" genre - indebted to and playing off of a familiar ground of horror films, but without film's tendency towards emotionalism or immediate effects... Working on a far more compressed scale than even the cheapest 80-minute b-movie, amplifying abruptness or abstraction into something dreamlike and strange. And with the great advantage of taking place inside a totally constructed world. It's not strictly a horror comic but something like Jess Johnson's "Nurture The Devil" is unsettling in part because it's hard to place in relation to either a real world or the world of dreams - whether it's a stylised version of some more familiar content or whether the stylisation is a literal depiction of what's happening.

A comic as physical object can also be a relic - not something we experience in one go, rather something to pick up, put down, sift through, read and reread, with new meanings emerging from a mass of material of which the supposed narrative may not be the most important part. The dreadful, knife-wielding maniacs from Al Columbia's Pim & Francie are familiar figures, but seeing their obsessive repetition across the different collected scraps of abandoned or submerged narratives changes them into dream symbols rather than direct threats.

I like a lot of comics that draw on horror imagery - Mark Beyer and Rory Hayes, A. Degen's "Junior Detective Files" and Daria Tessler's "Cult Of The Ibis", Nicole Claveloux and Imiri Sakabashira. But I wanted to try writing here about some comics that made me interested as horror in a genre itself.

Junji Ito: you may not have heard about this guy.... I actually hadn't read any of his work before the Viz edition of Uzumaki a while back, and the sense of being late to the party didn't make it feel less of a revelation. I think part of it was the sense of comics that were totally distinct while at the same time feeling like they were working entirely IN a genre tradition rather than against it; there was a sense of almost impersonal originality in their laconic and assured pacing, the clarity of line and their lack of need to give too much away, which suggested they must be drawing from and distilling a whole surrounding tradition. And this impression persists even when you follow up on other horror manga and the stated influences and find these comics still feel mysterious even in that context. One of his best effects is a willingness to seem more anonymous than he is, or to give the impression even in his most original effects that he's just flatly transcribing a readymade idea or image. And I think this is his biggest influence on internet-era horror, which has tended to disguise itself (even more than is typical for horror) in anonymous and generic forms, a surface impersonality: as if everyone aleady knew about this, except you.

But what I do feel gets underplayed about his work in particular is also how funny it is, and how indebted to comedy timing. Compare the monstrous reveal in an Ito story with one by Umezu (RIP) - in the latter the frame is pushed right in on someone's face, eyes bulging, screaming, the image repeats, gets even closer, we're in that portion of a nightmare where we feel immobilized by horror, stuck in a pit that we can never escape. The same moment in an ito story tends to be one of ironic equipoise - when the horrible thing finally appears it's depicted clearly, powerfully, it's almost this beautiful and static image. The onlookers stand frozen at the edges of the frame, mid movement, eyes wide but expression not yet changed, a single drop of cartoon sweat on the edge of their heads. There's a contrast between the assurance of the thing and the hapless rabbitlike fascination of the character regarding it, who becomes, like us, an aesthetic spectator - for a moment. When the spell breaks, when we see them screaming, running, it's comic because something of that mood of still contemplation that remains intact. Their eyes bulge, their mouths scream, but they're rushing backwards, away from the panel, and we regard their fear with the same attitude of detached interest with which we saw the full outline of the monstrous shape a panel earlier. To me this sense of humour is apiece with the disconcerting flatness of his approach to setting, in which the usual horror sets - gothic, extraordinary places outside the everyday - feel replaced by something anonymous and shabby, a kind of just-expired contemporary. The monsters rarely need to be explained; it's as though our own world has gradually become too worn down to have any purchase or power on these creatures of dreams that walk the landscapes and alleys with impunity.

Richard Sala - sometimes the artists I end up most fascinated by are ones I spend a while bouncing off of first. I read a few Richard Sala stories over the years and for a while I didn't know what to make of them. Great art, stylised and weird, but as narratives they were hard to place - too stylised and exaggerated to feel like straight horror but too obviously serious about and committed to those genre elements to feel like mere parody or pastice. I think I needed to read Uzumaki before I could get what he was doing, because it relies so much on a sense that genre horror was worth taking seriously; seriously enough to treat neither as a punchline or a heritage piece, something you could bring your own offbeat sensibilities and aesthetic to without condescending to the form, because there was something there. In some great interviews he did with the Comics Journal he was explicit about what he valued in the form: the dreamlike and symbolic qualities of b-movies, the ritual and fetishistic nature of repetition, the way pulp artists in an overlooked form could evolve a private vocabulary of forms, structures and images which worked like surrealist procedures to be mined and combined for new discoveries over time.

He was also interesting to me for the way his work changed over time. The shorter early pieces collected in comics like "Thirteen O'Clock" are recognizably art comics using a vocabulary of found horror images: the secret society, the leering face behind a window, are representative symbols of states of mind rather than presences in themselves. But his first longform serial "The Chuckling Whatsit" inverts this. Here the horror elements are given full play - it's a crazed pile up of characters, murder plots, conspiracies, odd locations, dreams, gimmicks, knives and masks, and while none of these feel like straightforward symbols of authorial expression there's obviously still something being worked out underneath that surface narrative, something warping all the pieces into new directions. The scene and the plot seem to abruptly change direction with every page; new characters are introduced and killed off again, constantly; the longest explanation of the plot we get is delivered by a lady with a cartoony moose-end-sqvirrel phonetic accent, but somehow it never loses either a sense of mysterious inner coherence or a sense of dread.

For me his middle period is from "Reflections Of A Glass Scorpion" (reprinted as "Mad Night") to "The Hidden". His art improves and he plays more with colour; the narratives slow down and there's more of a willingness to let them breathe. Characters become more important - my favourite is Judy Drood, the crazed Nancy Drew analogue crashing through a world of horror. Some of the books in this period feel less essential, as though having established what a "Richard Sala" comic would look like he was happy to spend a while doing the Richard Sala version of a vampire story, or an evil clown story, or a YA book. But he kept developing his style and "Delphine", towards the end of this period, is maybe his best single book: spare and serious and strange, as if he had reached a point in his craft where he no longer even needed to resemble himself.

But strangest of all is his late work, which maybe comes closest than most comics careers to the famous "late style" identified by Adorno in his essay. After increasingly subtle and quiet, almost slick, works, there's suddenly a return to the garish - rather than horror the model seems to be sleazy eurospy b-movies, the kind where masked girls in leotards run around machinegunning each other in underground bases. I don't think the biggest Richard Sala fan would think of him as primarily an action cartoonist but that's what we get here - panel after panel of firing handguns wildly into a crowd ("the simplest surrealist act" - andre breton) of milling henchmen, unkillable figures of vengeance running wild. And at the same time, just as startling, there's an abrupt and explicit emphasis on politics - the figures being shot are crowds of ghoulish Bush-era congressmen, executives, cops, sneering militia creeps, guffawing yuppies, movers and shakers. There's a sense of deliriously vindictive wish fulfilment that he's obviously having fun with, and what's not to love about a comic where a masked supervillain named Super-Enigmatix (shortened by the text as "S.Ex") breaks into the chambers of the Supreme Court to shoot the judges with a raygun known only as "the dissolver" in a single panel. But there's also a kind of sadness in the fury with which these characters are obsessively killed and re-killed; the flat, declarative way the political content declares itself has a kind of contempt, as if it weren't worth dressing up any other way. Rather than the politics of horror we have politics as horror, horror as the only form with which politics can adequately be represented.

Sala's last published work was "Poison Flowers & Pandemonium" - a collection of four(!) volumes unpublished at the time of his death, one of which is a collection of cavegirl-themed cheesecake art a character in the book itself winningly describes as "the dumbest thing i've ever read". The first book, a sequel to the late period work "The Bloody Cardinal", is one of his best - tensely paced and cohesive despite swerving crazily across genres, characters and settings (and also involving an evil mummy who exists in two dimensions). But the very last book, Fantomella, haunts me the most. It takes place in a world where the murderers have won - a vaguely futuristic tower in which dumb, bullying assholes, in costumes that are unsettling combinations of paramilitary gear, medieval torturer outfits and old-timey superhero costumes, spend their days in inscrutable violence or tangled, careerist infighting. The heroine, the title character, climbs up the tower level by level and kills absolutely everyone who gets in her way. The guys in the tower bicker and betray each other and bark orders over walkie talkies and then die and die and die; it's as though, having spent the last decade establishing a whole imaginative taxonomy of These Types Of Guy, there were no need for them anymore; they could be erased, one by one, in the perfunctory way of a henchman being offed in the final five minutes of a cheap film. Eventually Fantomella gets to the top of the tower; there's an ending reminiscent of stated lifetime influence Franz Kafka. Did I mention that this book is placed right after the sexy cavegirl story? Art can be powerful, when we let it be.

Mike Mignola, Guy Davis, John Arcudi - yeah, from B.P.R.D. These are spinoffs from Mignola's own Hellboy comics, and as will be the case with spinoffs I think they never quite got the respect of those other books. They're less quiet, less offbeat - they lack the quality in Hellboy of a mysterious folktale logic that we're barely able to glimpse. But that's the thing for me - in Hellboy many characters have some kind of knowledge that they act on, often piecemeal or imperfectly. What makes B.P.R.D. distinct is the sense that nobody knows what's happening at all; not the heroes, not the villains. Stuff just happens and happens and happens and maybe later on some of it is concluded in ways nobody notices because they're dealing with some other shit - the bits of narrative closure we get are as abrupt and unwilled as a long-forgotten gun that suddenly goes off. Maybe someone will accidentally glimpse the resolution of some other thing they had no idea was happening, in the shape of e.g. a nazi millionaire in a homemade skeleton outfit being pulled screaming beneath the earth by a plague of human frogs. Who was that? There's no time to worry about it, because the world is ending.

There's a lot of these comics and I can never keep track of what order they're in, but I want to suggest that one of the deep pleasures of longform serial narrative is reading it out of order and trying to figure out what's going on. You'll see someone pop up for a panel or die or do something of unexplained importance to the rest of the book and then keep going and maybe read an earlier one where you glimpse the setup that you saw finally paying off - if you can still remember. It's maybe an odd one for me to recommend, as someone who aggressively does not care about apocalypse shit, or military shit, or lovecraft shit. But in addition to the fun characters and offbeat storytelling and Guy Davis's typically great art I think what made this stick with me so much was an odd formal parallel, between the slow, shambolic, weirdly believable end of the world it depicts and the nature of serial storytelling itself. Details pile up, beyond our ability to keep track or notice them. The doomed task of remembering, of cultivating the little pile of our perceptions as they spill out and roll away, feels horribly similar to the efforts of the characters to hold a catastrophe in place; a catastrophe that no-one really seems to know the start or meaning of but that we're all stuck living out regardless.

It's a longrunning comic so there are lots of issues. You can try following it from the start and still find after a certain point that you no longer have any idea of what's happening, that "the start" is itself not really the start, just the latest in a series of dubiously reliable origin stories that seem to have no lower bound. You can spend a lot of time on wikis trying to combine the pieces and figure it out, just like the characters in the comic, the ones who inevitably end up going "AIIIEEE!" as they're blown up by a big machine or by some cosmic thingamabob they only realise too late they maybe never really got. Or maybe if you're lucky you can be a bit-part character; here in some pages, missing in others, with fate uncertain, deferred by an error in issue numbering, or a failure of memory.

#anthology of the killer #horror comics #richard sala #junji ito #bprd

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