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sethnakht · 2 years

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everyone wants darth vader dead in greg pak and raffaele ienco's darth vader, it seems, seemingly including darth vader. no sooner has luke slipped his grasp does it strike into public awareness like a firework set off in a crowd -- vader's power, too, is slipping. the weight of that collective scrutiny -- from officers, bounty hunters, and assassins to the paper-pushers of the Imperial court and the former handmaidens of Queen Amidala -- manifests in a hunger to dismantle him physically, to wrench and tear off the armor, to see him gorged upon by giant monsters, to freeze him and puppet him, to seize control over the "softbody" and flay him of his life support. nor is vader left unaffected by this hostile focus on his physical limits -- as he slouches, limps, stumbles, crawls -- and pauses, exhaustedly, though there is no way to catch his breath -- his way through the comic, the gleaming armor is hacked, punctured, electrocuted, torn open, shattered, and burned, while his thoughts dwell on weakness, grief, and fear. such abjection, however short lived, sets this comic run far apart from marvel's previous two darth vader runs, both of which traced an upward trajectory: vader's rise to the height of his power in esb (gillen/larroca), and his journey to becoming a committed sith after rots (soule/camuncoli). the trajectory here is to the grave.

Darth Vader (2020-) #5, Pak/Ienco/et al - observing that vader is walking right into a major barrage of fire - not for the first time - the forensic droid accompanying him hints that he might have a death wish.

vader himself refuses to admit weakness, of course - at least consciously - but his arguments bear all the weakness of bad political discourse. "there is no conflict", he says, making one think of conflict; "my son is weak", he says, making one think of the father. when you tell someone not to think of an elephant, even in negation, you invoke the elephant. darth vader is very good at conjuring the elephant, and making one peer very closely into the bold and marked outlines of its supposed non-existence.

Darth Vader (2020-) #1, Pak, Ienco, et al - unable to handle that he has been rejected by his son, Vader transfers the failure to Luke, calling him "weak" for choosing to flee him, for choosing potential death over Vader's offer of power, even as he stands empty-handed before a gravesite, his own desire to punish the dead thwarted by his having made them so. The comic doesn't leave it at ironic framing - Vader too is aware of what he is invoking, and the associations brought up as he stands at the site of his mother's grave show that Vader cannot entirely suppress his own sense of failure - his own memories of his own perceived weakness.

vader's private thoughts -- rendered in the comic in startling little red boxes that, like mummy coffins, nest in larger black boxes, nearly always isolated from physical imagery, from contact with the visual world -- are as tiring and repetitive as an unwelcome pigeon on the window sill. the stunner is not what he thinks or even what he invokes, but that his thoughts are not actually private at all. there is no room to admit weakness because, as it turns out, vader's master can pick up on his thoughts from the other side of the galaxy. vader's master can croon into his black boxes, scoop out the words and spit them back out like trite poetry learned from heart in grade school. watching him from afar, vader's master reads into his actions and mocks what is unexpressed. if there's a space free from his influence -- an influence that is similar to the reader's influence, an influence that explains why we can see his thoughts at all, because we too are complicit and voyeurs -- it might only be the gutters, those gaps between panels where the mind completes the temporal and spatial relationships between the images. in the page from the first issue shown above, for example, note how the speech balloon for the remembered "I won't fail again" nearly connects with vader's head in the panel below it, linking anakin's grief-filled promise to become stronger with vader's helmeted head, all while lingering on padmé's face - his next inevitable failure. even if he cannot think it.

the humiliation is public, we're part of the frenzied mob, swiping at the armor for scraps of cursed fabric -- transgressing boundaries both mental and physical, eating up that transgression like the intimate, play-by-play accounts of a famous suicide. vader's armor is repeatedly hacked, a gag that bluntly serves to hammer and hammer and hammer home for you that shame of being mocked before the class that specially belongs to darth vader, dark lord of the sith.

Darth Vader (2020-) #13, Pak, Ienco, et al - Vader is made a puppet more than once over the course of the comic, frozen and trapped both in his mind and body.

to be honest, I was originally a little annoyed by the number of hacking attempts -- everyone gets to take their shot at controlling vader, from hutts and droids to the handmaidens to a psychic squid who puppets him with its tentacles -- because of the frequency and similarity of the attempts, because while vader does address some vulnerabilities, he still gets scanned and sliced, meaning he's overlooking weaknesses or choosing not to address them; because he doesn't seem greatly affected by the threat to his bodily autonomy, and because of the friction with gillen's run (where being hacked sends vader into a high-stakes psychosis and is a major and unusual event that he takes measures to prevent from happening again in the aphra comics). then I remembered this scene:

Darth Vader (2020), #12 (Pak, Vilanova, et al) - After losing all but one limb, being set on fire, tracking through lava on mismatched ancient droid parts, being chased and attacked by assassins, droid scrappers, an Imperial Star Destroyer, and a wall of Sith acolytes, then nearly ripped apart mentally and physically by a psychotic giant squid and a screaming kyber crystal, Vader is "repaired" on Coruscant - i.e. sawed open - before a hostile, chattering audience, the Emperor laughingly dismissing him as a threat.

which. is. absolutely. fucked. up!! and to top it off, there's this sly little sequence --

Darth Vader (2020-) #14 (Pak, Ienco, et al) - Vader's armor specifications appear to be tracked with each repair and are openly accessible to the Imperial court

-- which shows that even if vader updates his armor, that knowledge will be recorded the next time he comes in for a repair (if it's not always being transmitted automatically). anyone with sufficient credentials in the imperial machine, including the demoted sub-administrator sly moore, can access his repair logs, analyze them for untested weaknesses, and saunter off with an suit override stick. (to be sure, sly moore isn't supposed to be looking at his records and is chastised when she's found; she also tries to use the same kill stick twice, failing to account for the updates vader does make after the first slicing attempt, perhaps because she hasn't checked or been able to access the records for updates. the point here though is that vader's suit is a matter of government record, treated like imperial property; you can imagine all sorts of fun scenarios here, such as that his private upgrades are wiped each time he comes into the repair center, or that new vulnerabilities are built in each time, etc.)

even the dead contribute to this panopticon effect. in the latest issue of the comic, the skakoan jul tambor reveals that he's been collecting dismembered droids -- each of them individually sliced apart by darth vader over the years (notably, however, most of them are separatist droids, hinting at tambor's blind spot: he hasn't collected the droid corpses anakin left littered on battlefields). drawing on their recorded logs of their own demise, tambor observes vader precisely when he might feel the least concern about it -- in the act of killing, of eradicating the viewer. the now-repaired droids possess a kind of moving simulacrum of vader's battle tactics. perhaps because he too relies on a pressure suit and breathing device to survive in the same atmosphere as most humans, tambor doesn't need static blueprints of the suit -- he has no intention of shutting down vader's life support. the difference in method is only a subtle one, however: he too is targeting vader's dependency on his armor. in lieu of a direct attack, he means to target the suit's limitations indirectly, to swarm vader with the very droids he once demolished and have them target his limited mobility, his repetitious set of moves within the suit's confines. with his reliance on surveillance technology, tambor is only the latest in a long line to act on the premise that vader's demise is a given because he has no secrets left.

Darth Vader (2020-) #30, Pak, Ross, et al

if it seems a blind spot that tambor hasn't collected archival footage of anakin on a droid rampage, he's nonetheless managed to address it thanks to a chance encounter. when padmé's former body double -- sabé, vader's double in the comic, a shadow of the shadow -- arrives on vader's orders to kill tambor, then tries to convince him to abandon a plan that she fears will only get hundreds killed, he captures her. tambor rightly recognizes that sabé is more to vader than an agent skilled in deception and lies: she represents his weakness, he believes, a reading that vader himself may even share.

sabé is the bright note in this story of decline, the one character who cares enough and dares enough to consider vader's "weakness" a possible strength. like the reconstituted droids, she is in her own way a dead woman brought back to life, a ghost -- padmé back from the grave to haunt him, as she tells vader upon their first meeting. like any good ghost, she wants revenge for padmé's death and to enact her final, unfulfilled wish; as it happens, killing vader to save anakin would neatly accomplish both. (as it happens, she and vader have both seen recorded footage of padmé's last moments; tambor's recordings of vader from the perspective of dying droids is both a parallel and a contrast to padmé, shown dying from wounds inflicted by an absent vader, whispering of the good still in him.) when sabé freely enters his service, claiming she wants to help, vader is troubled -- does this make him weak? -- and yet also quite smug. here is finally someone who has chosen him of their own free will; here is someone who has accepted his offer of power; here is someone who looks and talks just like the dead wife he's convinced himself would have stood with him and espoused his cause ("order"). (indeed, she wields real power -- jealous and fearful, the assassin ochi effectively portrays her as a tiger handler who unleashes her pet when she wants someone dead.) it's a fantasy come to life.

yet sabé is not dead, present as she may as ghost or shadow or fantasy -- sabé is herself haunted: haunted by padmé, whom she could not save, and by anakin, whose mother she could not free. sabé is herself a killer whose guilt and loyalty and poisoned grief have moved her to try and execute vader "for padmé and anakin", and who gets a real chance -- closer than anyone but palpatine -- to put vader to death. sabé's attempts to kill vader have evolved with time -- a first attempt, imaginative but unrefined, made when she unequivocally thought him anakin and padmé's murderer, involved luring vader into an underwater lair, provoking him into claiming he killed anakin and padmé, and feeding him to a massive sea monster. a second, disastrous attempt led to the pointless slaughter of her ground and aerial troops, though vader left her and padmé's remaining former handmaidens alive. (unbeknownst to her, the emperor nearly killed vader for that choice, leaving him deprived of all but his arm and core suit functionality on the burning banks of mustafar, to relive obi-wan's abandonment and crawl his way through the corpses of murdered separatists, into and out of death.) she comes closest to actually killing him, however, only after she's had such an effect on him that she's moved him to confront his great nemesis (sand) to save her life and bring himself to the brink of death on behalf of a refugee camp composed of freed tatooine slaves. having fried his suit -- through the bounceback of his own hubris, ultimately -- vader lies incapacitated on the ground when sabé finds him and reveals her own fantasy involves killing him. her ghosts hold her back; padmé stays her hand.

of the humiliations heaped upon him since luke's escape, including the routine of hanging head-down and mostly naked in a bacta tank flanked by observing guards, only this -- this grave insistence from padmé there is good in him -- manages to shake vader.

Darth Vader (2020-) #28, Pak/Ienco/et al -- Vader conjures the elephant of his diminishing power as he dangles hulkingly in his bacta tank in full sight of two guards. Subsequently, he shatters the bacta tank in rage.

unlike the attacks riffed from public records, the private knowledge padmé possessed as she died is one that no one else can see. even sabé admits she can't understand why she chooses to trust it. as for vader's master, we never see him overhearing the padmé recording, he never cites it directly (though he does mock vader for "listening ... to your heart", perhaps a way of dismissing its importance). as in the panopticon the prisoners never know when they are observed, so too does the emperor presumably turn his eye away from time to time, all too certain the name "anakin" has lost all "power" over vader. as in the prison of andor "no one is listening", there is still the quality of a secret in what vader and sabé know about padmé. even if, in his fear of weakness, all vader can see in that secret is death.

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cowsabungus · 8 months

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Art Hacks for Physical Disabilities!!

I know art can be inaccessible to physically disabled people for a lot of reasons, and I think art should be accessible to everyone, so here’s a couple of the things I found to help for a few different issues you may face that stop you participating!

I have a link to all these items (UK) in my link tree!!

IMAGE DESCRIPTION

Slide one: illustration of a white woman with pink hair, wearing a pink outfit, sitting in a power wheelchair, looking at the viewer with thumbs up. Text Reese “hacks to make art more accessible”

Slide two: illustration of three different kinds, using three different types of pencil grips. One hand uses a circular grip. 100 is a large, rectangular grip. Another uses a grip that is ergonomic and fit into the hand. Main text reads “Paul, grip, strength and dexterity”. Subtext reads “there are loads of different types of pencil, grips or design for different disabilities and conditions. Increasing the width of the pencil can give more texture for a better grip using a pencil with a thicker with also reduces the amounts of pressure needed to hold a pencil you can make your own using items like pool noodles. KT tape an air dry clay. You can also put these groups on things like paint brushes.“

Slide three: illustration of a hand using a tool that looks like a wrist support with a paintbrush connected to it text next to it reads “this talk next a paintbrush to your hand in a way that means you don’t need to hold the paintbrush with your fingers and you will need to move your arm around“ on the bottom right hand corner is in photograph of a guided hand device. Text read “regarded hand as a tool designed to reduce the need for moving your hands and fingers and relies on the movement of your shoulder and upper arms and can be used with different materials like paintbrushes, pencils, pens and styluses.

Slide four: main header reads “when in bed“. Illustration of an iPad pillow with a iPad in it is next to text that reads “iPad pillows, put your tablet at an easier to access level when sitting or lying down“. In the bottom left hand corner is an illustration of a girl sitting in bed in her pyjamas with a pillow behind her and a bed table as she is drawing. On the left hand side is a photograph of a bed table with the text reading “bed tables are used to give you a flat tire up surface while in bed, and are often height adjustable”. In the bottom right hand side is a bedsit, a pillow with the text underneath, reading “ bedsitters of specially shaped pillows that you put behind you in bed to help you set up and give you a soft surface to lean back on”.

Slide five: maisie had a read out “at a desk left”. On the left hand side is a photograph of the document holder with the text “document holders put your paper at an angle to help prevent crane in your neck down”. On the right hand, middle side is an illustration of someone using a armrest and on the bottom left hand side is a photograph of the armrest. Text next to them reads “economic arm rests clip onto your table or desk and give you a surface you lean you’re forearms or elbows on. This can be used to steady your arm and reduce pain and fatigue while sitting at a desk”.

Slide six: maisie reads “foot and mouth painters” . on the right hand side is an photograph of swapping Augustine, an Indian woman with no arms, wearing a sari painting with her left foot. In the bottom left hand corner is an illustration of a woman with green hair painting using her mouth. Text reads “foot and mouth painting is a technique used by artists who do not have, or cannot use their arms so hold the paintbrush in their mouth or using their foot. Swapna Augustine is a foot painter who has painted with her feet and participated in multiple exhibitions of foot and mouth painters. Her art is stunning and I would definitely recommend checking some of help work out.“

Slide seven: main text reeds “art without brushes and pens”. On the left-hand side is a photograph of a spin art device. Text next to read it reads “spin out involves using bottles of ink and squirting them onto a spinning piece of paper to create spiral art. On the middle right hand side is a illustration of a laptop with coding art written on the screen. Text me next to it reads “coding art involves making programs that design and create art pieces digitally. This could be used in conjunction with an eye tracking software.“ On the bottom left hand side is a photograph of a child in a power wheelchair with paint on their wheels painting onto a large piece of paper. Next to this is text reading “wheelchair painting involves putting paint on your wheelchair wheels and moving around and large piece of paper. Sometimes you can connect a roller to create more marks.“

Slide eight: text reads “what do you do to make art accessible for you?”

End of ID.

#art #original art #artist #oc art #original character #queer #disabled #disabled rights #disability #disability pride month #disabled artists #disability art #art hacks #accessible art #accessibility #foot and mouth painter #foot and mouth painting

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