Archive for July, 2007

I like this one as an example of a non-political comic inspired by something political. Even though the comic references George W. Bush (and makes a far-from-timely reference about him), I don’t think you could determine from this any particular political viewpoint. I kind of like that.

I think part of the origin of this one comes from when I was in high school and the “axis of evil” thing was a lot more timely. All of my friends worked on the school newspaper and came up with funny stuff for the paper. When the “axis of evil” was in the news, they came up with an idea of “The Original Axis of Evil,” which became a brilliant cartoon/illustration in the paper. I don’t quite remember all of the characters they came up with, but I remember the list included Moby Dick, Caligula, Hitler’s Ghost, Gary Oldman as Sid Vicious, and Bizarro Mother Teresa. Anyway, that was probably buried somewhere in the ol’ subconscious when I came up with this one.

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Not too much to say about this one. I was just at work at my soul-crushing call center job thinking about how lame a slogan “I’m lovin’ it” really is, and I came up with this one. The original version of this contained an embarrassing spelling error.

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Awwwww. At the time that I wrote this, a couple of months before I posted it, I didn’t have a cat. We were at least sort of hypothetically thinking about getting a cat, though, which is what caused us to have a conversation about mythological pet names. By the time that I posted this, we had an adorable and crazy little tortoise shell kitty named Nausicaa. Nausicaa is now about two years old. Here’s what I dubbed her “class picture”, probably from around this time:

If you want to see more of how adorable she is (and also how messy our apartment was back then), my lovely girlfriend has a gallery of her photos here.

If you’re wondering, Telemachus is the son of Odysseus and Penelope, and is one of the main viewpoint characters of The Odyssey. Nausicaä is the daughter of King Alcinous, who saves Odysseus at the beginning of The Odyssey. She’s totally hot for Odysseus, too. In some accounts, she later married Telemachus. Clytemnestra is also mentioned in passing in The Odyssey when her husband Agamemnon bitches about how she killed him when Odysseus and company meet him in the afterlife. There’s several different versions of that story, but the basic gist is that Agamemnon really wanted to get his big fucking army to Troy to beat down the Trojans but the winds were shitty. So to make the gods happy, he sacrificed he and Clytmnestra’s daughter Iphigeneia. Agamemnon is kind of a dick. Anyway, when he finally won the war and came back Clytemenstra was still a mite peevish. You know women. It’s always, “You didn’t take out the garbage!” “You never take me anywhere!” “You sacrificed our daughter to the gods!” Plus, Agamemnon was boning Cassandra, the seer cursed for spurning Apollo (speaking of entities who are huge fucking dicks). So Clytemnestra offed him and Cassandra too. Later, her son Orestes kills her in revenge for killing his father. This part of the story makes up the plot of the Aeschylus play The Libation Bearers, also known as That Play Quoted At the Beginning of Harry Potter 7: No Not The William Penn Thing, The Other One.

Mythology is awesome.

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The summer after I graduated from high school, I worked in the local library first as an intern and later as a page. One of the areas I worked fairly regularly was the AV section–shelving videos, audiobooks, cds, etc. Because of this, I got to be something of a connoisseur of video box copy. In my thus educated opinion, I came to believe that this is the Cadillac, the Citizen Kane of video box copy:

 Somehow it happens. A conversation begins, then the magic of interaction and the fever of ideas take over. The next thing you know, your train stop is miles back. Or the restaurant is empty and the waiter is gone. Or the sun seeps into your dorm room. You’ve taken a Mindwalk. You’re different than when you began.

That’s the box copy from the film Mindwalk. Later that summer, my good friend and I watched the film and were greatly disappointed. It just couldn’t stand up to the promise of the box text. It leaned heavily on certain “profound” truths–the kinds of things that make you think “duuuude–mindfuck.” Or they do when you’re taught them in middle school physics. In a high-brow film, however, the come off as just kinda weak. This comic is inspired by that.

It wasn’t the only thing inspired by that, though. At the time, my friend and I talked about how awesome it would be to make a movie based on the back of that video box–something a little more irreverent. In homage to Mindwalk, whose tagline was “A film for passionate thinkers,” we dubbed it “Mindfuck: A Film for Passionate Drinkers.” This wasn’t unusual for us–we spent much of our junior high and high school years making up movies. What made this one special was how close it came to becoming real.

Our vision of the film crystallized when we were in college and regularly exposed to pretentious drunken college student speeches. We ourselves were certainly the perpetrators of many of those speeches. We realized that Mindfuck would be an extremely easy movie to make–all the actors would be college age, the only set we’d need would be a dorm room. We started writing a script the first night we moved into a shared off-campus apartment. We put it aside for another year or so, until he won a copy of Final Draft in a contest when we went to a short film festival. Then we got serious and wrote a complete draft of the approximately ten-minute short film. One of our friends needed to do some kind of media project for an internship she was doing, and we talked her into making Mindfuck that project. We put together a cast that wasn’t even entirely made up of our immediate friends–we even shot a scene. But then nobody really had the drive to be the main person driving the production and it ran out of momentum.
So! If anybody out there in internet-land is looking for an easy student film to make and doesn’t have a  script, I’ve got one you might be interested in. If you think The Angriest Rice Cooker is funny, you’d probably like this too–the sense of humor is similar.

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I’ve said before that I have very little use for any standard of artistic or literary quality that doesn’t take into account pure aesthetics. I think that the standard of artistic quality that I have the least affection for is the “virtuoso” standard: how hard is it to do? Now, I can certainly appreciate the beauty of a virtuoso performance. The feeling that comes from listening to someone play a difficult Liszt piece, for example, does come in part from the sheer physical impressiveness of the player. But that is just one kind of aesthetic pleasure that can be derived from a work and it’s absence doesn’t imply, to me anyway, that a work is any less artful. There are other Liszt pieces that demand very little in the way of technical skills, but they are still quite beautiful in a very different way.

In fairness, the rice cooker here makes his sarcastic point using a logical flaw. The “my five year old could do that so it’s not art” argument suggests that difficulty of execution is a necessary prerequisite to great art, but it doesn’t really suggest that difficulty of execution is a sufficient condition for great art. The idea that something as physically demanding as contortionism is great art doesn’t follow, even if you take that argument to the most absurd extremes.

But, hey, he’s a fuzzy logic rice cooker, not a conditional logic rice cooker.

(har har har)

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I’ve mentioned earlier how much I love Escape Pod, the weekly podcast of short science fiction. This week was a story that I just had to link to because it strikes so close to the core idea of The Angriest Rice Cooker in the World. The host, Steve Eley, even mentions his own fuzzy logic rice cooker and the absurdity of a rice cooker that’s smarter than the family dog when he’s talking about his own love of gadgets. The story is called Conversations With and About My Electric Toothbrush. The titular Toothbrush has a very different response to his lot than our Rice Cooker friend, but they’re dealing with fundamentally the same problem: wanting more for themselves than their creators gave them. Plus it made me laugh out loud, so I think you’ll like it too.

After that one about cancer and death and radiation and science, here’s one about the rice cooker singing to himself and “beeping” along. This was just an idea that made me giggle that I threw together quick during a break at my then-new job.

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This is a comic I wrote in direct response to this series of comics in FreeFall. Eric Burns at Websnark wrote an essay once in which he said that part of why he likes FreeFall so much is that in spite of its goofy sense of humor, it’s fundamentally a Hard SF comic, built on that kind of world. For him, that’s a huge selling point. Now, I like FreeFall a lot, too. But elements that remind me of Hard SF frustrate me. Some, though certainly not all, Hard SF tends to have a certain pedagogic feel to it, as if we as readers are supposed to be learning about the joy of science by reading it. FreeFall definitely has this feeling quite a bit, with a number of strips that involve Florence explaining some scientific idea or other. That’s fine, and actually now that I think of it seems perfectly natural to me. My lovely girlfriend is a student of ecology, and we’ve been known to spend hours talking about sciencey stuff. But the problem comes for me when this “I’m teaching you things, dear reader” sense is applied to things with a kind of political angle to them–like nuclear radiation. There’s an attitude in some, and again definitely not all, Hard SF that because the writer knows science he (almost always “he”) knows better than the ignorant plebes about insert political issue. If they only knew about science, they would agree! It comes off as really condescending, and often misses the point of the political issue. I don’t really think that that’s exactly what’s going on here–although there’ve been other strips that suggest that people are afraid of nuclear radiation only because they were mislead in the past. I think it was more that the feeling was too similar for me and it provoked a response in comic form.

Part of it is that this particular issue strikes literally close to home for me. I live in Olympia, Washington now and I grew up in Boise, Idaho. While not the worst by far, both of these are areas that have and continue to be impacted by nuclear waste and nuclear testing. My high school chemistry professor used to talk about how he would sit out on the porch in Nampa, Idaho and watch the nuclear detonations–the light carried that far. Idaho didn’t get quite the dose of “downwinder” problems that Utah did, but it wasn’t unaffected. And in later years, it was used as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. Washington is perhaps even worse. Nuclear waste sits in unlined trenches at the Hanford site, and has for decades.

And guess what? Washington has one of the highest incident rates of cancer in the country, and the highest rate of breast cancer. Now, a scientist can’t draw a conclusion from that kind of data–there’s just too many variables. And that’s part of why science isn’t as useful to public policy as some science-types would like to think. Science is very slow to come to conclusions, and very equivocal about those conclusions when they finally come. For the advancement of knowledge, this is a good thing. But for taking action to fix problems even if there may not really be a connection, adhering to the rules of science can be counterproductive.

Anyway, that’s some of the overthinking I did before I wrote this four line comic.

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I was reading a bunch of Marvel’s rather delightful teen romance comic Spider-man Loves Mary Jane recently. I enjoyed it, which I expected both because it is an unusually common guilty pleasure among customers at the shop I work at and also because I love superhero romance. I actually started reading Ultimate Spider-Man again when I found out about the Spider-man/Kitty Pryde romance.

Anyway,  it made me think and now I have a proposal for a comic that would make me very happy. It’s just like Spider-man Loves Mary Jane except instead of being about Mary Jane it’s about the X-Men. Call it, I dunno, “Cyclops loves Jean Grey” or something. Once I thought of the idea, it seemed totally obvious. Mary Jane is, as near as I can tell, a fairly successful comic, particularly with demographics who don’t ordinarily read superhero comics. I know this is the fact at the store where I work. It’s not a bestseller by any means, but it’s been steady and growing. The X-Men, even more than Spider-man, have built in love triangles and romance. You could even take it something like the original first X-Men issue, having Jean Grey come to a new special school for mutants only to be the target of tons of adolescent male attention. You could add more and more interactions. There’s even been a very brief appearance of Iceman in Spider-man Loves Mary Jane, now that I think about it, so it would be pretty trivial to have the two comics exist in the same universe. And then you could even do the Kitty Pryde/Spider-man thing and own my heart forever.

C’mon, Marvel. It’s not like you’re not going to launch a bunch more X-Men comics anyway. Why not do something a little bit different with the X-Men. I bet it would not only help serve the same audience as Mary Jane, it would probably bring in more people to that title, since I think that a lot of X-Men fans would enjoy the Mary Jane comics as well.

I just watched Goro Miyazaki’s Tales of Earthsea/Gedo Senki again with some friends. Although this was a much better version with much better subtitles, it didn’t really change my thoughts about the film, which I discussed here. But afterwards I was doodling around a little on Ursula K. Le Guin’s web site afterward and came across a short essay entitled “What Makes A Story.” Now, I’ve read a very similarly titled essay, “What is a Short Story?” by Marion Zimmer Bradley, another writer I respect a lot. Bradley’s essay made me mad with the limiting definition it gave for the “commercial” short story. Someday I may write more about that, but suffice it to say that I was little bit hesitant when I clicked on this link on Le Guin’s page.

I was silly to worry. Not only are her meditations on what a story is beautiful and expansive enough to include all the stories I love, she wonderfully encapsulated what I think is so wrong about traditional attempts to define the story by writing:

“A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end:”  This comes from Aristotle, and it splendidly describes a great many stories from the European narrative tradition, but it doesn’t describe all stories. It’s a recipe for steak, it’s not a recipe for tamales.

I think the best antidote for restrictive definitions of stories is just to read a lot of different stories from different cultures and see for yourself how false they really are. Le Guin captures that idea marvelously.