#I think about the last panel on the daily. like it changed the narrative of my entire life kind of way

[mazojo]

How do y’all like your metaphorical love confessions?

[taptrial2]

(CW INSTITUTIONAL ABUSE AND MEDICAL TRAUMA)

also let me tell you about how vlad and danny escaped the pentagon in my special au. let me tell you about it. (you are chained to a chair in a dark interrogation room) BUT FIRST i need to explain their daily routine while they're there

morning routine is almost always the same. a scientist shows up at their door at 8am sharp and claps and goes ALRIGHT BOYS UP AND AT EM. and says misc things like "both feet on the floor" "do you want breakfast or what". their facility was designed with just one half-ghost in mind, so the lads both sleep in the same bed (PLATONIC). the excuse the scientists make to each other is that they "prefer cohabbing" but it was just to save budget because their bedroom (or more accurately, cell) is one of the most well-armored places in their entire wing and it'd be too expensive to build another one.

they have power suppressing cuffs on their wrists and ankles all hours of the day, controlled via remote or panel depending on where they are in the building. they can be allowed partial access to their powers incrementally, or all at once if they're sure their boys are contained and it won't cause issues. the cuffs can also force morphs, but this isn't necessary unless they're unconscious (usually used during surgeries)- they both respond to "ghost" (accompanied by a snap as to not get triggered during conversation) or "human" (snap) commands reflexively. (this detail is important for the narrative)

ANYWAY after they get up they are bathed. they don't bathe themselves, brush their own teeth, dress themselves, or change their own bandages - all of it is done by staff. a lot of this protocol is left over from when vlad was a teenager and bothered to fight back. one of the head scientists only has three fingers on his right hand from a dental examination he did on plasmius in the 80s. by the time danny is 14, vlad hits the 10 year anniversary of a perfect record... he just doesn't want to put the boy in danger because of anything he did. he had no such qualms about that when he was alone.

after that they have breakfast. if they've been good (they're usually good), they get real food made by a professional chef with a menu formulated by an on-staff nutrition specialist. if they've been bad, they get the nutrient sludge. it tastes like raw coffee grounds and has the texture of improperly set gelatin. they would prefer to not eat the sludge. if they've been VERY bad, food is withheld.

after this, their days vary drastically. the only consistent things are lunchtime, dinnertime, and bedtime; everything else varies. activities include: exercising their human halves in the gym, training their ghost halves in the training facility (anything from sparring to timed obstacle courses and such), getting to relax in the rec room at some point (a few kids' toys, a couch that's hard as a rock, one blanket, a handful of books that they've read over and over, no tv), getting blood or ectoplasm drawn, having in-depth medical exams done, going into surgery (very frequent and usually without being told what will be done to them or how long they'll be in surgery), and being experimented on in ways both benign and violent.

the facility has no windows. neither of them have seen the sun or the stars. they were asleep as babies being carried out to the unmarked government vehicles to take them away. danny has read the one book they have on astronomy a thousand times over, its pages are falling out and its sleeve worn horribly. they don't dare dream of outside because it's too painful to think about. days bleed into one another. sometimes it feels like months between days, sometimes they think it was christmas last week until they learn it's august.

one day in june, shortly after the ten year mark of vlad's perfect record, it's time for the comprehensive vivisections again. someone makes a mistake transferring them to the prep room. their cuffs fall off of their limbs harmlessly. when they realize their opportunity, they sieze it - vlad phases two people's lungs out of their bodies, one person per hand, and as they fall to the ground he and danny make a break for it. they steal an ID card off of some scientist or another and use it to open the ghostproof door even as security is cracking down and alarms are blaring and danny has to scream someone's head off of their body, the red paste of them sloughing to the floor. the rest of the building isn't ghostproofed. danny clings to vlad's back as he flies up and away, not knowing where he's headed but just Away. they phase the blood off of them and it splatters onto the pavement of washington dc.

they only stop once they hit colorado. they collapse into the grass and revert back into human form, still in hospital gowns and matching plastic boots. only now is the adrenaline starting to subside. danny rolls over and gasps. vlad is still panting, still in disbelief, and he starts to fist at the grass below him before danny taps his shoulder and whispers "look." vlad turns his head and sees the sky. stars. they lay there under the sky, real trees rustling in the breeze, real grass under their backs, a few bugs starting to explore their skin, and they're quiet. for a long time they say nothing. and then they start laughing and they embrace each other and they say we're alive! we're free! we're alive and we're free!!! we're outside!!! they're giddy, they're crying, they're laughing, and they're holding each other close.

when they wake up the next day they go to the town nearby and it turns out that they've got a lot to learn about the outside world. two disheveled guys who smell like death and look like they just walked out of the emergency room asking strangers how to get money turns out to be offputting and strange to other people.

[iridescentscarecrow]

the use of contrast in csm 167

thoughts on how the discomfort & the tension that was almost universally felt were set up by certain narrative techniques that employed a use of contrast: elements in opposition whose clashing yield tonal jarrs that casts suspicion on scene.

1. rain/heat:

CSM 166 ends on it raining, their retreat into the alleyway shows the visible marks of rain on yoru and denji's skin. this contrasts with the scene itself, the aggressive and oppressive heat you feel emanating from its panels.

the retorts, the sequences are short, jerky, emphasising this sense of heat and disconsonance. the raindrops appear like sweat: signifying warmth & passion inherent to the location of an abstract sexual act. (sweat: also a sign of distress). this is a perversion, artificial.

2. city structure & its possible meanings:

here's my inside cover analysis -- more on this.

the texture of the city, especially when made present in part 2 underlines this claustrophobia. here: the scene is set very strongly within the city and its alleyway, the texture of it, its pipes etc. being the background.

what is of the city? what exists within daily life in the city? the residue & paraphernalia of the state, its violent institutions — in schools (teachers), in churches (the cult), in government (public safety, already makima).

this figure of the city with its core of sexual control and exploitation turned against children is central to part 2's stem. the architecture of war around it, normalised into its processes: bodies in the streets & people hurt that denji regards with bafflement appear almost normal, almost natural within the setting of the city as does its inherent sexual violence (a location of control).

none of these scenes disrupt tension.

disruptions are most often exercises of our protagonist in order to disrupt the exploitative city narrative he feels alienated within. these are never entirely successful: his turning into the chainsaw man outside his burning house, his professions last chapter about his sexual urges... the scene around him (see: my 165 analysis) is turned hollow in disapproval.

3. intimacy/aggression:

i recall discussions during the <burning house> chapters when denji was hugging miri & simultaneously tearing into him about how intimacy and violence's often intertwined & experienced (by him/audience in chainsaw man). this extends to writing.

i think a useful metric of comparison is the reze kiss scene where the more sensual (almost cooler) horror of the post-kiss scene there is one of unequivocal violence. the tone here is very different: the aggression is made forefront even in an act overtly sexual. it's rushed movements, back to back, & a host of crowded panels.

4. yoru, framing war, within asa & denji's victimhood:

i kind of also find it interesting how nayuta's control (and its relinquishing of memory) is what triggers the shift in scene.

aside: the two shifts in scene here: (1) from the knife -> hand, physical proximity: potential for the rest of the scene occurs when denji says no.

(2) the memory changing nature of the scene into pseudo romantic. yoru then forces herself upon denji & this SA is simultaneously perpetrated onto asa, whose body she occupies.

understanding yoru as the metaphorical figure of war within the city as settled upon asa here is q. important.

the narratives on sexual violence that permeated all the horsemen (essentially fictitious figures of fears that set you inside city & render you to exploitation) was something i noticed a while back: CONTROL as set by makima, institutional grooming, HUNGER — kiga's affiliation with a cult that feeds into aspiration & marries off children, WAR as sexual conquest in warfare (yoru's introduction to asa about making yoshida her boyfriend).

seeing war as the thing that mediates this act and perverts it makes sense but i find the framing of this offputting (wrong: see the note on rain creating passion) & yoru's odd nervousness), the location of the kiss interesting.

the kiss as removed by control (producer of narrative that informs city's ideological construction) and now reintroduced as trigger creates the dissonance in contrast, in framing between yoru & denji. this reminds me of asa's exercises on romance, her poetry. nestling ideals of romance (asa's want of a boyfriend when she dies) within the CITY is important because this is how denji approaches it too re: sex. asa dies as a casualty of an event situated in sexual violence and war resurrects her. her whole self is now unowned in sexual encounter around a metaphorical skin (calling itself war but also functionally engaging with asa's protagonism, their names complementing each other — day/night), whose powers deal with, in some effect, consent.

bringing back what i was talking about in re: the rupture of tension that's been evading us, i think this lean into intimacy/aggression is framed in a manner where the crowded panels create this feeling of fastness, finally ends in being spaced out more and more... the last two panels, perhaps the only ones which are less active, more static in the figures that occupy them: there's a chilling break of tension as she looks at her hand post war's departure. these panels are more unhurried, they horrify and distort, occupying the page.

[fezwearingjellybananas]

You’ve written a lot of amazing AUs 🥰 which one was the most challenging and why? What did you learn from writing it?

Thank you so much <3

I think that everything has had challenges, but due to just how long it is, it's probably the Milk and Sugar 'verse. I had so much fun writing that, but there were definitely moments. Beans in particular- it's one of the very rare occasions I started posting before having the entire fic written and the last few chapters really started diverging from the original plan, which did make writing feel a little more rushed and I learnt I very much prefer having the entire fic written than trying to work to self-imposed deadlines (hence Gone in a Flash updating daily but being fully written first). I think also there are a few parts of the Milk and Sugar 'verse I would do differently now, maybe more with other timeline Barry in Paper Cups, and part of the changes to Beans included losing some more Lily and Laurel focused parts, so they definitely did not get the relationship development I was necessarily hoping they would get in the original plan.

It did take years to write though, and it is the longest thing I have ever written, so it did teach me a lot, and apparently enough I should probably use a read more here.

There were a few points at the end it felt like I was maybe trying to juggle a few more characters than really fit in some of the scenes because I got attached to writing them and didn't want to send them off out the narrative (which I think is also something the Flash TV show maybe fell into a little with later series), so when I wrote Old Friends, the last Flash & Hawkgirl fic, although pretty much everyone is there by the end, there are only a handful of characters who get the focus of the plot, to be able to follow them more.

(I think that's actually that's one of the things comics can pull off better than written works- when you're writing you need to find a way to tell the reader a character is in a scene, whereas comics can have panels with dozens of characters in the background while only actively focusing on a handful, so the Justice League can be fifty odd people trying to stop the world ending again, while the focus of the plot is Batman again)

It also taught me about planning and what kind of plan works best for me- the way we did planning for creative writing at school was always the very rigid plans where you write down everything that happens and stick to it and I actually can't really write with that sort of plan, so previously I mostly just wrote by having a vague idea in my head and dropping backwards and forwards a lot. When I wrote the Milk and Sugar 'verse though I planned everything while writing Coffee, To Go, but I did it by splitting chapters and making a brief note of who the PoV character would be and a handful of bullet points on what I wanted to happen to get to the end point (and any future scenes I wrote early- some of these made it in, some got reshuffled, and some got cut entirely). Which I find works far better for me, I like having flexibility in a plan and the parts in the middle as finding out how they happen when I get there, but having like checkpoints almost to take me to the end of the plot is helpful, and quick bullet point brief planning is something I use for all my long fics now.

And also continuity- because it took so long to write I went back and read parts again but I also rather than take the chapters I'd written out the plan entirely I kept some brief summaries in there, as well as a list of dates I'd referenced (birthdays, things like that), a few lines that got picked out for Barry to say again post coming out the Speed Force at the beginning of Beans, and a list of all the canonical C.C.P.D. members- this came from the Arrow wiki and quite a few of them ended up with lines through their names because I did not feel quite so bad about killing them as I did about killing Ronnie (hence he came back again). Which helped me keep track of a few things to try not to keep contradicting myself later, and did come in helpful a few times, so if I were to write anything quite that large again, I'd probably use the same method.

And I learnt a lot about science! I did so much research for that fic, predominantly out of reading one little thing then getting curious and going to find out more, partly because I felt like writing scientists I should probably put some sciency stuff in there, and also because I was writing it approaching it as science fiction, when I got stuck at parts one of the things I did was go look up the actual real science of this scenario as much as possible and then twist that to fit what I needed the plot to do, which is something I learnt is helpful because of that series and have found very helpful for not getting writer's block in several situations now. Gone in a Flash there was a point I was stuck so went and read the wikipedia page on tachyons and that helped.

It also taught me I quite like writing Snowest.

Thank you!

[Talk Shop Tuesday]

[soyouareandrewdobson]

Alex ze Pirate Mini Review 3: About pacing and terrible dark revelations played as jokes.

And here we are at the second part of the arc, which was titled “Abandoned”. And just as a word in advance: While “Underappreciated” was mostly defined by the shitty behavior Sam experiences by his crew and how Dobson crossed comedic lines to the point Alex and her crew come off more as abusive than “funny” in the way they treat Sam or interact with their environment, this one is defined by another major issue Dobson has in his bigger stories overall: Pacing.

 See, the right pacing in a story is really one of the most important basics a creator kinda has to grasp. He or she needs to know primarily the following things in relation to pacing, when planning out a story: What are major events/storypoints/key scenes I want to work towards to, what happens inbetween these points and at which speed do I get from point A to B, C etc.

Cause the truth is, a lot of stories out there follow certain tropes or expectations, particularly when they are part of a certain genre, so people more or less have ideas when a certain “point” is hit, what the next point, if not even the endpoint is going to be down the line. And people also kinda want to reach the endpoint of a story, particularly if they expect doing so will finally give the protagonists they care for (and the audience itself) some sort of satisfying conclusion.

The one thing you can now do however, which can in the worst scenario totally kill an audiences/readers enjoyment of the story and even break your creation apart, is get the pacing wrong. For example by unnecessarily dragging out your story instead of just getting to the point, especially when people just want to reach the next major beat, resulting in increased annoyance by them. This can e.g. be seen in a lot of fanfics when writers create damn arcs within their own shit, or (to give a professionally published work of fiction as example) the manga Bleach, when instead of fighting Aizen and his two major supporters directly, the “war” against him was unnecessarily dragged out by having e.g. a pointless flashback sequence that barely shed new light on certain characters and gave EVERY damn main and sub captain of the Shinigami a shot at some random villain/minion Tite Kubo created on the spot but no one cared about really, just to make the story arc run longer.

Obviously, the opposite can also be the case, where people just rush too fast from one point to the other instead of giving the audience time to even properly comprehend or explain what happened and why it happened. Which can get additionally frustrated, when by rushing through plot points the work of fiction gets overloaded with concepts and ideas that may on first glance look interesting, but don’t have any real payoff in the big picture of things, making it come off as pretentious in some cases and pointless overall. Like the movie Southland Tales, which deserves to be burned off the surface of the planet.

 The “best” case scenario when pacing a story, is to know when you need to slow things down (give characters and the readers e.g. moments to breath and emotionally comprehend a situation they are in, giving also insight into a characters emotional state or personality) and when to speed things up (e.g. when there is a big battle, to know which moments are meant to focus on, but also when to be “faster”, giving really the impression that time is of the essence, that high stakes in a short amount of time are given and to hit a key event at the right moment to get a satisfying reaction from your audience)

 And now, after giving a glance on my general opinion on pacing, in order to avoid me commiting the cardinal sin of dragging things out, lets just get to Dobson’s actual artwork.

  As you can see, the chapter starts off again with the island, but this time now with Sam not part of the picture and its consequences (no one cleaning up the place in the morning). This is not really a bad thing to start the chapter of, primarily because it creates a nice contrast to the beginning of the first part.

Page 3 to 5 however…

Lets just say I get what Dobson tries to show here, but I think is exaggerated to a degree that kinda hurts the narrative; the fact that without Sam, shit does not quite get done.

The problem is the execution of the idea. See, instead of putting the fact Sam is missing into the forefront, the fact stuff has not been done is. Stuff the crew should be able to handle after a very short time of adjustment easily. I will admit, Talus suspecting they were robbed but then asked if he had also looked into the cabinets, is kinda funny. I mean, it fits the character (and sometimes people in real life) to be so adjusted to seeing a certain situation as routine every day, that when it is slighty changed they may initially assume the worst but in reality just one convenient step of the routine was left out. Less forgivable I think is the fact that seeing how Sam did the clothes the day prior, I have to wonder how dirty those guys are that already everything is left in piles of dirt to the point they have only the following alternative as wardrobe.

Halloween costumes.

…. Ok, why is there Halloween, and likely a modern day variant of its celebration, in a comic set in a fictional world compared to ours, in a time period it would not exactly exist anyway? Christ on a pogo stick, consistency is all I ask for. Oh and of course NOW they realize Sam is gone. Because they finally put together that their daily luxuries they took for granted are no longer available.

Hey now, Talus. You all are guilty of being terrible friends. In fact yu are so terrible, you would make Twilight Sparkle vomit at the sight of yours. Also, why of all characters are you wearing a costume? Unlike those two bitches, you still had clean clothes on a few pages ago. Speaking of bitches, Atea in the middle panel looks readyto be edited in a cumshot video. Just saying for all those “creative” editors out there.

 YAY! Lets get our slave back so he can do all the stuff we care about but do not want to do.

Seriously, if Dobson tries to convince us they want to get him back because they care for him as a person, he fails miserably. Both by the choice of wording in this page, where Atea and Talus react angrier about the fact that without Sam things don’t work smoothly, rather than concern about his well being, as well as any behavior expressed in the previous chapter. These people are not reacting like friends in worry, they act like spoiled brats. Especially Talus who could still get his stupid burgers if he, as the cook of the crew, would just do his job. All he has to do is additionally open a few cabinets. Also, where in the heck is Uncle Peggy? Oh just go to the next pages so we are getting this over with.

Oh great, the lolcat pirates are back. Because they were so hilarious the first time. And look, they got defeated again. And what is their contribution to the story? To give information on where Sam may have gone.

And it is here now where I have to stop and come back to the pacing issue. Cause the last ten pages here? They are a good example of what I meant with rushed pacing and how it ruins things.

Once more I need to say, I get it. I get the major points Dobson wants to get across. That a) Sam is gone that b) without him things are not all that good for the crew anymore c) they decide they want to find him d) they get information of where he is by going after the one feline that can provide a potential hint. Four major story points Dobson wants to get across. And he is free to get them across. But the way he does it, is just way too fast. Neither the characters, nor the reader really gets time to comprehend that Sam is gone and what that means aside of the surface level loss of luxury Alex and Co are now experiencing. The emotional weight of Sam’s “loss” is pushed aside for the sake of cruising through the plot defined by its surface premise, as fast as possible. And considering that the meat of this story is supposed to be how much Sam means to the others as a person as well as his personal tragedy, intend and execution, thanks to this pacing, does not compute.

Pacing and overall structure are way off and fail to engage us in addition to just killing any suspense in what is going to happen next or surprise us in an interesting fashion. In other words, I am not entertained by this story. It is not funny, it is not sad, it is not “adventurous”.

Personally, I would suggest to actually use the “premise” of those ten pages and turn them at least into two independent chapters of this story overall, to give the premise actually some meat on the bone. The first chapter being a multipager with the crew realizing Sam is gone first BEFORE realizing that without him their luxuries are gone (putting also emphasize this way on the fact they care for Sam also more as a person instead of just the things he does for them) and then once they realize he is missing, deciding to go after him. Only to realize that when they want to prepare themselves for the task (getting their gear together as well as lunch e.g.) that everything is dirty or damaged because Sam normally takes care of it. Leading to a sequence of them having to experience doing Sam’s work for once, making them already there indirectly in part realize what he all does they took for granted.

The second chapter would then be them on the sea, trying to think of where to look at and eventually stumbling upon the cat pirates. Only instead of defeating them easily this time and getting the information, expectations are subverted and the cats actually fight back first, leading to a more hilarious confrontation where Alex and her crew can actually also show how they can be funny and badass, instead of Dobson just always “talking” and trying to convince us they are cool. And look, I do not expect a multi chapter One Piece like battle against the cat captain who turns out to be a master of Scratch Jutzu or something the moment he sniffs catnip. But please, give me something in this story. Some conflict, some diversion, something for characters to actually do that shows they can be badass, funny and awesome. Something that is as cartoony as Dobson likes to claim Alex ze Pirate is, but has never shown in its entirety.

Instead we get to this page, where of all characters Talus is the one who finally seems to realize how he and others took Sam for granted.

 And again, even this page is a good example of terrible pacing. Cause this realization, now shoved in within this and the next page? It would mean so much more if it happened in parts somewhere else in this story before or after, slowly to everyone stepwise. Cause then it would actually feel like a “development” of a chain of thoughts and internal realizations. Instead it is half heartedly thrown in all at once in those pages, to get the point across that NOW Sam’s “friends” finally realize, they took him always for granted.

Congratulations on realizing that you are the real scum in this story. What do you expect from me now? To give you hugs and feel pity for you like you are characters in Steven Universe, all because you had an epiphany? You do not deserve mine or any readers sympathy, just because NOW you feel bad for your terrible behavior. Cause if I did, it would just feel rewarding in a certain manner. And you do not deserve a reward. You have to make things up first or at the very least put in some sort of effort to show me, that you are not just feeling bad, but are willing to change for the better. Otherwise you are in the future still just the same toxic abusers you were two pages ago.

... man, that really felt like me already venting at Steven Universe.

Anyway, we have reached the town where Sam is from…

And it looks NOTHING at all like the artwork from Legends implied parts of the town to look like

Where are the badly drawn docks? The houses that imply this is not just a small village on the beach but an actual small town? The twon square where they sell underaged boys as slaves? Jesus Christ, what is the orphanage going to look li-

Nevermind. The orphanage is crushed. And all the people that lived in it are dead.

... WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH YOU, DOBSON! This is genuinely a sick joke here. Look, I am all for black and dark comedy myself, but this feels cruel. I need to remind you, Alex ze Pirate in Dobson’s eyes was also meant to be a comic for all ages. Meaning something also little kids should be able to read and enjoy. Pushing aside how much of that would be bullshit by the shitton of sexist and sex jokes in other strips of the comic alone, this here is not the kind of joke I would like to see a little kid being exposed to when reading any form of story.

Look, I am not saying you can’t make fun about death. But Death is also a major part of life, which many of us are already being exposed to at an early age. And I think it is important that when we talk about death as a subject in a story for kids, we should actually address it in a “mature” manner the kid may understand. That death, as in the genuine loss of a life and not e.g. an awesome interpretation of the Grim Reaper as written by Terry Pratchett, is tragic. That it means permanently losing someone you or someone else loves. That when talking about it, we should talk about it in a serene manner. And there have been great kids stories who tackled the subject directly or indirectly. A Land Before Time for example, the loss of Littlefoots mother and how he “copes” with it while the majority of the plot still focuses on an adventure to find the Great Valley… that is great. But this thing here that Dobson does? To create a shocking revelation and then sell it as a joke based on the fact that Alex, Atea and Talus react with jawdrops to it? It is not handling the death of those children with any form of gravitas in a story that supposedly is meant to be emotional and play with your heartstrings. And yes, we know nothing about those kids, they are essentially non entities to further the plot. But in context of the story, you have to consider, those kids that are “unimportant” to the reader? For the character of Sam, those people were family. At page 14, we as readers start to realize what Sam finding this locket and going back to his hometown only to find out everyone he knew is dead must mean for him. We, people with even an ounce of empathy and understanding how tragedies should be in part written realize, that shit just hit the fan for Sam and that the story should genuinely focus on how Sam would deal with such a tragedy. But does Dobson treat this revelation with any grace or dignity? NOPE!

It is just a bunch of information dropped on us randomly by an old guy who (I guess similar to Dobson) does not even care that kids died. They are just a plotdevice. Oh and also most of those kids died of an infectious disease where most people die of dehydration after literally shitting non stop. Just to add additional gravity and dignity to the loss of prepubescent lives that should count as Sam’s siblings.

You know, I have to change my opinion on Alex. She is not the worst abuser of Sam. The worst person to ever abuse Sam is Andrew Dobson himself. Cause at least Alex did not kill his extended “family”. And to think this “children comic” was written by the same guy who made a “So you are a Cartoonist” strip where he talked about how kids media can tell more mature comics with more gravitas than live action stuff and novels meant for people that aren’t just children, young adults or mentally stucked manchildren. Dobson, after this page you have no right to call your stuff “appropriate for children” or mature anymore.

I am genuinely furious at this page right now as that I can go on. So here, have the last page of this chapter so I can wrap this up and enjoy some good forms of fiction…

Well Atea, everyone he knew from this village and potentially cared about died in an house collapsing with no one having removed the remains still and he is going on a cemetery. UNLIKE DOBSON WHEN WRITING THIS, USE YOUR BRAIN YOU INSULT TO LESBIANS!

[houseofvans]

SKETCHY BEHAVIORS | INTERVIEW WITH PEARL C. HSIUNG

LA based multimedia artist Pearl C. Hsiung explores the relationships between humans and nature through her various paintings, sculptures, videos and installations.  In a collaboration with the Borrego Boys & Girls Club as well as members of the public, Pearl recently created a site-specific sculpture using wood, plexiglass and non-recyclable plastic waste. She’s also unveiling a large-scale tile mosaic commission in 2022 at the new 2nd/Hope St Metro station in downtown, LA. We’re excited to find out more about Pearl’s artwork, collaborations, and what she’s got coming up for the rest of the year.

Take the Leap! 

Photographs courtesy of the artist. 

Could you introduce yourself to everybody? Hi I’m Pearl C Hsiung, I live and work in Los Angeles.  ‘Hsiung’ is pronounced ‘shung’ and means the animal bear in Chinese.  I have a pet mini-Rex named Rambo who lives free- range in my apartment.

How would you describe the art you create? How would you describe your particular technique? I’d say that my practice uses the landscape as a starting point for thinking through our connection to it and towards the idea that we are inseparable from the matter around us.  If all matter in the universe combusted out of the same material then our current, subjective reality, where we behave as if we’re defined apart from everything around us, is an illusion.  

In past painting, video and installation works this is performed through metamorphosing, flowing and eruptive forms bursting out of their geological, biological, technological, and cultural skins.  In works like Full Gorge (2017) and Original Face (2018), I was thinking about the interconnection of all that is natural, human, more-than-human and artificial through an experience of immersive presence in material space.  

For me, these free-standing paintings point to a certain moment of presence, not unlike the moment I experience sometimes after reading certain zen kõans or Daoist phrases; it is an instant moment, a moment of clarity where I understand it all.  But it is fleeting, it is a momentary experience that precedes, challenges or completely eludes language.  Maybe this is not unlike a moment experienced when in nature, during sex or laughter (during both?), plugged into VR or while coding.  

What are your favorite things to paint? What should folks take away from your works? I enjoy painting on canvas, paper, MDF, wood…  Actually I hope people bring to my works.  I encourage the exchange that I make the work and viewers bring their perceptions and interpretations.

What’s a typical day in the studio for you like? And what are you currently working on in the studio? My studio schedule is fluid depending on the season.  It also depends on how much I’m teaching, I may only get one full day and a couple half days a week for the studio, other times I’m 5-6 days a week.  Time spent in the studio varies a lot and can include research, reading, sketching, painting, writing, building, cleaning, organizing, accounting, correspondence, grant proposals, teaching applications, pacing, prepping for big work/big actions, paint experiments, materials tests, staring, repotting plants…

I’m starting on new work for a show at Visitor Welcome Center in Koreatown in November 2019.

When you’re working on and developing a new painting or piece, how does it begin - take us from sketchbook, to color choices, to finished painting?   New work is always a continuation of themes and ideas from previous works and research. The form changes as the focus shifts on those ideas or approaches.  The decisions on everything from composition, structure, color palette and presentation are informed by this new focus as well as the new context of making that work.  Personal, experiential, studio environment, cultural influences, topical events all seep into that.  The sketchbook is full of garbage, I let it sit there to compost and sometimes it sprouts a new bud…

What tools will someone always find you using at your studio? What are your preferred materials? Tools have changed through the years.  More recently you’ll see squeegees and plastic paint guides (that I use like a squeegee) rather than brushes for the paintings.  Consistently, I use white paper and tape as painting tools.  The computer, the internet and books are always studio necessities for research and admin tools.  I use paints and inks that comes tubes, tubs, tins, buckets, bottles, spray cans, jars, sets on canvas, cold-pressed paper, MDF, cardboard.  I’ve been experimenting with painting on non-recyclable plastic I’ve tried to make into it’s own substrate but it’s not yet working out.

How do you unplug yourself so to speak? What do you do to center or re-focus yourself if you find yourself stressed out about deadlines, art shows, and the sort? When the stress piles up it helps if I do yoga first thing in the morning in my living room, but the best way to deal with the stress is to work through it.  When I feel overwhelmed by anxiety relating to projects, teaching, or deadlines, it usually helps me to become more prepared, using research, preparation and experimentation to deal with the parts that can be addressed.  For short term refocusing, I step outside and stare at things:  the sky, the plants outside of my studio, the birds on the telephone lines, the clouds.  Or I’ll take a walk around the block, change my daily routine like driving a different route, take the bus, walk through the grocery or thrift store before getting to work.  

For longer term re-centering, if I can, I leave town or just go stare at the ocean.  Staring is like open-eyed meditation for me, I try to empty out my thoughts, blank out and spend unscheduled time.  Sleep well and spending time with family and friends are also priceless rechargers.

You recently worked with AIR Talks: Candlewood Arts Festival collaborated with folks you met at the Borrego Boys & Girls Club? Tells us about the festival, the project and about the various workshops you helped conduct? Why was this event so important to you? This was the inaugural Candlewood Arts Festival, a temporary public art event in the town of Borrego Springs located in the Anza Borrego State Park.  Tanya Aguiniga, Devon Tsuno, Kor Newkirk, Mario Ybarra Jr and I created different site- and community-specific sculptures and happenings during the last weekend of March 2019.  Most of our works were located out in Galleta Meadows, an open, outdoor lot amidst the expansive desert landscape.  

For my sculpture Holocene Screen, I collaborated with youth from the Borrego Boys & Girls Club as well as members of the public during a workshop at the Borrego Art Institute to create a sculpture using wood, plexiglass and non-recyclable plastic waste that considered the simultaneity of nature, human and artificial as a landscape within a landscape.  

As part of the Holocene Screen workshop process, the students had to brainstorm words that fell into three categories: nature, human and artificial.  Then they were asked to write a short story, poem or single sentence using one word from each category which they painted onto a plexiglass window in the sculpture.  It was interesting to learn how easy it was for them to identify elements from nature and human, yet struggle with artificial.  

We had discussions about what artificial is and what items from their everyday lives fall under that definition.  Their next step was to visualize and compose a singular picture or narrative that threaded all three.  I think that was a good example of how easily we can grasp, and even romanticize and/or idealize the relationship between nature and human, and the difficulty or resistance to imagining the artificial in our aesthetic compositions or picture of reality.  

My intention, for both workshop participants and myself, was to place these three elements in one view, one image in order to de-emphasize the space between natural and unnatural.  What does that look like and where does that lead us to.

What do you enjoy about collaborations? What would be your dream collaboration? The best aspect of collaboration is giving up control and the sharing of ideas and labor.  Working in the studio is so solitary that it can be a great relief to open up to working with someone else or others.

Earlier this year you also showed works and visited with the Paramo Galeria in Guadalajara! Tell us a bit about the overall experience and exhibition. I had paintings included in New Suns, a group exhibition curated by Kris Kuramitsu at Paramó, it was the first time I’ve been to Guadalajara.  It was thrilling to be showing with such a strong group of artists, Sherin Guirguis, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Nasim Hantehzadeh and Gabriella Sánchez among them.  I went for the opening back in December and also spoke on a panel with Sherin, Kenyatta and Kris at the Guadalajara International Book Fair, which I learned is the largest book fair of the Americas and the second largest in the world.  

Another first was speaking to an audience while being translated sentence by sentence.  We had a really furtive conversation though regarding the themes that our practices share.  

Something else that was new for me, was having an experience that someone might call…spirit related.  Ghost or undead related?  I told you about it later and you also had a ghostly experience the same weekend but in Big Bear?  

All I will say is that it was a disturbance by very young thing that was too visceral to be a dream.

You’ve worked in various mediums from murals to sculpture to painting to video / animation. Is there a medium you’ve yet to try that you want to get into? I like an answer that Gertrude Stein gave during an interview from 1935.  It regards the forms that writing takes, i.e. the novel, the autobiography etc, so I’m taking it out of context a bit, but the interviewer asks her “What has passion got to do with choosing an art form?”  She answers “Everything.  There is nothing else that determines form.”  So I think I’ve let form, or choice of medium come from the initial impulses of the work I end up making.  Maybe there is a VR piece or mural in bronze in my future….

What’s the most challenging aspect of what you do? How do you overcome these obstacles? What keeps you going? Financial sustainability.  Keeping the studio open while also preserving time to work in it.  I live off a financial collage composed of hustling - teaching, selling work, artist lectures, panel discussions, grants, commissions - but the stress of keeping it together has taken years off my life!

Share with us some artists you’re really excited about as of late.  York Chang,The Signal and The Noiseat Vincent Price Art Museum, April-July 2019. What I like about York Chang’s works in this show is that he uses information, text, images and sound to magnify the chaotic and disorienting feeling that comes with checking your phone, radio or tv for news or information. Facts and truths are just atoms floating around in a giant cosmos of distorted narratives, info, and transmissions, you cannot locate the signal or its source amidst the noise. The show’s installation makes you feel swallowed up in this, it’s enveloping yetliberating to be lost in, setting you up to enjoy the weird connections that York makes.

Carolina Caycedo’s Apariciones / Apparitions, a video exhibited at the Huntington Library last summer (you can see it on view at the Vincent Price Art Museum this summer, June 15 - December 21, 2019.)  This video is gorgeous and powerful.  Female, black, brown and queer dancers twirl, flounce, throb and glide throughout the colonial-style and asian gardens and libraries of the Huntington.  Sometimes they are totally fluid bodies in motion and at others times quite still and making spellbinding eye-contact with the viewer. You are watching a conjuring of the bodies and spirits of those whose representations and histories are missing throughout the art, books and histories archived in the Huntington’s collections.

Christina Quarles But I Woke Jus’ Tha Same at Regen Projects, April-May 2019. I suggest people see her paintings in person, they are really engaging.  They are figurative, figures coupling, moving into and through each other, embracing beyond recognition by the brain and into recognition by the flesh.  Materially they are gymnastic, virtuosic but not stuffy and make me want to paint. York Chang, The Signal and The Noise at Vincent Price Art Museum, April-July 2019.  What I like about York Chang’s works in this show is that he uses information, text, images and sound to magnify the chaotic and disorienting feeling that comes with checking your phone, radio or tv for news or information. Facts and truths are just atoms floating around in a giant cosmos of distorted narratives, info, and transmissions, you cannot locate the signal or its source amidst the noise.

Dynasty Handbag (Jibz Cameron) is a performance, video artist who lives in LA right now.  She’s the sharpest, funniest, slipperiest, grotesque-adjacent comic performer in the universe.  When you see her live, she reads the room, the crowd and herself so spontaneously that you’re always on a mood-swinging rollercoaster. She’s so distortedly vulnerable, proud and charming that you’re not only laugh-crying with and at her, but you’re mostly dying over how culture makes us schizo and insane.  She hosts a monthly queer performance night called Weirdo Night here at Zebulon.

What are your favorite Vans? SK8-His that are all solid black w/ black soles.

What do you have coming up that you can share with us? I’ve got a show opening in November 2019 at Visitor Welcome Center in Koreatown, LA and a large-scale tile mosaic commission at the new 2nd/Hope St Metro station in downtown LA, opening in 2022!!

FOLLOW PEARL | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM 

[sol1056]

if you promise peaches, deliver peaches.

After S7, the asks have been piling up. A few examples:

I was so confused in ep4 when Acxa disappeared, I thought she’d stuck with the team after ep3 and maybe I just missed the scene where she left, but others have brought that up, too.

Funny how the majority of the problems in s7 are because they tried to force BP Keith to the detriment of the story, and ironically, Keith's story, too.

I thought Lance’s family reunion would be much more emotional and be a part of his arc, since he was the most homesick, but then they gave that to Hunk?

Shiro got tossed aside in the most ableist, racist, and homophobic way, and Allura could have had a cool storyline mixing her paladinship and her castle storyline with a new altean mecha, instead of Shiro becoming a bad Allura 2.0 and Keith becoming a bad Shiro 2.0.

Srsly tho, am I the only one who finds it extremely bothering that in writing Allura and Lance they don't bother to show Allura coming to view Lance in a romantic light after her breakup?

Why even bother in S6 to make such a big deal of Shiro/Kuron saying his dream is to be a paladin over and over? Until he was revealed a clone some of us thought he was Shiro, so it's even harder to accept Shiro not being BP anymore.

The EPs seem to be so stuck in their initial idea and salty they couldn’t do it exactly as they want that they just ignore the story itself?

The EPs have spoken of being determined to get the VLD gig out of fear it’d be given to someone who'd wreck the story. That's understandable, but we're talking about a 78-episode, six-season, space opera mecha series. This genre practically demands a sprawling world and a massive cast, and it's far beyond the scope of anything either JDS or LM have ever helmed on their own. 

My guess is that JDS and LM didn’t realize the enormity of what they were taking on, or they (and their bosses) seriously underestimated the degree to which they were wholly unprepared.

Behind the cut: what I meant when I said these EPs are not storytellers.

I’m not surprised the EPs over-estimated their skill, really. People will look at a creative process like art –- where you often start young, practice daily, maybe study it formally, apprentice or intern (especially in animation), and gradually work your way up -- and they see the effort. They know it wasn’t an overnight thing. 

Too often, the very same people won’t accord that respect to the art of storytelling. It’s treated like divine inspiration, something that just happens. We’ve been hearing and reading and watching stories all our lives; how hard can it be to do it ourselves?

It’s goddamn hard, is what it is. I would love to tell you otherwise, but that’s the truth. You can rock your dialogue but you gotta track character goals, too. Complicated backstories only get you so far if you don’t understand how to modulate tension. You can have a great premise but you still gotta resolve the damn thing. A story has a hundred moving parts; scale up to a space opera’s necessary levels of epic and we’re talking exponentially more.

In my experience, the hardest part of storytelling — not the technical aspects of writing, but the art of storytelling — is holding the shape of the story in your head. The entire thing, all at once. You have to, if you’re to see how a choice at this point will echo down the line, or a motif laid here should reflect there, how the theme shifts but stays true from start to end, how these secondary arcs weave together to undergird the main arc.

I’d say a lot of what we learn in our first few novels is how to see — and hold —the story’s shape in our head. I’m not talking dialogue or voice acting or choreography. I’m talking about the overall shape, the vision and theme it establishes, evolves, and eventually resolves.

If we cannot, we will find our stories promise peaches and deliver pine cones.

Looking back, there are too many clues --- almost all given by the EPs themselves --- that they didn't have the experience to do this story justice. What they did have was a certainty that their vision was the best, an inability to deviate from that one story they'd devised, and a continual low-grade frustration at being held back.

Let's go back to the beginning. S1 starts a little rocky (to be expected as a team finds its groove), but S2 builds on S1 quite deftly. It’s not perfect, but in a storytelling sense, it’s the strongest season, and it's much too self-assured to be a beginner’s. It moves swiftly but steadily to a pivotal midpoint, and from there snowballs gracefully into its finale; it balances nuanced characterization with plot movement, and its opening promises bear fruit by the end.

In those earliest interviews and panels, the EPs are often casually vague about basic details, like character ages or relationships. At least twice their answers change, giving the impression they hadn't known and had needed to confirm with someone else. Generally, though, they're low-key and hopeful, possibly leaning on the borrowed confidence of that other storyteller’s influence.

By S3/S4, their tone shifts to a peculiar kind of non-ownership. They joke about having no idea what's going on, tossing out guesses as though they'd be the last to know. They offer head canons, rather than insight. They wear their frustration openly, alluding to the story they'd wanted, chafing at what had been decided for them.

As the story moved into the split-seasons, it's clear that whomever lent that guiding hand in S1/S2 was no longer present. Someone else’s fingerprints are on S3, and my guess is it’s mostly Hedrick, at least on the script-level. The word choices change, the cadences change, the beats change. From S3 on, VLD has all the hallmarks of a muddy vision. 

You can see that in the story’s shape. It holds together, but barely. It darts forward, then sideways, then treads water for a bit. It’s erratically paced, dropping plot points and introducing new ones, only to drop those as well. It can’t settle on a driving antagonist, and when it finally does, it can't keep the antagonist’s goal consistent. It sacrifices nuance for one-note characterization, and shoves most substantiative character growth off-screen.

This continues to S6, which generally continues the focus on plot coupons over character goals, exposition at the cost of emotional beats, and neglecting established characters to introduce left-field swerves in the guise of plot twists. On the plus side, it does manage to rally enough to end its multi-season prevarication, and put to bed questions hanging around since late S3.

It's worth noting that both EPs have only a single writing credit each, for the pilot three-parter. That makes it doubly striking that JDS chose to write the Black Paladins episode. After the season aired, JDS complained in passing about rewrites on his episode. If that seems odd, remember that an EP has final approval on every script. If it bothered him to have his ideas rejected in favor of keeping Shiro, it must've burned to have his writing choices countermanded.

From the timing and the episode credits, this must've been around when Tim Hedrick left the team --- and the EPs took full ownership. 

It shows in their post-S6 interviews. Gone are the ambiguous expressions or vague promises of doing their best. Their wording is declarative: what Kuron had been, what Shiro would be, the resolution of Shiro’s illness, the nature of Shiro’s past relationship. None is equivocated, nor couched as head canons. They’ve taken control of the narrative, and their interpretation is now the deciding one.

This change was important enough to them that they had to make sure we’re aware. There’s simply no other reason to tell us S7 had been written in its entirety, let alone tell us the original outcome. Nor is there any other reason to tell us they petitioned for — and got — permission to rewrite.

When I look at S7 with my writer’s hat on, everything tells me this is where the brakes came off. With Hedrick’s departure, there was no one left but the EPs themselves to steer the story. By whatever means, for whatever reason, VLD went from a crafted vision, to a conflicted one, to none at all.

Set aside the larger controversies for a moment, and just think about the shape of S7. It’s almost three seasons in one: the first part skips from event to event, then abruptly timeskips to reset the entire playing field. That second part in turn is divided from the last half by a two-parter that halts momentum for an overlong flashback with an entirely new cast, followed by a finale that mostly backseats its protagonists in favor of letting that new cast dominate.

There’s a common pattern in the way beginner writers react to critique, and I see that all over the EPs’s responses, from the beginning. It’s only grown worse since S6. They can’t quite juggle the story they think they’re telling versus the story they’re actually telling.

I’ve had these conversations too many times to count. I ask, how did this character get from here to there? The newbie storyteller is quick to explain, usually in great detail. I ask, but then why did this happen? The more I dig, the greater the chance the newbie will get angry that I don’t seem to be reading the story they’re so obviously telling. If I keep pushing, they’ll get defensive.

They’ll confidently assure me this is exactly the story they’d intended to tell, and if I don’t like it, that’s my problem. (They may not be able to hold the shape in their head, but they’ve probably already taken to heart the adage that one must stay true to one’s ‘artistic’ vision. The part about listening to critique even when it’s uncomfortable… that takes a bit longer to learn.)

My reaction almost always boils down to: you’re telling me this amazing story, but that’s not the story you’ve actually written.

Sometimes the best description of the shape of a newbie’s story is that of a house after a tornado’s swept through: the front door is on the chimney, the roof is half-off, and the windows are shattered in the front yard. Most of the pieces are there, but it’s all so jumbled the newbie storyteller can’t see what’s missing. They can’t hold the shape of the story in their head, so even when they know here’s where something goes, they’re too overwhelmed to remember the door they need is still on the chimney.

An epic story is no cakewalk, and boy do I give credit for that effort, but it’s one thing to learn by noodling in a fandom on AO3. It’s quite another to do it at the scale of a television series, let alone one with the expected scope of a space opera spanning galaxies. This is not the place to learn as you go.

Here’s why the shape of the story — and holding that in your head — is so important. 

Think of a story’s resolution like a fresh peach. You want the reader to bite into the peach as the culmination of everything the story has been, from start to end. But you don’t get a peach by planting pine trees. You must start with the proper seeds, and make sure what grows is a peach tree, such that your final act bears the right fruit.

I touched on this before with the promise of the premise. Themes, backstories, world-building, and motifs are facets of the seeds planted in the first act. Everything you need to resolve the story must be present when the story begins; that’s where your premise lies, and your promises are made. 

Through the entire second act, the tree must grow. The storyteller’s task is to trim as needed, bind this to that, shore up the roots, add water and nurture: this is where the theme expands, the foreshadowing laid, the questions reveal answers that lead to further questions, narrowing the outcome, each outlining the tree’s shape in sharper detail.

By the time the story turns the corner into the third act, the readers should be reasonably certain they’re going to get a peach tree. This is not a bad thing! You want them looking forward to plucking the peach and enjoying it. You want everything planted at story-beginning to come to fruition, at story-end.

That is why you must hold the shape — the vision — in your head, always checking against where you began and where you plan to end. You cannot throw out the entire tree at the end of the second act and start over; if you ignore the fruit your story is producing and insist on serving up pine cones, you’re going to have confused and possibly angry readers.

You promised them peaches, damn it.

The story is now midway through the third act. Everything planted in the previous seasons must now be coming to fruition… but it won’t. The EPs are openly (even proudly) reversing course on everything that’s come before. That means directly violating every motif, every thematic element, every bit of foreshadowing in word, image, or sound.

And at the same time, the story’s scope is simply too vast, and they haven’t the experience to juggle all the thousands of moving parts. The result is the most slapdash season, yet. Characters simply drop out of sight, only to reappear again with no warning. Themes and motifs built up over so many episodes are tossed aside as if they mean nothing.

The hand-to-hand fights are visually striking — the EPs’ strengths are in storyboarding, after all — but emotionally hollow, bereft of dialogue that could finally give us closure. Characters that would’ve once spoken openly with each other barely exchange a word; character-distinct dialogue is uttered by someone else, as though the VAs mixed up the scripts in the recording booth.

To achieve the emotional heft required for a meaningful resolution, there must be echoes of the story’s beginning. But when the beginning is negated—underscored by a timeskip that resets the entire playing field—there’s nothing to refer back to. The events now are happening in a void, divorced from the themes and motifs that created the emotional context in the first place.

This is by design; the EPs’ vision has never matched with the story as it was told to this point. They can’t go back, so they’ve rebooted. Once with the timeskip, and again with a two-parter episode that introduces new characters that can be entirely their own. Compared to the protagonists, these secondary characters have been lavished with attention to the point of overload: full names, backstories, designs. All of of that, and the time required to introduce them is to the detriment of the actual protagonists.

Whatever story VLD ostensibly set out to tell, that story is gone, now.

This is no longer a matter of losing track of the story, such that the promised peaches have transmuted into pine trees. We passed that point somewhere in S6. The EPs have burnt down the orchard to plant new seeds, while doing their best to ignore the charred stump of the story we'd been promised.

I would've preferred peaches, myself. That was the story I was promised, and that was the fruit I expected from everything I saw onscreen. But now? 

I hope you like carrots.

[readingwebcomics]

Analyzing Questionable Content: Pages 51-100

No Faye, it only looks that way because he’s playing Final Fantasy X-2. Good God, I just realized that Final Fantasy X-2 is someone’s first experience with Final Fantasy. That’s a depressing thought. Although someone starting out the series with Final Fantasy XIII is probably way worse, now that I think about it. At least X-2 had fun.

…huh? Oh right, the comic. You sure you’d rather not listen to me write an essay on Final Fantasy, instead? I have this great point about how Final Fantasy IX has the most emotionally impactful narrative but as a game it only really clicks with long-time players of… no? Okay fine, let’s get back into QC.

The very next comic has Marten getting a tax return check for $1,100, and being the wise adult that he is, decides to spend that money on a new guitar. Tagging along, Faye brings up something that gives us new insight on her character:

And clearly didn’t bore her, considering how much of that information she retained. Here we have yet another example of a shared interest between these two, Marten clearly being into Guitars if he’s invested enough to blow a fat wad of money on it and Faye carrying around quite a bit of information on the instrument herself. I’ve made the point in the last post, but to reiterate – at this point in the comic, it’s clear these two are clicking as far as interests go. They can keep up with each other, can and have provided support for one another, and challenge one another… okay granted that last one isn’t entirely true, it’s clear Faye challenges Marten more than vice-versa, but still. There is a clear, acting relationship dynamic between these two, whether platonic or romantic. The reason why early QC works as well as it does is because these two have clear characters to them and their relationship FEELS real – they feel like people you’d know who’d really be friends – or maybe more than friends. This is Jeph’s character writing at… well I hesitate to call it at its best because to imply he peaked as early as the 53rd comic would be an insult to him as a writer, and I’m not looking to do that here.

I’m looking to do that a little bit later on in this part when we discuss Faye’s “character quirk.”

Before that however, we’re going to get a little bit on insight on Marten:

The story is elaborated on in a future comic, but here we get Marten’s backstory – traveling across the country for a girl, the relationship falling apart and leaving him stuck in this part of the country. This will go on to explain several of his character choices, including Pintsize (although that’s something we’re not going to approach until MUCH later on). It also further elaborates on Marten’s character as a whole: He doesn’t make many active actions as a whole, but when he does, it tends to shift the entire dynamic of how he lives. He decided he wanted to follow this woman across the country, and that action ended up completely upending his life. Could this be part of the reason why Marten is so passive? Does he skew towards this lifestyle because he’s been “trained” to take any kind of affirmative action as an intense, life-changing event?

While I’m not certain myself, and I have a damn good feeling Jeph wasn’t thinking that far ahead when writing Marten’s character, it’s an angle I’m willing to continue exploring as we further our journey down this comic’s history.

This comic was written in 2003. I’m half-tempted to believe Meme culture can be tracked by indie bands now. Wonder if there was any zeitgeist with neo-nazi indie bands ten or fifteen years ago then, if that theory holds true?

…I just made myself really, really sad.

Later on, Pintsize proceeds to eat a cake when he really shouldn’t – again – and we are gifted with… this lovely image.

Okay. I understand Pintsize is an AI, so it makes total sense for him to be able to be uploaded to a PC like this (ignoring for the moment modern commercial hardware can’t possibly support the resources necessary to maintain human-level sapience and ESPECIALLY not in 2003), but this is one of the freakiest fucking things I’ve seen from this comic. Mostly because at the time of writing we’re on comic 4000 and AI as a whole take an entirely different turn in the world of QC around that time, so… this is just kinda surreal to look at.

…We’ll get to AI in regards to QC’s universe later on when it becomes more relevant. Needless to say, it becomes one of the core “themes” of the comic as a whole.

The narrative reason for this turn of events is simple:

Pintsize is now in a new visually appealing model, capable of moving his joints around so he can do more than just stand around and talk!

…also one that has a horrifying government-level laser built into it! Believe it or not, this DOES become a relevant plot-point later and it’s not just for the sake of a gag. This is a great example of Jeph taking a tiny detail he may have originally written in as a joke and building off it to create conflict… although I’ll be getting more into that later on when it actually DOES become relevant.

Pintsize agrees to turn the laser off, and a few comics later Marten and Steve go to the bar to discuss their lives – specifically Marten’s love life.

Further showcasing of Marten’s passive nature and his straight-up lack of confidence.

Say goodbye to Sara everyone – for real this time, I’m fairly certain this is the very last time we ever see her. I could be mistaken, but I highly doubt it. Plus, while we don’t see it in detail we get enough information to gleam Steve as Marten’s exact opposite – charming without being overwhelming, confident without being cocky. Steve is just straight-up a cool dude, and it’s easy to see how he can easily get into relationships while Marten stays there floating along, too scared and/or passive to make the move that comes to Steve naturally.

Wait. Shit, I may have the hots for Steve. Abort, aboRT, ABOR-

I’m showing this in part to showcase the next point of conflict and also to draw attention to the new style Jeph is trying. He’ll do this throughout the run of QC, trying out brand-new styles to see what fits and what doesn’t. I’ll be including this in my comparison pictures at the very end of this post to give a clearer image of what changes and how he improves… although you can see even in this comic he’s struggling against old habits as Marten’s face in the final panel looks drastically different than in the rest, looking more akin to how he looked in older comics. That’s okay! Habits die hard, it’s worth applauding the fact that Jeph is trying. God knows I can’t draw to save my fucking life, so I’ll always support artists trying new things.

I’m mostly including this panel for two reasons: The fact that Faye’s stuck in the closet right now – if you don’t get why that’s funny, you will in about 3700 comics from now – and the way she’s talking. Do you notice something different about the “feel” of Faye’s dialogue? Keep an eye on it, I’ll try to include more panels of her talking from this point onward.

Anyway, Marten dismantles the previously established conflict by revealing he managed to get Faye’s prescription for her and got her a new pair of glasses.

Mark this as the second time Faye has actually displayed real physical aggression against Marten.

Again, depending on how much you know about AI in QC’s world from future comics this could either be a lot funnier or a hell of a lot less funny. Although… the subject of AI mortality would make for an EXTREMELY interesting plot point in more recent comics. Remind me to touch on that when we get further along.

Again: Pay attention to Faye’s dialogue in this comic, especially in that last panel. You’re noticing it, aren’t you? The fact that she sounds a little… different? Give me a little more time, I promise I’ll touch on it a little later.

Hey, guess what? It’s later!

Faye does not punch Marten whenever she says something nice about him. In fact, she has ever only assaulted Marten twice – both times for completely arbitrary reasons not related to her saying anything to or about Marten. Nor has Faye ever spoken completely without contractions, as you see she’s doing now. Later comics will go on to point out how odd it is that Faye only speaks with contractions when she’s drunk and dips into her southern accent… when we’ve seen in previous comics that she is capable of speaking with contractions and talking like a normal human being. This change has shifted the entire “feel” of every line of Faye’s dialogue, as she no longer “sounds” like the Faye we started the comic with.

These are both examples of a writing mistake that a lot of long-form regular updating writers make, be it fanfiction or daily comics – retcons. If you’re reading this, you most likely know what a retcon is. For the few of you that don’t, a retcon – short for retroactive continuity – is the practice of in later works of an ongoing series introducing a fact that changes what was previously established in previous works. This is most commonly seen in Superhero comics from Marvel and DC, but the kind of retcon I’m talking about is more common on smaller scale works, like fanfiction or unedited novels or ongoing RPs.

See, when the writer realizes they wanted to change up something, introduce a plot element that would require them to go back and change something previously to make it make sense and find that for whatever reason they can’t, they may go ahead and introduce the plot element anyway while assuring the reader that no, of course this element was always included. That’s what’s happening here – Jeph had an idea for a plot element he wants to include, realized he can’t exactly go back to older comics and change them considering it’s a regularly updated webcomic, and so decided to retcon these facts by introducing them like they’ve always been a part of things and assert their truth while continuing on.

Not that I can necessarily blame the man – in a situation like this, realizing there’s an important plot element that you want to work with but can’t due to you leaving it no room in what you’ve previously published, there’s not much else you can do besides either retconning things or accepting you can’t introduce that plot element and just move on. However, there are other ways you can work with this that abide by previously established continuity and lets you introduce a plot element you want to introduce. For example, Faye punching Marten: You could introduce it as something she feels more comfortable doing the longer she’s around him. Have more frequent comics of her following saying something nice up with a punch, let us see her actually assault him more, and draw a correlation between her getting more comfortable around him and her getting more physically aggressive – something Jeph does touch on later, so it is entirely possible to introduce this new dynamic without asserting things have happened that we clearly see haven’t happened.

…as for Faye not speaking in contractions however, that’s just stupid. It’s a gimmick for her character, plain and simple, without adding anything to her as a character. If you want something big to showcase she’s keeping herself restrained, just continue as you were, having her speak in a southern accent when she’s drunk. That works as a fun gag to attach to her character without seeming like a dumb gimmick. And I’m sorry to say… this whole “Faye doesn’t speak in contractions” thing? It’s a dumb gimmick.

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that all off my chest, let’s introduce ourselves to the new main character of QC…

This is Dora, the owner of the Coffee Shop that Faye works at. She’s a cool cat and (seemingly) supremely chill. She’s introduced as another secondary character like Steve, but will swiftly become a mainstay character and join what will become a growing ensemble cast.

Also, potential conflict is seeded when it’s revealed she’s totally crushing on Marten.

And if you doubt Faye’s assessment, let’s hear it from the woman in question herself.

Also say hello to Dora’s cat. The cat has a name, I just can’t remember it for the life of me considering the little fella joins Sara on that island eventually. But yeah, Dora DEFINITELY has the hots for Marten, sewing another potential seed for conflict later on – Marten and Faye are certainly in the “will they or won’t they?” phase, and here sits Faye’s own boss with a clear, vested interest in Marten. Will she make a move and push Faye to take action? Time will tell.

Jeph enjoys trolling his audience, and Marten is suffering because of it.

Dora goes on to establish herself in the reader’s minds by having a clear, distinct personality that bounces off Faye’s beautifully. They banter so comfortably with one another it makes it so much fun to read, which goes on to make Dora a more appealing character to the reader. The more she talks, the more you want to see her because she’s such a genuinely charismatic individual… which can further serve to establish her as a very real conflict in the potential Marten and Faye relationship. After all, what’s a greater spanner in the works of this “will they or won’t they?” relationship than a character who will gladly say “Yeah, I will” that the audience likes enough that they are completely on-board with seeing go through?

The most dangerous thing to a romcom relationship is a third wheel that a good portion of the audience prefers over the teased relationship, and that creates good drama.

(Also Sara’s name is spelled wrong but eh it’s not like she’s around to complain anyway)

…that said, Dora goes on to assure Faye that she has no intention of swiping Marten off his feet away from her when it’s clear Faye’s interested in him. Then again… the more Faye insists she’s not interested in him, the more likely it may be that Dora believes her.

True story, I found this concept so funny that in a campaign I ran a few years ago, I actually had one of the players – who was supposed to be stuck as a worker in a dreary 9-to-5 job that he’d desperately want to escape to go onto adventure – be labeled as the Office Bitch. My only regret is that I didn’t print out a real business card for his player. That either would have gotten a laugh from the table or gotten me punched.

This here is Scott, Marten’s boss. He’s a cool dude, but for reasons that will become evident later on we don’t see very much of him. At first, I thought he was going to end up being the future husband of Marten’s father – and if you haven’t read through QC yourself that sentence will probably completely catch you flat-footed – but looking it up later I found that Marten marries a man named Maurice, not Scott. I only thought they were the same person because they’re both blonde and the art style changes so much later on anyone could look like anyone else.

Actually, fun fact: I started reading QC when 2512 was the most recent comic, so before she was introduced I thought Faye and Marigold were the same person because of how drastically the art style changed and I only recognized “curvy white girl with glasses and brown hair”.

Anyway, Scott’s pretty chill and… yeah. Yeah, that’s pretty much it. He’s a chill dude to work for, and that’s probably the only reason Marten hasn’t outright quit his job yet. The worst job in the world can be made tolerable with a good boss, and the best job in the world can be made unbearable with an awful boss.

Further evidence of the lack of contractions hurting the way Faye’s voice comes across than anything else. Seriously, is it just me or does this not sound like Faye? Like, at ALL? I’m open to being told I’m wrong, just… seriously.

Aaaand here we have Steve officially having broken up with Sara. Also, it’s a small thing but like I’ve said, I’ll give Jeph credit where it’s due – that visible wince on Marten’s face is the most expressive any of his characters have been thus far. Good work man, I’m happy to see you improving with your art!

After drinking together, Marten and Faye decide to go to an all-night diner for some drunken late-night pancakes when we get this bit of information from Faye:

That is Faye, if you can figure out which of the two Martens your fist will connect with. But yeah, the fact that Faye speaks in a southern drawl while intoxicated went from a joke to actual character – she’s legitimately from Georgia and that’s her natural way of speaking. Which may raise the question to the reader, why does she repress that voice so much? Don’t worry – they touch on it in later comics. For now though, another round of applause to Jeph for slowly and organically creating new information about his characters.

Faye is clearly not telling the whole story – the lack of eye contact being a key indicator of just that. Still, we’re getting a little bit more information on her, and the fact that she kept her wording vague leaves a lot to still explore in her future. Needless to say… it was a LOT more than just her mother being over-protective that led her to moving up north.

Marten’s just kind of accepted his lot in life by this point. Although when I was first reading through these I honestly thought this was going to be the headbutt-into-crotch moment.

Once again, if you haven’t read through QC yourself that sentence made zero sense to you. I’m kind of giggling at the thought of someone reading that and doing a double-take, actually.

Finally, we have the last comic of this batch, setting up a bit of conflict for our next batch…

Wuh-oh! Marten walked in on Faye changing! One really nice detail is that you can see the scar on Faye’s chest right there in the first panel, which means Jeph had a LOT of Faye’s backstory already planned out while he was drawing this stuff. Which just leaves me to wonder… how far back did he have this planned? When Faye first showed up in the third comic? When he had her start speaking in a southern accent while drunk? When he decided to have her stop speaking in contractions? I’d love to ask him, but I know for a fact he wouldn’t give me the time of day. Oh well, either way: He’s got shit planned out, shit that we won’t see until Comic 500 or so, and that’s always good for a long-form comic like this.

Like last time, let’s do some quick comparisons between the first comic of the batch, the comic where Jeph made a clear and active effort to change the art style, and the last comic of the batch:

It looks like Jeph found a happy medium between the style he was originally going for and the newer style he tried to incorporate, keeping the relative size and position of the characters’ facial features while rounding out everyone’s faces, making things much less angular than previously. The bodies are also beginning to get some real texture to them, looking closer to real human bodies than stick figures with a shirt.

Overall, what did I think about this batch of comics? Well aside from my complaints about Faye’s lack of using contractions and the sloppy way Jeph tried to incorporate that into the narrative, I thought it was better than the first batch! Marten and Faye are getting into a comfortable rhythm with each other, and we’re falling in-line with that rhythm ourselves. We just met a new character who’s going to be a mainstay of the series and in the few comics she’s shown up in, she’s made her presence stick with the reader. Even if I didn’t know how important Dora would become, I’d be saying I’m looking forward to seeing more of her.

You know what time it is now? That’s riiiiiight! Data compilation time!

Between comics 51-100, the following characters’ proportional “screen time” as it were are as follows:

Marten: 46/50 – 92%

Faye: 45/50 – 90%

Pintsize: 12/50 – 24%

Dora: 8/50 – 16%

Steve: 6/50 – 12%

Sara: 2/50 – 4%

Scott: 2/50 – 4%

Dora’s Cat: 1/50 – 2%

And the grand total of each character’s screentime, not including non-canon or guest comics, from most to least time shown:

Marten: 91/100 – 91%

Faye: 83/100 – 83%

Pintsize: 27/100 – 27%

Steve: 14/100 – 14%

Dora: 8/100 – 8%

Sara: 7/100 – 7%

Jim: 2/100 – 2%

Scott: 2/100 – 2%

Raven: 1/100 – 1%

Dora’s Cat: 1/100 – 1%

Yes, I’m counting Dora’s cat among the statistics. I’ll change the name when I learn what the critter’s name actually is. Also, I was reminded that when the Secret Bakery becomes a thing later on in the comic there will be another character named Jim, with this particular construction worker being called Jimbo instead. I’ll change the name properly when he’s called “Jimbo” proper in the comic, don’t worry. I’ll be doing my best to keep this list from getting confusing… it’s in as much my best interest as yours seeing as I want to keep track of everyone properly.

Tune in next week when we see the exciting conclusion of this spicy “Marten happening to walk in on Faye undressing” drama! And Dora flashing someone. See you then.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to a weekly collaboration between FiveThirtyEight and ABC News. With 5,000 people seemingly thinking about challenging President Trump in 2020 — Democrats and even some Republicans — we’re keeping tabs on the field as it develops. Each week, we’ll run through what the potential candidates are up to — who’s getting closer to officially jumping in the ring and who’s getting further away.

Nearly 20 candidates are now crisscrossing the country to court voters in early primary states, including Rep. Eric Swalwell who declared that he was running for president this week. But despite being one of the early-poll front-runners, former Vice President Joe Biden is still sitting on the sidelines for now, while the party embraces some of the lesser-known contenders.

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, for instance, out-raised several well-known Democratic candidates, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, according to an ABC News analysis of candidates’ preliminary fundraising numbers from the first quarter of 2019. And in a Saint Anslem College poll of New Hampshire registered voters out this week, Buttigieg was in third place, behind Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders with 11 percent of the vote. A new Quinnipiac poll of California voters put Buttigieg slightly lower, tied in fourth place with Warren, with each earning 7 percent of the vote. It’s early yet, though, so whether Buttigieg’s bump in the polls will continue, or if another candidate will edge him out, remains to be seen.

Here’s the weekly candidate roundup:

April 5-11, 2019

Stacey Abrams (D)

The Georgia Democrat continues to hover on the periphery of the 2020 field as she decides whether to run for president or Senate (or neither). When asked during an interview with CNN whether there are too many Democrats running for office, she said, “No, I think that’s a false narrative.”

“The point of a primary is to winnow down the number of people who are actually going to be viewed by the public and go through the fisticuffs of debate,” she said.

Michael Bennet (D)

Days after announcing his prostate cancer diagnosis, the Colorado senator hit the campaign trail with back-to-back stops in early-voting states. The potential 2020 candidate returned to New Hampshire for his second visit over the weekend. He then jetted to Iowa on Monday for a meet and greet with the Polk County Democrats.

Joe Biden (D)

Despite capturing headlines last week over claims that he made several women uncomfortable by inappropriately touching them, Biden avoided controversy during a speech to accept a lifetime achievement for his work supporting cancer access and affordability, particularly for African Americans.

At the close of his remarks, he told the crowd in Washington, “I am convinced, as we make significant progress in cancer, the only truly nonpartisan issue facing the country, that the rest of the nation is going to say, ‘Dammit we can do anything. This is the United States of America.’”

With an announcement expected in the coming weeks, according to CNBC, Biden stopped at the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday for a panel discussion on the opioid epidemic. He will also deliver the eulogy for late U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings in Charleston, South Carolina, on Tuesday.

Cory Booker (D)

Booker, who formally announced his entry into the 2020 race in February, is hosting a hometown official kickoff on Saturday to launch his “Justice for All Tour” that will take him on a two-week trip across the country.

At the onset of the week, the New Jersey senator introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate to form a commission to study reparations. Booker told The Root that he “unequivocally supports” reparations for black people. His bill is a companion to HR 40, introduced by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee in the U.S. House.

“Since slavery in this country, we have had overt policies fueled by white supremacy and racism that have oppressed African Americans economically for generations,” he said. “[The bill] will bring together the best minds to study the issue and propose solutions that will finally begin to right the economic scales of past harms and make sure we are a country where all dignity and humanity is affirmed.”

Pete Buttigieg (D)

Earlier this week, Buttigieg traded barbs with Vice President Mike Pence after he criticized the former Indiana governor for his views on LGBTQ issues.

“If me being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade,” he told a crowd at the LGBTQ Victory Fund National Champagne Brunch. “That’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand. That if you got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me — your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”

Pence’s press secretary responded to Buttigieg’s comments, writing in a tweet, “The last time we recall Pence even mentioned @PeteButtigieg was in 2015, after news that Pete came out, Pence said: ‘I hold Mayor Buttigieg in the highest personal regard. I see him as a dedicated public servant and a patriot.’”

The 37-year-old South Bend mayor, who announced his exploratory committee in January, is poised to officially launch his candidacy on Sunday at a rally in his hometown.

Julian Castro (D)

In the hours after President Trump touched down in San Antonio for a fundraiser, Castro held an opposing rally in the city, according to the Corpus Christi Caller Times. Admonishing the president’s hardline immigration policies, the former San Antonio mayor said: “People in San Antonio understand the value of immigrants. This is a city that has been built up by immigrants, and it’s one of the most successful cities in the United States. It’s a testament to the power of immigration over the generations.”

The former secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development travels to Iowa on Sunday for his third trip to the first-in-the-nation caucus state since announcing his candidacy.

John Delaney (D)

Delaney, one of the first candidates in the field, emphasized his centrist platform on the trail in Pennsylvania to cast himself as a “different kind” of Democrat, according to the The Daily Pennsylvanian.

On Sunday, Delaney makes his 17th trip to New Hampshire, meeting with voters in Bedford, Nashua, Laconia, Meredith, Conway, Lancaster and Deerfield.

Tulsi Gabbard (D)

Gabbard, who launched her campaign in January, hit a significant milestone on Wednesday: reaching the 65,000 donor threshold needed to qualify for the first Democratic debate.

Thank you! I’m extremely grateful that over 65,000 of you have now donated to our campaign, ensuring our voice will be heard in the upcoming debates. For a small campaign that doesn’t accept PAC money, I knew we had to rely fully on the power of the people. Aloha & Mahalo! pic.twitter.com/Uw303e2JUh

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) April 10, 2019

“For a small campaign like ours without a big dollar donor network and a campaign that refuses PAC contributions, we knew we had to rely fully on the power of the people,” she said in a video posted on her Twitter account. “We’ve been blown away.”

Kirsten Gillibrand (D)

The New York senator contended with past congressional votes this week as she addressed her controversial record on immigration during her tenure in the U.S. House while also embracing her relationship with former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

“When I was a member of Congress from upstate New York, I was really focused on the priorities of my district. When I became senator of the entire state, I recognized that some of my views really did need to change,” Gillibrand said during a CNN town hall Tuesday. “They were not thoughtful enough and didn’t care enough about people outside of the original upstate New York district that I represented. So, I learned.”

GIllibrand also said in the town hall that Clinton has given her advice about her presidential campaign and is a “role model for all of us.”

“Hillary Clinton put that 65 million cracks in that highest and hardest glass ceiling. She’s inspired the world by her bravery and courage,” Gillibrand said. “Secretary Clinton is still a role model for all of us.” But despite her admiration for Clinton, Gillibrand said that she believes former President Bill Clinton should have resigned after the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Kamala Harris (D)

Harris signaled that she’s open to an all-female Democratic ticket in 2020, saying in an interview on SiriusXM Progress’s Make It Plain, “Wouldn’t that be fabulous?”

Harris landed in third place in a new Quinnpiac University poll of her home state of California. The poll found that Harris had the support of 17 percent of Democrats and voters who lean Democratic, putting her behind Biden (26 percent) and Sanders (18 percent).

She also made her third trip to Iowa earlier this week — focusing on the issue of raising teacher pay — according to her campaign.

John Hickenlooper (D)

The former Colorado governor took the stage at the Building Trades Conference in Washington to court the pro-union crowd, urging that the country “needs a president” that supports unions.

In his speech, Hickenlooper focused on his private sector experience as a business owner, saying that it will complement his ambitions in the public sector.

“I didn’t check off how many times I said you’re fired,” he told the audience, an apparent jab at President Trump. “I said you’re hired. … That’s why I am running for president.”

Hickenlooper will also make six stops in Iowa starting Friday, during his second trip to the state.

Jay Inslee (D)

Inslee, who has staked his 2020 candidacy on climate change, reinforced his focus on the issue Wednesday while seeking to show his broader record beyond climate.

“We are the first generation to feel the sting of climate change, and we are the last generation, literally, who can do something about it,” the Washington governor said at a CNN town hall.

He also took aim at one key debate playing out across the 2020 field — reforming Senate rules and the filibuster. “We’re not going to be able to get health care done, or anything else for that matter, unless we get rid of the filibuster,” he said. “If the filibuster is still in Mitch McConnell’s hand come 2021, all hope is sort of down the tubes to be able to do real significant reform.”

Inslee travels to Iowa on Friday to visit community members who have been affected by recent flooding, according to his campaign.

Amy Klobuchar (D)

After announcing earlier this week that her campaign committee, Amy for America, raked in $5.2 million in the seven weeks after the launch of her campaign, Klobuchar stopped at a union conference in Washington to deliver a pitch to voters.

Politico reported that the Minnesota senator spoke about her grandfather saving money in a coffee can to send her father to college and her father’s struggle with alcoholism later in life.

“I saw him sink to the lowest valleys because of his struggles. He got three DWIs, and it was on the third DWI that he finally had to go and get treatment,” she said. “Because of his work, because of people that worked with him … just like people work with you, he was pursued by grace, and his life changed.”

Terry McAuliffe (D)

Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who is still considering a run for the White House, signaled that he is closer to making a final decision. “I have not made my decision yet. I am very close,” he said at the Building Trades Conference in Washington. “If I do decide, I’ll make a decision in a couple of weeks.”

McAuliffe spent most of his speech Wednesday touting his record as governor of Virginia — before underscoring his willingness to take on President Trump.

“I think when you’re looking for your next president, you have to look at the governors because they are CEOs,” he said. “I just want you to remember one thing — of all the candidates running, how many have actually wrestled a 280-pound, 8-foot alligator for a political contribution for $15,000.”

“If I can wrestle an alligator, I can sure as hell wrestle Donald Trump,” he said.

Wayne Messam (D)

After announcing his long-shot bid for president, Messam traveled to both South Carolina and Nevada, before heading to California on Thursday. The Democratic mayor of Miramar, Florida, kicked off a two-day visit in the state with a stop at the University of Southern California’s College Democrats meeting.

Seth Moulton (D)

The Massachusetts Democrat embarked on a tour through the early primary states of New Hampshire, South Carolina, Iowa and, most recently, Nevada.

The former Marine, who is considering a 2020 bid, sought to bill himself as an “outsider” in his pitch to a core group of Nevada voters: veterans.

“I’ve always been an outsider,” Moulton said, according to the Nevada Independent. “I’ve always been willing to take on the Washington establishment. That’s been true in almost everything I’ve done, and I’m someone who doesn’t have a long political history. But I am someone who believes in this country.”

As Moulton inches closer to a decision, Politico reported that he is asking voters if he should run for higher office in digital advertisements running on social media.

pic.twitter.com/s9kHe5Qo3Y

— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) April 10, 2019

Beto O’Rourke (D)

The presidential hopeful recently told the Texas Tribune that he had a change of heart about a controversial vote he cast in 2016 on offshore drilling.

His campaign spokesperson told the news outlet that his vote to allow federal dollars to fund oil and gas exploration studies in the eastern Gulf was about trying to “get off of our foreign reliance on resources in oil and gas that has caused so much foreign wars and American lives and troops and resources.” But after speaking with voters on the campaign trail, the spokesperson said, O’Rourke “wouldn’t cast the same vote today.”

The former Texas congressman has been crisscrossing early voting states, bringing the style of his unsuccessful 2018 Senate bid against Ted Cruz to the rest of the country. After an 843-mile drive through Iowa, O’Rourke returns to South Carolina on Friday for his second trip since announcing his candidacy, for a three-day drive through Charleston, Clemson, Denmark, Beaufort and other communities.

Tim Ryan (D)

In a pro-worker pitch to a union audience at the Building Trade Conference, the newly announced 2020 candidate anchored his speech to his roots in the Midwest, pushing a populist message to the predominantly blue collar audience.

“The national emergency in the United States today is that the American dream for millions of Americans is on life support,” he began. He also took a swipe at Trump, without mentioning him by name: “Put the phone down, let’s get to work.”

But the native Ohioan then turned his criticism inward, to his own party, suggesting that Democrats don’t need a “savior” but someone who can “grind it.” He also added that the party should “not be so hostile to the free enterprise system, not be hostile to business.”

Bernie Sanders (D)

All eyes were on the two-time White House hopeful’s tax returns this week. Sanders, a millionaire, told The New York Times he would release 10 years of tax returns by April 15. He refused to do so in 2016, which brought comparisons to President Trump.

Sanders also introduced a signature piece of legislation Wednesday: the Medicare for All Act. The bill, which he has introduced several times in the past decade, is far more sweeping than previous versions; it would provide government-run, Medicare-style health insurance for all Americans.

“Health care is a human right not a privilege,” Sanders said. “Together, we are going to end the international embarrassment of the United States of America — our great country being the only major nation on earth not to guarantee health care to all as a right. That is going to end.”

Earlier this month, Sanders reported that his first-quarter fundraising numbers show that he pulled in an impressive $18.2 million. Sanders heads to several Midwest battleground states this weekend, holding rallies in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Howard Schultz (I)

The former Starbucks CEO, who has not formally entered the race, stopped in Johnson County, Kansas, this week to pitch running as an independent to voters.

Schultz said he plans to make a decision over the summer on running, according to the Kansas City Star. During his trip through Kansas, before continuing on to Arizona and Utah, he told a crowd at a local community college that “the extreme ideology of the Republicans and the extreme ideology of the Democrats do not represent the vast majority of Americans who are at the center of this country, and we have to unleash them.”

Eric Swalwell (D)

The U.S. House member from California officially announced his candidacy on Monday on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

“It’s official,” Swalwell said. “Boy, did it feel good to say that.”

Swalwell also unveiled that gun control and student loan debt will be the centerpiece of his 2020 agenda on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Tuesday.

“I’m telling folks, keep your rifles, keep your shotguns, keep your pistols, we just want the most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the most dangerous people,” Swalwell said. “Most gun owners believe that.”

At his first event as a presidential candidate, Swalwell visited Broward County — the site of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 17 students and teachers. “Throughout this campaign, there will be other issues that I talk about — health care, education and climate change,” he said. “But my pledge to you tonight is that this issue comes first.”

Elizabeth Warren (D)

Warren announced a $6 million fundraising haul in the first quarter from 135,000 donors. The average donation was $28.

While the Massachusetts senator bested two of her colleagues in the Senate — outraising both Klobuchar and Booker by $1 million — she still fell short of others like Sanders and Harris.

The announcement came on the heels of Warren releasing her 2018 federal tax returns, which revealed that she and her husband together made nearly $850,000 and paid about $231,000 in federal taxes after deductions on that income.

“I’ve put out 11 years of my tax returns because no one should ever have to guess who their elected officials are working for. Doing this should be law,” Warren said in a statement.

Andrew Yang (D)

Yang told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” that his cornerstone universal basic income proposal — which would provide every U.S. adult with a $1,000 guaranteed monthly income — will prepare the U.S. economy for the 21st century.

“We have to solve the problems that got Donald Trump elected in 2016,” Yang said. “And to me, the main driver of his victory was that we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, the swing states he needed to win.”

Yang said he’s running to prepare the country for a future in which new technologies could cause a third of the nation’s jobs to disappear.

[southeastasianists]

Tell me a little about yourself and how you became a writer. I’ve always loved stories and writing since I was a little girl. At eight years old, I filled a notebook with stories and poems. I liked especially adventure stories and mystery stories. I was painfully shy and fearful, and I couldn’t even say anything when someone was being rude to me in public. My only outlet was writing. It was the only space where I could truly be myself and say what I need to say.

So, I took it seriously. I kept on writing – I wrote longer and more complex stories, and after college, I began sending pieces out to various publications, both in English and Bahasa Indonesia. I also started working on what became From Now On Everything Will Be Different, signed up for workshops and festivals, and learned the business of becoming a writer. As I got published more often and got invited to speak at writers’ festivals, slowly I gained the courage to speak up in daily life too. I became more confident in my own opinions and instinct; I became more able to trust that I have good ideas and good vision.

Now I can talk back when someone catcalls or insults me in public, for example. It’s all because of writing, and finding someone who loves me for me and doesn’t want me to change or conform. Writing is my home; I feel most alive with my imagination and the world I’m creating. It is my space to ask the questions I need to ask about the world, about how and why Indonesia is changing, about why we don’t allow women to be in control of their own bodies and their own lives, why I can’t be myself around my family, if I still want to be a Muslim and how, and many other things. I believe writing – and being creative – is an expression of faith in our own ability to heal and save ourselves.

Your novel From Now On Everything Will Be Different is about the Reformasi [post-Suharto] period that began in the late 1990s. What inspired you to write it, and what themes were you going after? The inspiration was the letters I exchanged with a friend. We were discussing our sexual adventures, which we had to keep secret from our family, colleagues and our other friends who disapprove of such free behaviour. We also talked about our artistic aspirations and how our family pushed us to more conventional, stable professions. We talked about the opportunities we had and how we missed them, our self-destructive habits, if we could ever break free from the patterns of starting [anew], failing and moving somewhere else to start over again. I realised that is also the story of Indonesia – from ’98, we had moments of great hope, moments that promised transformation and improvement, but we were often disappointed. I thought we would be free to choose our own leaders, careers and romantic partners. I thought we could write about whatever we wanted because writers and artists would no longer be censored or persecuted. I thought we could all be safer to be ourselves. Then I realised the obstacles don’t come only from the government – we are also constrained by social norms and our families’ expectations. With From Now On, I want to explore how the young generation could try to live free and follow their own hearts, choose the profession and relationships that fulfill them, instead of what is usual or expected of them.

Your novel was set to be launched at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in 2015 but was cancelled due to government pressure. How did you react to this? Has the environment for writers improved since 2015? I believe the pressure mostly came from the local police. I reacted by printing excerpts of my novel on T-shirts and wore them to the festival. I wanted a creative means to resist or circumvent the censorship, and I wanted to do it in a way that achieved the goals of the book launch, which was to let people know that I had this novel just published. I also wanted to show the authorities who might be watching that censorship often has the opposite effect. They attract people’s attention to the censored or banned book, rather than away from it. I also wanted to show fellow writers and artists that we can resist censorship – there are ways to do so that are fun, creative, and conducive. I believe if we have good amount of attention, and international attention, the authorities will think twice before messing with us again.

I think there are still many concerns and much fear in exploring and publishing certain topics – for example, controversial periods in Indonesia’s history, ’65 and ’98 especially, environmental issues that brush against corporate interests, LGBTQI issues and anything challenging the mainstream conservative Islam narrative. Regarding the last two themes, I’d say things are even worse now. We need publishers and media outlets to be braver to support writers who are exploring those themes in a progressive and inclusive manner.

Tell me a bit about your work at House of the Unsilenced, and why you founded the project. The idea came to me late last year as I was following the #MeToo movement. It occurred to me that there were not as many stories coming from Indonesians. If a survivor were to come forward with her story, she may face negative stigmas. These things affect survivors everywhere, I know, but I feel in Indonesia the social stigma and sanctions can be harsh. So I thought if we can’t speak directly in person or through social media, maybe we can speak up with art. This way, people will have to listen to us. We’re not just nameless survivors anymore, we’re also artists and creators. We’re telling our stories and turning them into art. We’re also fighting the situation by telling our society that we refuse to be silent, we deserve to be listened to.

We had more than 20 artists, writers and performers participating [in the project], and about 50 survivors. We invited artists working in various mediums because people express themselves in diverse ways and we want as many survivors as possible participating. We had workshops and collaborations. We had discussions about themes related to sexual and gender violence. We had a film showing and an open-mic night. For most performances and discussions, we had a full room. We provided quiet rooms and psychological first-aid volunteers to help survivors who felt panic or triggered. With our partners we developed ethical guidelines for staff and participating artists and writers. We worked with partners who often work with survivors, such as APIK Legal Aid Foundation, Pulih Foundation, Lentera Sintas Indonesia support group and Hollaback! Jakarta. We also consulted Indonesian Association of Women With Disabilities to help make a conducive environment for disabled participants. The themes for the artworks also varied, from survivors speaking about sexual harassment to how sisterhood still often excludes non-cisgendered women, to forced pregnancy and lack of access to safe abortion services, and many more.

The artists and the survivors are equally important in this project. I want us to speak up together with the survivors, not for them.

What does being invited to speak at the festival mean to you? What types of events will you speak at, and are there any writers you are especially excited to meet? I hope by speaking at the festival, I can create more interest and support to do more House of the Unsilenced events, particularly in Bali and also in other places. That is one of our goals: to be able to hold events with House of the Unsilenced’s model wherever it is needed, with local artists and survivors.

I’ve heard so many great things about Clarissa Goenawan’s work, and I’m also excited to meet or hear Reni Eddo-Lodge, Yenny Wahid, the filmmaker Kamila Andini, also my friend Tiffany Tsao, and many others.

I’ll be speaking at two panels, #MeToo and Ladies to the Front. I’ll be talking about women’s leadership and the imbalance of power that makes rape culture possible. I will also share experiences in creating a huge collaborative art project with a strong social focus, and what a privilege it is to get to know and make work together with resilient women and survivors who, despite the huge obstacles they face and the deep trauma they’ve experienced, can overcome their fear and speak up and work for others like them.

[armeniaitn]

Scholars, Journalists Focus on Armenia-Azerbaijan Clashes During NAASR Panel

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/society/scholars-journalists-focus-on-armenia-azerbaijan-clashes-during-naasr-panel-40738-29-07-2020/

Scholars, Journalists Focus on Armenia-Azerbaijan Clashes During NAASR Panel

[embedded content]Much has already been said and written about the increasing tensions along Armenia’s international border with Azerbaijan since deadly assaults on the region of Tavush began just over two weeks ago. In an attempt to lend to the discourse surrounding the regional implications of the deadly flare-up, the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Series on Contemporary Armenian Issues hosted an online forum to examine the motivating factors behind the escalation of aggression, the significance of democratization in Armenia, domestic and global media coverage of the events and the geopolitical roles played by Turkey and Russia. 

Last Thursday’s discussion was moderated by Anna Ohanyan, Richard B. Finnegan Distinguished Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Stonehill College. Panelists included former Weekly editor Antranig Kasbarian (Director of Development at Tufenkian Foundation), Arsen Kharatyan (Founder and Editor-in-Chief at AliQ Media) and Maria Titizian (Editor-in-Chief of EVN Report).

The panelists agreed that the recent attacks represent both a continuation and departure from past practice on behalf of Azerbaijan, noting the novelty of the incursion into internationally recognized territory of Armenia.

“More than ever, in all countries, wars are being fought simultaneously for domestic consumption and for international gain,” stated Kasbarian, referring to the Aliyev administration’s interests in diverting attention from domestic strife and the increasing promotion of anti-Armenian racism and hate speech.

In the immediate aftermath of the assault that was instigated by Azeri forces, mass pro-war demonstrations broke out in Baku, which Kharatyan believes were orchestrated by the state to turn the attention of the public to the conflict, a strategy that backfired when people took advantage of the temporary easing of pandemic restrictions on free assembly and free speech to assert their discontent with the Aliyev regime and demand domestic changes.

“That reflected the general environment in Azerbaijan, and that is not prioritizing Karabakh as much as it is prioritizing their own freedoms, prioritizing their problems with democracy, the kleptocratic regime that Aliyev has there and the fatigue of not bringing about a change,” argued Kharatyan.

The panelists agreed about the significance of democratization for Armenia’s national security, yet disagreed about its exact function.

Kharatyan stated that while Armenia does not have a lot of oil and gas to export, it could effectively export its Velvet Revolution. “This is not just a territorial or ethnic war. This is a war against democracy. This is a war against human rights,” he said. “This is a war against our aspiration to build a strong democratic country, which some countries in the neighborhood do not like, because if we are successful, that means the same thing can happen in their own case.”

Yet Kasbarian warned about the quixotism of going too far with this line of thinking. “It sounds nice rhetorically, but it worries me in practice,” he contended. “I don’t know how our large neighbor to the north would take to an Armenia with ambitions of exporting its democratic revolution elsewhere,” said Kasbarian, referring to Russian influence.

Nonetheless, the panelists recognized the multitudinous benefits of promoting democracy in all domestic realms, including supporting the media, human rights groups, local non-governmental organizations and civil society groups at large.

“Deepening Armenia’s democracy, consolidating it, has an enormous strategic value for the country, particularly in regards to addressing the conflict,” Ohanyan stressed.

Titizian, who has been leading EVN Report’s relentless coverage of the ongoing developments to the minute, attested to the necessity of investing in the media in Armenia by elevating the quality of journalism, particularly in terms of conflict-sensitive reporting. “Not always believing what the Defense Ministry says…does not make you a traitor. It makes you an honest journalist,” she upheld. “When you try to do that, you are framed as a traitor to the nation. When you say, ‘escalation of clashes,’ well, no, you need to be hung out in Republic Square, because you have to say ‘attacked by the enemy.’

Titizian partially attributed the international media’s incomplete and uninformed coverage of the recent flare-up  to the failure of Armenian news outlets to develop good relations with global media outlets and “present their side of the story.”

All of the panelists agreed that the false equivalence established between Armenia and Azerbaijan by the international media is unacceptable and detrimental to conflict resolution.

“This false parity is a disservice to the peace process,” said Titizian. “Because when you’re not calling out the aggressor, when you’re not calling out the person who instigates the escalation, then you’re just compounding the problem even further.”

The panelists also deliberated the respective responses by Turkey and Russia to the escalation of aggression by Azerbaijan, contrasting Turkey’s immediate declaration of support of Azerbaijan and incendiary rhetoric with Russia’s explicit neutrality and backdoor diplomacy.

Ohanyan explained that Russia behaved characteristically as an imperial power in selecting not to take sides in a conflict among its peripheral states. “I think the signature move really shows how far-sighted Russia as an imperial power is, relative to Turkey, which has narrowed its foreign policy to nationalism and to working purely with the Azerbaijani side,” she upheld.

“For Turkey to come out and talk about how they’re willing to support, whether militarily or otherwise, is just showing how disingenuous it is to talk about Turkey’s possible involvement as a mediator in this process,” Kharatyan assented. “I see Turkey as a patron of Azerbaijan that can be viewed as an equal party.”

“I sense that Turkey is still in a long process of realigning itself, and it’s testing out all directions to see where it can maximally leverage its influence,” Kasbarian argued, speaking to the future of the conflict. “I think not only our preparedness, that is the Armenia side’s preparedness, but also Russia’s preparedness to defend its southern flank, will ultimately be the deciding factor in how far Turkey can go.”

All of the panelists agreed that the recent violence indicates the supreme importance of calling for ceasefire monitoring at the border and the line of contact.

The panelists ended the discussion by encouraging viewers to develop a sense of media literacy and rely on dependable sources of information on the conflict, suggesting Civilnet, EVN Report, the Armenian Weekly and Hetq as resources to continue to stay engaged. 

Lillian Avedian

Lillian Avedian is a journalist based in Los Angeles, California. She has written for the Daily Californian, Hetq and the Armenian Weekly, covering topics ranging from the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Armenia to the Armenian feminist movement on Instagram. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts in Peace and Conflict Studies and a Bachelor of Arts in Armenian Studies, and applies her human rights expertise to uncover silenced narratives. When she is not on the hunt for a story, Lillian enjoys writing poetry and attending quarantine “Zoom-ba” classes.

Latest posts by Lillian Avedian (see all)

Read original article here.

[wsmith215]

How ‘Curtis’ Tackled the Coronavirus in a Newspaper Comic

Curtis © 2020 King Features Syndicate Inc., World Rights Reserved/Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

In the closing weeks of March, comics pages in daily newspapers were oblivious. People were still making plans. There were parties. When animals talked, as animals in comics do, they said nothing about quarantines.

One of the first voices to speak of the new normal belonged to Barry Taylor Wilkins, the younger of two brothers in Ray Billingsley’s long-running strip “Curtis.” It was on Monday, March 30, and we see Barry and Curtis’ mother, Diane Wilkins, squeezing hand sanitizer on her boys’ hands.

“Why do I have to put this stuff on my hands, Mommy?” asks Barry.

In “Curtis,” it is common for such questions to have both simple and complex answers. Since debuting the strip in 1988, Billingsley has mixed lighthearted gags with occasionally stark portrayals of the Wilkins, a middle-class African-American family, and their larger community of family, friends, barbers, and teachers. In “Curtis,” realism sneaks up on you: the family’s third-floor apartment can feel cramped; the father, Greg Wilkins, is uninspired by his job; and young brothers Barry and Curtis have real stresses, like fear of guns in school.

On this day, Curtis tells his brother the sanitizer is to clean his fingers before picking his nose. But we know the real reason. So does Diane. The boys don’t. But that will change.

Little Nemo Was the Most Beautiful Comic Strip Ever Drawn

At four panels a day, time moves slowly in a daily comic, even when events in other newspaper pages move alarmingly fast. As March finally gave way to April, the Wilkins family were seen adapting to their little corner of the pandemic. There are jokes about home-schooling and cabin fever. Greg tries to cheer his sons up with a theatrical display of pancake-making, flipping them with a juggler’s flare. “I try my best to shield my boys,” Greg will say to Diane. “And that is why I love you always,” thinks Diane.

Curtis © 2020 King Features Syndicate Inc., World Rights Reserved

Then, in the middle of breakfast, the Wilkins’ lives change again. Curtis receives a phone call. He walks back into the kitchen, dazed. His stack of pancakes is still waiting for him, untouched.

Story continues

“It’s our teacher, Mrs. Nelson,” Curtis says. “She tested positive for coronavirus.” 

Curtis © 2020 King Features Syndicate Inc., World Rights Reserved

“I don’t want to start much trouble, but sometimes I can’t help myself,” Ray Billingsley told me in a recent phone interview from his home in Stanford, Connecticut, where he has been hunkered down with his basset hound, Biscuit. “It’s the artist in me.”

Ray Billingsley, the author of Curtis

Courtesy Ray Billingsley

Although a few new comics starring people of color have debuted in recent years, “Curtis” remains one of the few daily syndicated strips centered around black characters. Billingsley sees himself following in the tradition of Morrie Turner’s “Wee Pals” and Ted Shearer’s “Quincy”—and also Aaron McGruder’s “Boondocks,” but with a difference. “‘Boondocks’ was in your face, and he didn’t care how much,” Billingsley said. “The rest of us, we have to walk a tightrope.”

Billingsley tested that tightrope when the Wilkins family noticed that Barry was slipping milk out of the house. They thought he was feeding a cat but followed him and found instead an abandoned baby. In another strip, Diane miscarried after being assaulted at an ATM. “Nobody was expecting a miscarriage in ‘Curtis,’” Billingsley said.

One of the slyest moments in “Curtis” happened when the Wilkins family and friends were invited to Dagwood and Blondie Bumstead’s house, as part of a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the comic strip “Blondie.” They took a wrong turn and ended up in Mary Worth’s neighborhood. There, they discovered how fast police response time can be in a different part of town.

Billingsley often pushes against his six-week deadline to allow him the chance to comment on current events. Yet the experience of drawing “Curtis” during COVID-19 feels different than anything he has done before. “This one I’m going by instinct. I said, ‘It’s time to do it right now.’ I kept seeing that nobody was addressing this.”

Curtis © 2020 King Features Syndicate Inc., World Rights Reserved

I asked if he felt a special weight in his decision to have a character contract the illness. “Actually, I’ve been feeling the weight of this entire story,” he said. “I have to really get into what everyone was feeling. We’re talking about a core of four people and how it’s really affecting them as a unit. I’m not showing anyone else. It’s just about this family right now.”

“This has been one of the harder ones to draw. I had the flapjack party going on and I knew something was going to come up. When Curtis comes into the room, it hit me then, too. It made me depressed. I do it to myself. They’re so much from the heart that they can hurt me first. If I’m hit on an emotional level, I’m pretty sure other people will be too.”

People don’t usually die on the funny pages. It’s only possible in what’s called a “continuity” strip, one in which a narrative might stretch over many days or weeks. After all, Beetle Bailey can get beaten to a pulp and spring back up the next day, and nobody questions it. “In Beetle’s world, it doesn’t matter who’s president, or what kind of disease is going around,” laughed Billingsley, who counted the late “Beetle Bailey” creator Mort Walker among his friends.

The first major character to die in comics was Mary Gold, who in 1929 contracted a mysterious illness in the comic strip “The Gumps.” Since then, deaths have remained rare. In 2004, it came for the elderly Phyllis Blossom Wallet in “Gasoline Alley.” Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” has featured several deaths, most controversially that of Andy Lippincott, who died of AIDS in 1990. Letters from readers poured in after the death of the family dog Farley in Lynn Johnston’s “For Better or For Worse.”

You didn’t see any death scenes in the comics page during the so-called Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918. Comics scholar Jared Gardner began searching through hundred-year-old newspapers for any comics that dealt with the outbreak and was surprised by how little he found. “Lots of words, lots of typing, but not lots of drawing,” Gardner said, speaking via Zoom from his home in Columbus, Ohio, where he serves as director of Popular Culture Studies at Ohio State University.

Public Domain

Gardner put what he did find on his website “Drawing Blood,” which is dedicated to comics and medicine. There is a single Bud Fisher “Mutt and Jeff” comic with the punchline “I went home last night and opened the window and in flew Enza.” A few comics discuss wearing masks and avoiding crowds. Some subscribe to the xenophobia suggested by the misnamed “Spanish flu.” Others lightly mock it, as in George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat,” in which Krazy dreams of a Spanish bullfight and wakes up the next morning with the flu, which “may or may not disprove the ‘germ’ theory,” as Herriman wryly notes.  

Public Domain

Gardner suspects that the oversized cultural influence of comic strips in 1918 might be why there were so few mentions of the flu. Cartoonists and their bosses knew they were being watched. As John M. Barry wrote in his history The Great Influenza, the Sedition Act promised jail time for anyone who dared “print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the government of the United States.” This even extended to “pessimistic stories,” and the trial of leftist cartoonist Art Young for violating the Espionage Act had proven that the government reach might extend to cartoonists.

It might have just been that most cartoonists didn’t think people wanted to see the flu in the funnies. Still, the few that did address it have a lesson to teach us. “It must have felt like the end of the world for these folks as surely as this time does for us,” Gardner said. “It can feel unprecedented and apocalyptic, but looking at comics from a hundred years ago reminds us that they got through it.”

The first widely syndicated newspaper comic to address COVID-19 was Bill Hinds’ “Tank McNamara,” a sports-themed strip that had to contend with the sudden absence of professional sports. “Curtis” followed shortly after. Cartoonist Stephan Pastis often makes himself a character in his smart and acerbic “Pearls Before Swine”; he drew his first coronavirus comics as if he were stranded with nothing but pencil and notepaper, playing off his real-life situation of being out of the country when the United States starting limiting travel. Meanwhile, a heartbreaking series in Darrin Bell’s “Candorville” tackled social isolation by showing full-panel cityscapes from throughout the world. The same thought arises in different languages from each house and apartment: “I am all alone.”

Argentinian cartoonist Ricardo Siri, whose comic “Macanudo” is published in English under his pen name “Liniers,” says the strip was born out of time of social and economic crisis in Argentina. “My way of being punk was to be optimistic,” he said, talking to me by phone from his current home in Vermont, where he teaches at Dartmouth College. His coronavirus-themed work has been delicate and hopeful, often turning to the natural world for inspiration. In one full-panel strip, a girl and cat sit together, watching a butterfly make its way across a grassy field. The caption reads: “Taking care of each other will also be contagious.”

“I feel like when people are drowning, you can either throw them a life vest or an anvil,” Siri said. “Every now and then I allow myself to be angry in the strip, or pessimistic, or nihilistic. But I think the reason the comics page first existed, from the Pulitzer and Hearst years, is to give people something so they don’t jump out the window.”

In a sense, the visual representation of COVID-19 is itself a cartoon—a multi-colored illustration of a spike protein-studded ball created by Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (By contrast, Gardner notes that cartoonists in 1918 often used mosquitoes to represent the flu, due to the insects’ past association with sickness and death.) Eckert told The New York Times they were tasked with creating “an identity” for the coronavirus. But it took cartoonist Mark Tatulli to turn their image into a full-blown character. In Tatulli’s wincingly funny “Lio,” the Coronavirus might laugh menacingly or wait quietly in a doorway. In one chilling comic, it sits on the couch, watching the news. “It’s always weird seeing yourself on TV, ya know?” it says to a child.

To Gardner, these novel approaches to the novel coronavirus are a sign of hope for comics themselves. “If you want a media that can talk about it right now, and both comfort and educate, what does it better?” he said. “There’s social media, which is evil, and there are comics. It’s a moment where the comic strip, editorial cartooning, and web comics can talk about stuff as it’s happening, and they can build space for community in the moment—which is part of why comics and cartooning became so important in the first place.”

Added Gardner, “There’s a tone, a kind of intimacy, that the comic strip can capture that is really needed. I’m grateful for it.”

The most intimate moment in the current run of “Curtis” comes when Greg Wilkins is explaining to his son that because of social distancing, he can’t visit Mrs. Nelson in the hospital. Curtis pumps his fist and says, “Awwww, she’ll be all right!—Mrs. Nelson is a tough ol’ lady.” 

Greg smiles and holds his son. He praises him for his positive attitude. What he doesn’t see—but what is clearly visible to readers—is that Curtis is crying.

I told Billingsley that this devotion of a student to a teacher reminded me of a series in Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts,” when Linus is watching his beloved teacher Miss Othmar during a teacher’s strike, and she falls down with exhaustion.

“Remember, only Linus was close to Miss Othmar,” says Billingsley. “Lucy wasn’t. It can be a very special bond between a student and a certain teacher.”

In fact, he said, Mrs. Nelson was the name of his own third-grade teacher. “I didn’t have the best home life, growing up. I had a father who was very strict. It got to the point where I looked forward to going to school, because I was away from my father. I was one of those weird kids who was good friends with the principal.

“Mrs. Nelson was the first person who told my parents I had a career in artwork. She encouraged me, and from that time on I kept drawing.

“So when Curtis put his head behind his father, I quietly cried to myself, because I knew I was going to do this.”

Since that moment, there have been jokes in “Curtis” about Curtis saying that he’s bored and being handed a mop and bucket, and of Greg admitting to his son that he misses “being at work complaining about being at work.” But Billingsley said he’ll be returning to the story about Mrs. Nelson. He doesn’t know exactly when. Just like when it started, he said, he’ll be going by instinct.

“When it’s time to wrap this story up, I’ll know it.”

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[insanescriptist]

Hi! I've gotten Black Sky recommended to me by a lot of people because I really like long well-written Girl!Harry fics - so I gotta say thank you guys so much for 200+ chapters! The thing is that I'm not an anime fan and don't know much at all about the Reborn (?) part of the crossover; do I need to watch or read that first before Black Sky to understand what goes on? (PS. One of my friends suggested listening to the Gunslinger Girl OST while reading to make it more epic. I'll give it a try! :D)

Izzy’s not a big anime fan either; she’d rather read manga. Much faster, less irritation with character voices or the episode recaps and also doesn’t have to worry about buffering.

Black Sky for the first 40 or so chapters doesn’t focus on KHR elements, although we leave hints here and there for those who know what to look for.

After that we start introducing KHR-elements a lot more. Specifically focusing on three organizations within the KHR-verse; the Varia, the Vongola and the CEDEF.

Most of Black Sky doesn’t focus on Tsuna (KHR’s protagonist) at all so a basic knowledge is needed but not much more than that. Because KHR conveniently leaves most of the mafia in Italy around the Vongola as a blank slate. But you do need to know who some people are. We’ve got lots of OCs.

So summary of what you need to know:

Uh, KHR has a pretty simple premises in the ‘loser guy gets unexpected inheritance and things are complicated.’

The story of KHR focuses on Sawada Tsunayoshi who is introduced as so terrible at everything his nickname is Dame(Useless/No-good)-Tsuna.

And then he gets the ‘Greateat Hitman in the World’ Reborn sprung on him as a mafia tutor as he’s the last remaining heir candidate for the Vongola as Nono’s three sons are dead. Tsuna is understandably disbelieving as Reborn looks like he’s two or so. Reborn then introduces Tsuna to the Dying Will Bullet which unlocks his ‘Dying Will’ based on his ‘last regrets.’ Basically Flame Superpower with special color-coordinated properties which are explained later in series.

Reborn basically steamrolls over everyone for shenanigans. Tsuna gains friends in the Daily Life arc, notably Gokudera Hayato and Yamamoto Takeshi. Tsuna gains other friends and house-guests/dependents and of the greatest import is Lambo Bovino who has a bazooka that can cause whoever was hit by it to change places with their future self for five minutes. Not the wisest thing to give to a five year-old child okay? Reborn engages in shenanigans for about a year and some months.

And then we get Rukudo Mukuro kidnapping one of Tsuna’s ‘acquired dependents’ due to said dependent’s powers. Anyway, Mukuro’s introduced into things, KHR acquires a genre shift from gag to shonen. Mukuro is a former human experiment of the Estraneo and more or less spent the five years after slaughtering his way out of the Estraneo by killing mafia famiglias. For which he got tossed into the Mafia Prison, Vindicare which is run by the Vindici who are the mafia boogeymen; think Dementor like, wrapped in bandages, cool chain techniques and fancy top hats. Tsuna ends up fighting Mukuro and wins due to shonen power-up. The Vongola’s reputation as the ‘largest, bloodiest and most powerful Famiglia built on an empire of sin and suffering’ is mentioned here. Also because this is shonen, overpowered teenagers is a thing and so Mukuro is like a year or so older than Tsuna.

Then a month later, we get the Varia showing up. Which is the Vongola’s elite assassination division. Which is what Xanxus is in charge of. Xanxus is Nono’s ‘son’ that he took in from the streets due to manifesting his Flames young. Xanxus ended up getting raised as a possible Decimo canidate, was considered a much better choice than his ‘brothers’ and ended up in charge of the Varia because Squalo -who had taken over the Varia by killing the previous Head- decided to follow him. Xanxus leads a coup against his father -the narrative implies different things depending on perspective and how deep you read into it, the characters and the arc- and so like a great father, Nono decides to freeze his ‘son’ in the Vongola Secret Technique for years.

You can image that the relationship there is not the greatest. For reasons.

Anyway because both Xanxus and Tsuna are seen as ‘candidates’ and have been ‘nominated’ by the two people who’s votes matter in the means of Vongola Family Succession: That would be Nono Vongola aka Timoteo Vongola and Sawada Iemitsu, the CEDEF Boss and Outside Advisor. Both nominate their respective ‘children’ for Crazy Vongola Tradition. Anyway the Crazy Vongola Tradition is known as a Ring Battle.

Because of course, jewelry decides who gets to rule the Family. It helps to understand that the jewelry also amplifies Flame Superpower. So the rules go ‘whoever gets the most Rings becomes Decimo.’

As Izzy doesn’t wish to spoil the series, Izzy will stop here.

Recommendation:

Izzy says read about the first twenty chapters of the manga and wiki the other characters. Just a word of warning, the art style the first 100-chapters is a bit rougher than the rest of the series and ugly in comparison to later chapters. Mukuro hits the scene like chapter 61 and the Varia about twenty chapters after. So the art is still rough.

As another word of warning, the Reborn-wiki is not the best source to gain all your information from as some things are still off about it. At least they’ve ‘fixed’ things so that they no longer say that the Varia’s ‘all male’ instead of ‘no female members have been shown’ with a touch of ‘lack of confirmation about which gender Mammon is.’ Which is true in the anime but less so in the manga. Chapter 134, like last page. Is it really that hard to find and verify a character who is wearing lipstick, has long hair and an openly worn jacket with three-quarter sleeves as female? It’s like the last page and Izzy doubts that they can’t find a scanlation or physical copy of it. Sure it’s only one panel but a picture speaks a thousand words.

It’s not like this is totally non-binary and possible trans erasure because of Lussuria anyway. Luss who has canonically asked Varia Minions to refer to him as ‘big sis.’ And they did.

[kforourke]

Birmingham

Inspired, in part, by Gulf Coast’s Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing—which I did not win, bummer—last year I visited the Frye Museum in Seattle and wrote about Toin Ojih Odtola’s Birmingham, vis-a-vis other black portraiture.

Because Odutola’s piece is no longer on view (it was taken down in December), and because after several close editorial calls I want my essay to see the light of day, here it is in full. I am, as you’ll see, a fan.

Conditions for Energy: Black Portraiture and Toyin Ojih Odutola’s “Birmingham”

In all art, the structure and rules of one’s chosen form can be hard to escape. This goes for both forms with strict parameters—such as poetry’s villanelle, with its five tercets, single quatrain, refrains and repetitions—and “unlimited” abstract visual forms, which of course have their own rules, even if they’re harder to divine. Why are some Pollock paintings more successful than others? Why was Christo’s Running Fence better than The Gates?

While this is true of any form, it is particularly true of portraiture. Portraiture is as limited a form as exists because portraiture’s core subject—people—never changes.

Sure, every face and body is different, and artists have approached and treated different portraits in infinitely varied ways. But the fact remains that portraits will always be portraits. When looking at a portrait, one is always looking at a person or persons, with all of the complications and complexities that looking at people—and therefore thinking about people, which is its own ball of wax—entails. For example, whenever I’ve looked Chuck Close’s Big Self-Portrait, 1967-8, either in a reproduction or in person (as at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis), I inevitably think about myself. After a while, after staring at Close’s direct, shirtless gaze, unshaven and with a burning cigarette in his lips, my own gaze invariably turns inward, first to the banality of the painting’s details and my relation to them (do I need a shave??), and then to that silent inner core of self-reflection touched by only the best art.

The key is quality, or “painterly energy,” as John Berger calls it in his essay about the Fayum portrait painters:

“Among the several hundred known portraits, the difference of quality is remarkable. There were great master-craftsmen and there were provincial hacks. There were those who summarily performed a routine, and there were others (surprisingly many in fact) who offered hospitality to the soul of their client. Yet the pictorial choices open to the painter were minute; the prescribed form very strict. This is paradoxically why, before the greatest of them, one is aware of enormous painterly energy. The stakes were high, the margin narrow. And in art these are conditions which make for energy.”

Despite Trump’s daily provocations, and the not-so-inaccurate sense that the world is teetering on the brink of various catastrophes, there are glimmers in the darkness. For one, Americans are living through a golden age of portraiture. Specifically, black portraiture, which says better and more lasting things about America than Trump ever will.

To cite two famous examples, by virtue of their having painted the Obamas’ official portraits, Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley are inarguably America’s best-known portraitists. That their work, critical quibblings aside, has for so long been generally excellent has only bolstered their cases. And the Obama portraits—on view at the National Portrait Gallery—are so different from previous presidential and first lady portraits that they seem to have come from another universe, one where vibrant color and formal inventiveness actually exist. Even the portrait of Clinton, famous for his saxophone playing and philandering, among other colorful things, is of him standing in a dark suit in the Oval Office, his right hand resting on the HMS Resolute desk. It looks positively staid next to Wiley’s portrayal of a seated Obama among an explosion of colorful foliage. Sherald’s Michelle Obama, meanwhile, puts on a master class in the power of contrast and sharp edges, not to mention a direct, confrontational gaze. Both Barack and Michelle Obama face the viewer in each of their portraits, but Michelle is the one who really seems to challenge her viewers. Where Barack’s eyes are somewhat lost in the richness of Wiley’s hues, the whites of Michelle’s eyes stand out starkly in Sherald’s piece. It is as an arresting, attention-grabbing portrait as an I can recall.

The work of Toyin Ojih Odutola, though less well-known than that of Wiley and Sherald, is no less arresting, though in a much quieter way.

Specifically, her print Birmingham, which the Frye Museum in Seattle is currently showing as part of its “Recent Acquisitions” biannual series, takes a multimodal approach to portraiture. Comprising three separate panels, the work—four-color lithograph on satin paper, each panel 24 x 16 ½ inches—is both static and dynamic. The portrait’s subject, the artist’s brother, is captured in different poses in each panel (looking down; looking at the viewer; and then turning away) that can be seen either as discrete still images or as a series of movements. The work resembles a zoetrope strip at rest, and it works however one chooses to view it.

In person, hung as it is in a hallway between the museum’s entrance and its well-known salon room, Birmingham does not overwhelm the senses. Because the three prints hung together measure about feet wide by two feet high, its does not bludgeon its viewer with its size, in contrast to Wiley’s President Barack Obama (roughly 7.5 feet tall by 4.5 feet wide) or Close’s Big Self-Portrait (almost 9 feet tall by 7 feet wide). Birmingham is understated, but you still can’t miss it.

See, its size is to Birmingham’s credit, for it does not seek to confront the viewer, as in the Close or the Sherald, or overwhelm with the looming import of its subject, as in Wiley’s Obama painting. Birmingham’s form follows its function: the piece’s subject expresses a sort of recognition, which is a very different thing from confrontation. Moreover, because it comprises three views of its subject, Birmingham has something that the other paintings don’t: a narrative, or at least the framework of a narrative.

The portrait’s subject seems to be startled out of a reverie—in the first to the second panels—only to turn his back on what he sees in the piece’s third panel. Interestingly, in the third panel the subject’s back is indeed turned, but he keeps his right eye on the viewer, as if suspicious, or perhaps in pity.

Moreover, how Birmingham’s subject is portrayed lends the piece a deep richness. Ojih Odutola uses highly stylized, almost abstract line work that gives her subject a deeply dark, almost fully black skin tone, which is intermittently highlighted by bright white shaded areas that indicate both light and texture. The effect of the harsh black with white contrast is that Birmingham’s subject’s skin looks a bit like the night sky. That, combined with his white undershirt rimmed in gold leaf, and the movement of his body and gaze—up toward the viewer, but then away, as if he’s no longer interested in looking at what he sees—gives Birmingham’s subject an otherworldly (cosmic even) aspect. Moreover, to paraphrase Berger, the piece gives so much hospitality to its subject’s soul that Birmingham is suffused with a quiet, wholly realized sadness. And it is that sadness, and turning away from the viewer, that really sets Birmingham apart from its more famous forebears. Birmingham sees us and what we have become, and decides to look away.

...

Header image, “showing the wreckage of a bomb explosion near the Gaston Motel where Martin Luther King., and leaders in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were staying during the Birmingham campaign of the Civil Rights movement. Trikosko, Marion S., photographer.” via Wikimedia Commons.

Birmingham image via https://tamarind.unm.edu/product/birmingham-left-middle-right/

[daresplaining]

Do you think Matt is better suited as a prosecutor, or a defence attorney, as he seems to have been most of the time? Which, in your opinion, does he seem to prefer?

    This actually doesn’t come up as much as you might think, so it’s hard to point to a specific panel and say “Hah! Yes, Matt prefers ____”. There’s also not a ton of consistency, and he will occasionally jump from defense to prosecution from one case to another without explanation. But his general trend is toward defense, and since that’s the type of law he’s practiced for most of his career, we can assume that’s what he’s most comfortable with. He hasn’t shown a particular talent for one over the other either. He’s a good lawyer no matter which side he’s on, but overall, he’d rather spend his professional life keeping innocents from going to jail than throwing bad guys in jail– which is part of the reason why he does the Daredevil thing in his off-hours. That way, he is able to balance out the occasional instance of defending people he knows are guilty. And that leads right into your other question, so we hope you don’t mind if we go ahead and answer that here too…

    All the time. There’s a reason he’s been disbarred so many times. (Actually, there are two reasons, but we’ll leave the Kingpin out of this for now. The problem is mostly Matt.)

Judge: “Our issue is less with your sabotage of the Ogilvy case than with Nelson & Murdock’s now-disclosed history of ethics violations. Your past activities as a vigilante, as well as the questionable actions you and your partner have taken to preserve that identity, leave us no flexibility. With a heavy heart, this court hereby disbars Matthew M. Murdock and Franklin P. Nelson.”

Daredevil vol. 3 #36 by Mark Waid, Chris Samnee, and Javier Rodriguez 

    Matt is a moral guy but a very unethical lawyer, simply because he does operate on both sides of the law. Every single case he takes on is tainted in this way, because he nearly always uses his Daredevil identity and powers to gather evidence and determine guilt. At this late point in the Marvel universe (and with the exception of the period when the Superhero Registration Act was being enforced), being a vigilante doesn’t seem to be quite as illegal as it is in our world, simply because there have been so many dang superheroes around for so long. However, Matt is put on trial for vigilante activity– which we’ll be talking about later in the post– and it’s still a clear breach of legal protocol, and not what a lawyer should be doing. There’s also the factor of his powers, which he uses on a regular basis to give himself an edge, and on which he relies to an unwise degree. He hates defending guilty clients, and has gotten himself into trouble before by trying to determine guilt via heartbeat. All of this isn’t just a Matt problem, by the way– though it does tend to come up more with him than with other superhero lawyers. There’s a great issue of She-Hulk, for example, (She-Hulk (2004) #1, to be specific) where Jen loses a winning verdict because she saves the world while the trial is going on, and the judge rules that this biased the jury in her favor.    

   But Matt is the Unethical Lawyer poster child when it comes to this sort of thing, and this conflict has been a major theme in Daredevil comics, particularly within the last decade-or-so. With this in mind, we’re going to be providing just a few examples, rather than a comprehensive list of offenses.  

   The “Worlds Collide” story from volume 4 #15.1 focuses specifically on this dichotomy of legal work versus superhero work. Early in both his legal and… extralegal careers, Matt is assigned to defend a man who he apprehended as Daredevil. While spending his nights trying to ascertain whether his client is actually guilty, in court he is put in the position of arguing against the concept of superheroes.  

Matt: “What are his motives? What does he want? I want to know who this man, this ‘Daredevil’– who is, essentially, accusing my client of murder– I want to know who he is. Other than a criminal. We know he’s at least guilty of assault… and, in the case of the defendant, involuntary imprisonment. Consider the facts… An unknown man in a disguise attacks someone… tackles him to the ground… and yet it’s the person who was assaulted who gets arrested? This isn’t justice. And it’s not how the justice system is supposed to work.”

Daredevil vol. 4 #15.1, “Worlds Collide” by Marc Guggenheim, Peter Krause, and Matt Wilson  

   Matt is fully aware of the irony of making this argument and yet continuing to try and determine his client’s guilt as Daredevil. He knows what he’s doing is wrong, and he cares deeply about his career as a lawyer. That’s an important point that we want to make clear. It’s not just a cover/source of intel for his secret life, as jobs occasionally are for superheroes– he genuinely loves being a lawyer and cares about the legal system. But even in this story, at this early point in his career, he feels justified in taking massive liberties with the law for the sake of ensuring that justice is actually done. He’s a self-assured enough person to believe that he knows best, and that his interventions as Daredevil are fair and necessary. That doesn’t mean they are– but that’s his mindset, and it always has been.

Matt: “A man murders. He leaves clues. He did it. He’s guilty. He’ll pay for the crime. Simple. That’s the beauty of justice. Daredevil tracks him, Matt Murdock makes him pay. Simple, gorgeous justice. When I’m poor, blind Matt Murdock, it’s easy to believe in the law, in the courts. Why is it, soon as I put on this suit– I feel that belief cracking? Doesn’t matter. Tonight will be different. I’ll reel the killer in, and the courts’ll get him locked up for life. Pure, beautiful justice.”

Daredevil vol. 1 #251 by Ann Nocenti, John Romita, Jr., and Christie Scheele

    (By the way, this is a good example of what we were referring to in response to your first question. Matt is thinking like a prosecutor here.)

    To explain his willingness to cross these lines– if not to necessarily justify it– we need to look back at his origin story. A key part of his decision to become Daredevil in the first places was the fact that his father’s killers didn’t go to jail for their crime– and I’m partial to renditions of his origin that make clear that he only goes after the Fixer and friends himself after they’ve been put on trial.

Matt: “We did it all by the book. The police weren’t surprised that Sweeney and Slade were involved and it wasn’t long before they were arrested. But, on the day of the bail hearing, suddenly, they had some Park Avenue attorney. His hair gel cost more than what Foggy and I were wearing.”

Daredevil: Yellow #1 by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale   

   He sees justice fail, and so steps in to pick up the slack. Whether this was a good move on his part is up for debate. He unintentionally causes the Fixer to die of a heart attack long before he has a chance to go to jail, for instance, which is a moral issue all on its own. But with this inciting, highly personal incident always in the back of his mind, and as his legal career continues to show him the gaps and weaknesses in the system, he feels continually justified in filling in the cracks with his own brand of crimefighting.

    But credit where credit is due– right now, at this very moment in the current run (spoiler alert!), Matt is taking steps to address this issue. He and the D.A.’s office are attempting to set precedent for allowing superheroes to legally contribute their skills and testimony to criminal investigations, without being forced to reveal their identities.  

Matt: “Slug’s gang escaped, but we got him, and I picked up plenty of evidence with my super-senses. If the judge lets me testify, I can put him away, and maybe get him to turn over on his crew. It is legal. I’m sure of it. And if I can pull this off… if I can testify without taking off my mask, then we all can. Any secret identity hero. Spider-Man… even Blindspot. […] It could change everything. Our powers let us gather evidence the cops just can’t. If we can present it in court, legally… no more tying up bad guys, leaving them for the police and praying the system can get a conviction. We can be part of the process from start to finish.”

Daredevil vol. 5 #22 by Charles Soule, Goran Sudzuka, and Matt Milla

    This still doesn’t seem to address the fact that Matt is both a superhero and a lawyer, and is still free and willing to interfere in questionable ways in his own cases with no oversight– but hey, it’s still a big deal.  

    Generally, the instances of Matt behaving unethically that are emphasized within the narrative specially for being unethical, involve Matt trying to protect his life as Daredevil. His identity has been leaked to the press twice. The first time, fortunately, the journalist was discredited before the story got too far or Matt had to make any big moves. But the second time, when his secret identity is printed on the front page of the Daily Globe (not to be confused with the Daily Bugle) during Bendis’s run, he is forced to choose between accepting the charges or lying, both in public and in court. He opts for lying (with Foggy’s full-if-uncomfortable support), and the two of them even go so far as to sue the Globe for libel.

Foggy: “Working either side of the law? This means Matt Murdock defrauded the American justice system by faking a trial against Daredevil. And that’s just the most recent example. Matt– you can’t. You can’t come clean. You can’t come out. First? You’ll get disbarred. And then… then you go to jail. You know I’m right, pal. So the thing we do? We fight this. […] We get up on the highest tree and we scream: liars! We sue everyone in sight until their heads spin off their bodies.”

Daredevil vol. 2 #33 by Brian Michael Bendis, Alex Maleev, and Matt Hollingsworth

    When he is put on trial for operating as a vigilante, Matt contemplates fighting his way out of the courtroom and just running away, before deciding to plead not guilty. He does, notably, feel bad about all this later, and reflects on it in volume 3 #36 when he finally decides to out himself as Daredevil. But that certainly hasn’t stopped him from lying and playing with the law since.

    Arguably the most egregious– and certainly the most memorable– example of Matt’s shaky legal ethics (which Foggy references in the excerpt above) is the “Playing to the Camera” arc (DD vol. 2 #20-25). This plotline centers around Matt and Foggy getting hired to sue Daredevil, allegedly for causing some major property damage. Matt knows he didn’t do it, and is affronted that his honor is being impinged by some troublemaker pretending to be Daredevil. Despite the obvious immorality such a thing would involve, and Foggy’s protestations, Matt takes the case to keep control of it and prevent other lawyers from snooping around in Daredevil’s business.    

Matt: “Foggy, if we don’t take the case, Griggs’ll keep at it until he finds someone who will. Like Claude Unger. And the last thing Daredevil needs is Claude Unger poking around in his life.”

Foggy: “We can’t do it, Matt! It’s insane! To say nothing of the ethics! Allowing yourself to be hired to sue yourself– it’s illegal! You could be disbarred!”

Matt: “It’ll die on the vine. Remember, the case has no merit. Once we investigate and I find this imposter, it falls apart, end of story. It’ll be over inside of a week.”

Daredevil vol. 2 #20 by Bob Gale, Phil Winslade, James Hodgkins, et al.

   Surprise– it’s not over inside of a week, and it does go to court, and Matt finds himself in the position of having to sue himself. He manages to be in two places at once by convincing Peter Parker to pretend to be Daredevil, going behind his (DD’s) lawyer’s back in the process. It’s a hilarious, utterly unethical mess– and one Matt is perfectly willing to undertake for the sake of protecting his identity.  

    In short: lawbreaking is inherent in the superhero genre, and Matt’s position as a lawyer and devotion to the proper functioning of the justice system in no way prevents him from bending legal ethics to their absolute limit.   

[violetsystems]

#personal

The only drama I’ve been tolerating lately is my return to reading physical comics in public.  The world has gone batshit insane and that isn’t the intro panel to Immortal Hulk.  It’s pretty much real life for me without much explanation or external plot narration.  After a year of writing here about how I feel on any number of issues nobody in real life knows any different.  It’s always been here where the act of social sharing has fifteen layers of safeguards in terms of anonymity.  The community has always been very subtle and muted in how it treats each other.  It’s intimate how you come to know a person through their curation of content.  There’s entire relationships I have with people on here that matter more to me than people I’m in daily contact with in Chicago.  I’ve been submerged in the deep web like a cybernetic dolphin in a tank for years with the rest of you.  The Tumblr fishbowl has always been much more comforting than the public eye.  The only theory I have is that people really don’t pay attention to anyone in real life.  I’ve come to know the pain of recognizing when people stop listening.  Most people just project how great they are or how much more they know.  Society in America especially under the guise of capitalism is always a competition.  You can only assess the success or value of a person by the amount they make or more importantly spend.  From there people splinter off into efficiently divided cliques, tribes and teams that people try to draft you into out of fear of isolation.  Peer pressure doesn’t ever go away unless you shut the door completely or maybe even bust it wide open.  Even then it just gets nastier and more sophisticated.  You’d have to be the Hulk to enjoy that kind of constant abuse.  My follower count has been mostly the same which has always been something I respect.  Everybody knows I try to play it safe and genuinely respect different perspectives.  I walk boundaries and I maintain layers beyond that.  Around this time last year I had made a decision in my life to focus my attention on things that made me happy.  One of those was my communications here with people.  Things had grown from this into real life in a magical way.  And then people starting hijacking the narrative for their own selfish reasons.  Putting their own spin, opinion and value on the things they thought I was “trying to say.”  That kind of thing has been happening to me since the beginning of time.  People trying to turn something I do into something that can benefit them, influence or control.  When it comes to blogging on the internet here the outside world is mostly negative towards this space.  Truthfully I am pretty excited about the recent purchase of Tumblr but everything in the press is always negative.  People are so conditioned to bad news these days that we just fixate on the drama and do nothing about it.  People crave it in almost everything.  Walk into a coffee shop and employees are trashing other coffee brands instead of focusing on their own.  People talk behind other people’s back like it’s a secret trial and never face the demon within themselves.  Sometimes these things escalate into crossing the line or threshold of your dreams overcome by some madness and zealotry.  They think they have a say in whatever it is I do in my own time.  And with me we already know how badly people have fucked up in this regard.  It is sadly comical at this point and I am the butt of a constant cosmic joke.  It would be a broken record to spend another year describing how I haven’t gotten over it.  I don’t give a fuck about any of that shit really anymore.  I changed my train route, subscribed to better coffee at home and read Hulk comics on the commute.  

With all the drama between Sony and Disney over Spider-man people forget sometimes we’re talking about movies.  Who owns the rights to the intellectual property of poor artists to bankroll their studio profits every summer is maybe important.  If you didn’t have twenty two movies linked together already.  I don’t know really I just read comics.  I’m supposed to have an opinion about every part of the world I’ve never lived in.  Within all these arguments it’s always picking a side.  Mostly because people want a battle and a chance to feel right even when they are missing a perspective totally.  We can focus on all the talking about the problems all day and never find a solution.  It’s been particularly hard for me to come to grips with being in the environment I’ve been in.  I spent five years traveling to Asia to figure out my place outside of all this.  This last year I came back and focused closer to home.  In that respect I’ve found New York to be much less pretentious than I thought it would be.  It’s truly the city where you can cry on the street and nobody cares.  That feeling of freedom is something I don’t feel lately myself in Chicago.  There’s too much manipulation and utilization of public space.  People so concerned about why you aren’t happy and never would do a thing to correct the problem.  There has to be something wrong with you for feeling that way.  In New York you kind of share the space and let things breathe.  In Chicago everybody is trying to maximize your contribution to society.  Your social obligations in the highest taxed city in America are also taxed if not just by patience and will alone.  I pay taxes and I don’t mind paying them.  But encroaching on people’s life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for the sake of a brand is a bit weird.  Unless it’s Pink.  This coming from a guy decked out fully in Nike and Undercover.  You see these shirts that say “Chicago Over Everything” and then you see me rot in silence in my street wear coffin.  I hear a lot of sentiments that don’t ever address me directly.  People project what they hope you will hear and expect you to take the bait.  Looking for a fight.  Looking for a new friend to abuse.  Looking for another cult member.  People approach inclusion by never leaving you alone and make you feel crazy for feeling claustrophobic.   I guess people have never been a victim of police entrapment.  That’s some drama I’ve already written about and left in the dust.  These days it’s ten thousand times worse and then again I’m over it.  The double standard I see in the real world is mostly about making people question their legitimacy in the face of incompetence.  I’ve been the victim of so many dumb social experiments for art’s sake and otherwise.  All it ever really amounts to is intimidation and drama and it’s boring and ineffectual.  We argue things we can’t or won’t change instead of leading by example.  And leading in public by yourself with no safety net gets old after awhile.  Especially when nobody remembers all that you’ve done.  Or at least gives you the benefit of the doubt when the court of public opinion puts you on trial for the fifth week in a row.  People who will talk about you behind you back all day but never address you to your face.  Never acknowledge your validity.  Too busy being negative to give you a chance to shine.

There’s an entire decade of my life that has been left behind and forgotten about outside of Tumblr.  Imagine the irony that the people I shared things with here knew the deeper side of me.  And we all watched me get passed over and ruminate about how I could be a better person.  How I could right all these wrongs?  How I could be the hero.  And almost eerily like the Hulk comic I’m looked upon as something else.  I haven’t really had a modern comic experience quite like reading that graphic novel.  I just ordered the next volume and get to pick it up from another school’s campus after work tomorrow.  I do have to work all day tomorrow.  I’ve done that for almost two decades.  People still treat me like a kid.  People on Tumblr of course know I don’t feel like a kid or even remotely account for one mathematically.  But I’ve learned people look for any excuse to write you off.  They do it for years and when you grow better they find another thing to drag you down with.  When they can’t find anything they just ignore you.  And here we are a year later looking back.  It’s that time of year again.  People are actually back in school.  Just like every other year really it feels like.  People can acknowledge I feel invisible but not acknowledge me personally.  That’s the whole curse of the Undercover aesthetic.  You wear it so well even the police start getting it twisted.  Nobody asks.  Nobody has the guts to approach you and treat you fairly.  And so you grow to know better than to waste you time on shit that doesn’t appreciate your value.  It’s a mind fuck for me really to understand the way forward is more of the same.  That being isolated and exiled in some way is far more safe at this point of my life.  That maybe there’s things too precious for me to share with people who can’t fathom or know the value I place on it.  Because they don’t make the sacrifices I do to keep things safe.  To be responsible and be myself at the same time.  A year ago I felt like that mad scientist locked in a lab.  I’ve done enough barbell reps to be the skinniest Hulk alive.  The title of that volume is “Or is he both?”  It’s a far different vibe from either Professor Hulk or Planet Hulk.  Bruce Banner is a transient who changes into the Hulk nightly.  He’s tracking gamma ray signatures of what he calls Walking Ghosts.  Toxic creatures exposed like a virus to gamma radiation by another scientist trying to heal his son.  Banner is trying to right a wrong and at the same time stay in control of his inner core of responsibilities.  He keeps a secret that grows out of control and finally the Hulk cannot be contained.  Interestingly enough the Hulk exacts his rage in frighteningly calculated ways.  He even speaks kindly of Banner.  He also buries the other scientist in a mountain and makes him ponder hell forever instead of ending his life.  The Hulk eventually learns about this green door through the Walking Ghosts that whisper about it in fear.  There’s no gatekeeper at that door to hold the Hulk back.  And I’m sure there’s so much more drama behind that door.  It’s only Volume two after all.  I can’t wait to find out because that’s about the only drama these days I pay attention to.  I don’t need any drama getting in the way of my love for you.  Hulk out.  <3 Tim