It feels strange posting anything right now not related to the protests. Black Lives Matter. The police should be defunded and dismantled. The United States needs deep, systematic change.
Things NOT related to the protests are more important than ever now. A little distraction from the chaos, a moments respite from the tumult is not only beneficial, it is essential for a healthy mind and a balanced soul. If all you consume is only the Din of the Mob, that's all you will be. Believe me, I understand, I really I do. You want your comic to have social relevance. You want your Comic To Matter. YOU want to MATTER. It does, and you do. You matter. In fact...
ALL LIVES MATTER!
By singling out one group, you devalue the others. By holding up one ethnic group, you cast down the others. By saying one group is more important, you are saying the others are NOT important. everyone matters. everyone.
If you want to see REAL CHAOS, defund and dismantle the police. Who you gonna call when the real trouble starts... the Ghostbusters??? I don't think so.
Do changes need to be made? Yes, of course. But they are not that deep or systemic. We definitely need some new laws
that restrict police actions in certain situations. We need better recruitment evaluation and training. We need BETTER police, NOT NO police. Without law and order, we are just animals in the jungle, which is what we are seeing right now. Please don't succumb to the call of the mob. Use your reason, use your logic.
Excuse the long response. I don't know if the original commenter will even read this, but since this web comic is a pseudo-curated space in which my point of view, as a creator, is meant to pervade the content, I'll allow myself a bit of expansiveness.
Since you like comic, I'll also be couching my response in terms of the projected or implicit themes of Continuity Drift, particularly the current arc, which deals with the only human organism on a intergalactic meta-ship containing billions of archived specimens from millions of different extinct worlds.
I guess my view of narrative in general is that true escapism isn't possible or desirable. Fiction is speculative, in that it allows disassociation from immediate contexts. Through defamiliarization, however, fresh and more intuitive assessments of psychological and sociological realities can emerge.
Which brings me to my webcomic, and how it relates to the comment that I attached to its publication.
This will be tangent, to warn you. In structuralist literary theory, there are marked and unmarked terms. Marked terms are subjectivities that come with qualification. Their universality is not assured. So in terms of subjectivity, white male perspectives are more or less standard issue, and anything outside of those parameters must declare itself upfront or be marginalized or misunderstood.
Escapism, in other words, is only really accessible to those with privileged access to an assumed subjectivity. White creators can dwell in abstractions without having to maneuver themselves, from the top, into performative, or marked, subjectivities.
To put it simply, white people don't have to think about being white all of the time, as a matter of survival. Black people, often, do.
That is why I don't see the request for ALL creators, in a time of national change and upheaval based on the fault lines of race and class, to acknowledge the specificity of black experience, to be that much of an ask.
At the same time, I understand the resistance to a knee-jerk litmus test, where we are expected to trot out talking points from our various milieus: When someone says "save the rainforest" you don't assume that they are implying "other forests don't matter."
That is the most succinct explanation I remember for why "All lives matter" doesn't mean what it literally means, but rather is a freighted unwillingness to empathize with historically persecuted groups, a denial of a kind of lived experience other than your own.
In this comic page, I have the Earth represented by a man in a space suit, and the entire human species represented by a biological woman.
Note (and there is no way readers of the comic would know this) that the setting is a archive ship that contains the genetic records of uncounted extinct worlds, and the "human" is really an Sentient inhabitant of this mega-ship that has taken an irrational liking to an obscure, bi-pedal species, and who has been travelling with a bio-suit containing the algorithmic/memetic soup of the species' home ecosphere.
Unthinkingly, I made the features of this woman, however subtly, coded as white, most notably the hair.
For the next page, I was thinking of something like this:
The three or four panels are wide, horizontal shots of the increasingly terraformed scaffolding of the ship, with the human in the same place and pose, but with markedly different bodies.
PANEL ONE
NARRATOR: The human lived for several dozen lifetimes, incarnating as whatever genotypes the computer generated as "human", generally cloning and euthanizing herself before the discomforts of age set in.
The human sitting in front of a fire, with some grasses and suggestions of plant life.
PANEL TWO
A different (but the same) human setting in front of the same fire, in the same pose, but of a discernably different age and ethnicity.
The ecosphere, or genetic biosphere that had been contained in the suit is spreading out over the scaffolding of the archive ship.
NARRATOR: She hadn't given up on her goal of reaching the edge, of looking out into the stars without tricks of transparency and projection.
PANEL THREE
NARRATOR: It was hard, though, for her to move on, away from the planetary system all of her evolutionary makeup was screaming she belonged to.
PANEL FOUR
The same perspective as the other three panels, but more overgrown and chaotic. A different human
NARRATOR: After the 27th clone of herself, she decided to leave the Earth behind, since it could no longer use any language she undersood.
Okay, so maybe you see how the comic isn't unrelated to the question of which race, gender, or other signifier gets to represent humanity, and how my comment about recent political movements wasn't simply a superficial gesture towards political relevance or correctness, but an actual, necessary, context for the ways in which I was thinking about the story and its visual representation.
I could respond more specifically to the question of defunding the police, but I'll leave that for another place and time. Suffice it to say that this is not a knee-jerk parroting of something I saw on other media, but rather a statement that is comfortably consistent with a complex of political opinions that I have been developing over a life-time of observation and analysis.
Not many people comment on this webcomic, or on my stream, so I read and absorb everything that the audience brings into this space.
I will be happy to discuss politics at greater length, but I feel like it does intersect with my web comic in that I think that the evolutionary path forward for human culture is one of empathy, inclusivity, and allocation of resources into structures and networks that support and uplift communities rather than police them.
Comments
Wrong.
Things NOT related to the protests are more important than ever now. A little distraction from the chaos, a moments respite from the tumult is not only beneficial, it is essential for a healthy mind and a balanced soul. If all you consume is only the Din of the Mob, that's all you will be. Believe me, I understand, I really I do. You want your comic to have social relevance. You want your Comic To Matter. YOU want to MATTER. It does, and you do. You matter. In fact...
ALL LIVES MATTER!
By singling out one group, you devalue the others. By holding up one ethnic group, you cast down the others. By saying one group is more important, you are saying the others are NOT important. everyone matters. everyone.
If you want to see REAL CHAOS, defund and dismantle the police. Who you gonna call when the real trouble starts... the Ghostbusters??? I don't think so.
Do changes need to be made? Yes, of course. But they are not that deep or systemic. We definitely need some new laws
that restrict police actions in certain situations. We need better recruitment evaluation and training. We need BETTER police, NOT NO police. Without law and order, we are just animals in the jungle, which is what we are seeing right now. Please don't succumb to the call of the mob. Use your reason, use your logic.
nice comic.
7th Jun 2020, 11:33 PM
Excuse the long response. I don't know if the original commenter will even read this, but since this web comic is a pseudo-curated space in which my point of view, as a creator, is meant to pervade the content, I'll allow myself a bit of expansiveness.
Since you like comic, I'll also be couching my response in terms of the projected or implicit themes of Continuity Drift, particularly the current arc, which deals with the only human organism on a intergalactic meta-ship containing billions of archived specimens from millions of different extinct worlds.
I guess my view of narrative in general is that true escapism isn't possible or desirable. Fiction is speculative, in that it allows disassociation from immediate contexts. Through defamiliarization, however, fresh and more intuitive assessments of psychological and sociological realities can emerge.
Which brings me to my webcomic, and how it relates to the comment that I attached to its publication.
This will be tangent, to warn you. In structuralist literary theory, there are marked and unmarked terms. Marked terms are subjectivities that come with qualification. Their universality is not assured. So in terms of subjectivity, white male perspectives are more or less standard issue, and anything outside of those parameters must declare itself upfront or be marginalized or misunderstood.
Escapism, in other words, is only really accessible to those with privileged access to an assumed subjectivity. White creators can dwell in abstractions without having to maneuver themselves, from the top, into performative, or marked, subjectivities.
To put it simply, white people don't have to think about being white all of the time, as a matter of survival. Black people, often, do.
That is why I don't see the request for ALL creators, in a time of national change and upheaval based on the fault lines of race and class, to acknowledge the specificity of black experience, to be that much of an ask.
At the same time, I understand the resistance to a knee-jerk litmus test, where we are expected to trot out talking points from our various milieus: When someone says "save the rainforest" you don't assume that they are implying "other forests don't matter."
That is the most succinct explanation I remember for why "All lives matter" doesn't mean what it literally means, but rather is a freighted unwillingness to empathize with historically persecuted groups, a denial of a kind of lived experience other than your own.
In this comic page, I have the Earth represented by a man in a space suit, and the entire human species represented by a biological woman.
Note (and there is no way readers of the comic would know this) that the setting is a archive ship that contains the genetic records of uncounted extinct worlds, and the "human" is really an Sentient inhabitant of this mega-ship that has taken an irrational liking to an obscure, bi-pedal species, and who has been travelling with a bio-suit containing the algorithmic/memetic soup of the species' home ecosphere.
Unthinkingly, I made the features of this woman, however subtly, coded as white, most notably the hair.
For the next page, I was thinking of something like this:
The three or four panels are wide, horizontal shots of the increasingly terraformed scaffolding of the ship, with the human in the same place and pose, but with markedly different bodies.
PANEL ONE
NARRATOR: The human lived for several dozen lifetimes, incarnating as whatever genotypes the computer generated as "human", generally cloning and euthanizing herself before the discomforts of age set in.
The human sitting in front of a fire, with some grasses and suggestions of plant life.
PANEL TWO
A different (but the same) human setting in front of the same fire, in the same pose, but of a discernably different age and ethnicity.
The ecosphere, or genetic biosphere that had been contained in the suit is spreading out over the scaffolding of the archive ship.
NARRATOR: She hadn't given up on her goal of reaching the edge, of looking out into the stars without tricks of transparency and projection.
PANEL THREE
NARRATOR: It was hard, though, for her to move on, away from the planetary system all of her evolutionary makeup was screaming she belonged to.
PANEL FOUR
The same perspective as the other three panels, but more overgrown and chaotic. A different human
NARRATOR: After the 27th clone of herself, she decided to leave the Earth behind, since it could no longer use any language she undersood.
Okay, so maybe you see how the comic isn't unrelated to the question of which race, gender, or other signifier gets to represent humanity, and how my comment about recent political movements wasn't simply a superficial gesture towards political relevance or correctness, but an actual, necessary, context for the ways in which I was thinking about the story and its visual representation.
I could respond more specifically to the question of defunding the police, but I'll leave that for another place and time. Suffice it to say that this is not a knee-jerk parroting of something I saw on other media, but rather a statement that is comfortably consistent with a complex of political opinions that I have been developing over a life-time of observation and analysis.
Not many people comment on this webcomic, or on my stream, so I read and absorb everything that the audience brings into this space.
I will be happy to discuss politics at greater length, but I feel like it does intersect with my web comic in that I think that the evolutionary path forward for human culture is one of empathy, inclusivity, and allocation of resources into structures and networks that support and uplift communities rather than police them.
11th Jun 2020, 3:31 AM
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