After convincing a friend to read HERO, I am now doing another read-through of what's been released of it so far. It's fascinating watching the art style grow and develop alongside the writing. I've always enjoyed seeing art progressions.
So, you know, I’ll be doing a story and I’ll be like, “Well, something ridiculous needs to happen here. Um, God, he punched a dinosaur last Wednesday, can’t do that. Can I have… no, people jump through windows all the damn time, can’t do that again, gotta save it for next month.” I have had times where I’ve had to try to work at coming up with some ridiculous and appropriate set piece, and that becomes tiresome, when really, I have become mainly interested in a lot of cool plot twists and reveals. I’m excited about those, but I know that I have to do a certain amount of A to B until we get to C, and B is usually something along the lines of, you know, motorcycles exploding and stuff like that.
"Cumfart!" made me say I was done with the comic, but hearing how the fight was going drew me back in.
If Jimmy tells his daughter about any of this, he's going to have to look forward to hundreds of years of "remember the time you had to run away from a fight with a baby?"
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
My favorite part was one time she clearly was pretending to be someone else to complain about Dresden Codak, but then deleted it moments later, and then uploaded a sketch that said; "In which Cagle inadvertandly reveals she follows a hateblog."
Like hey Cagle, deceit? Pretending to be other people? Sockpuppets? Just another thing we do on the internet. It's cool.
Eh, more like a 360. He's humanized, and now we know he wasn't trying to murder his daughter. But he still made a bargain with the court, putting her remaining with them over her own interests.
More to the point, the unnecessary humiliation he inflicted was still just unnecessary humiliation in the end--the court didn't specify "start by making her wash off all her makeup and telling her she's inconvenienced her peers and friends". That was just the result of him "flipping out", as Tom put it--repressing his own shame and guilt and hurting Annie with it.
He's not an irredeemable jackass, but if Donald doesn't smack some sense into him he's eventually going to walk right into Renard's "I may allow harm to come to Tony through action" secret instruction from Kat.
That whole sequence felt like the climax to Michael Shea's "The Autopsy" except less unrelentingly gory. A glimpse of pure, alien malice made flesh. I know Morbi is into Shintaro Kago and the like but for this comic that level of horror is way out of left field.
it's 300 years in the future, he's become an international drug lord with the world's most pure cocaine, just killed about a dozen innocent bystanders in a chase that could have been prevented with just a little more forethought...
And Hunter is STILL hung up on "death row inmates," even if it means cutting out their tongues and chaining them to a wall all day, defeating the ethical purpose entirely.
So, Jeph Jacques is gradually turning AI in Questionable Content into a metaphor for minorities.
Robots (or Anthro-PCs) in the QC-verse started out similar to really intelligent children, which makes sense since they're practically the size of toddlers. Able to process data on a level exceeding that of the human brain, but their actions and goals were usually limited to whatever's in reach. Side characters to round out the human cast.
But then the Singularity hit, and the Anthro-PCs became citizeens with equal rights. And because it's hard to squeeze a lot of sympathy from the little bots, we now have two robots with humanoid chassis: Momo, the most fleshed-out of the original 4 Bots, who's now super-interested in AI civil rights and history, and now May, a hothead with a sailor's mouth who's trying to get a job fresh out of AI Prison. They correspond pretty specifically to black stereotypes. May is the stereotypical angry black person, and Momo's the stereotypical black academic who majored in Afro-American Studies in college (yes, that is a stereotype).
It's pretty clear that Jacques didn't actually plan this, and the fact that he didn't raises a couple of issues. For instance, if AIs are supposed to be parallels to minorities, then what does that say about Pintsize and Winslow? Winslow's about as dim as they come, and Pintsize's a lazy, hedonistic jerk. And, by default, they're now representatives of a minority group, ones that wouldn't be out of place in a minstrel show.
And then there's the fact that minorities are being represented by a fictional race in a universe where real-life minorities already exist. It's the old "fantastic racism" trope again. It's not inherently bad, and it's a good way to deal with issues that can't necessarily be discussed outright to the target audience (The Teen Titans episode "Troq", while still having some issues, is the best example that I have of this kind of thing). But in a comic that's dealt with suicide, sexuality, and other things quite frankly, it's kind of weird that we don't have actual humans suffering from prejudice (there's one or two mentions of that with Meena, a side character, but that's about it, I think).
And then there's the whole fact that QC's non-white cast never really gets a lot of screentime? Gabby got effectively written out, as did Sven's intern whose name I can never remember, Armin shows up maybe once every three months or so, and Emily's more of a punchline character than a full-fledged person. So, basically, Dale's the only full-fledged non-white character in QC right now, and that's only after Jacques did some overhauling on his character.
So yeah, long story short, there is a robot dealing with a prison record and prejudice, and I feel like something's wrong here but I'm tired so I'll try and write an actual conclusion tomorrow.
I feel like he's doing it again with this Bubbles.
Comments
That's a thing Tim Buckley is doing
When it comes to CAD, I'm always at a loss.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
So, you know, I’ll be doing a story and I’ll be like, “Well, something ridiculous needs to happen here. Um, God, he punched a dinosaur last Wednesday, can’t do that. Can I have… no, people jump through windows all the damn time, can’t do that again, gotta save it for next month.” I have had times where I’ve had to try to work at coming up with some ridiculous and appropriate set piece, and that becomes tiresome, when really, I have become mainly interested in a lot of cool plot twists and reveals. I’m excited about those, but I know that I have to do a certain amount of A to B until we get to C, and B is usually something along the lines of, you know, motorcycles exploding and stuff like that.
Chris Hastings on writing Dr. McNinja
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
If Jimmy tells his daughter about any of this, he's going to have to look forward to hundreds of years of "remember the time you had to run away from a fight with a baby?"
Even in Cagle's own drawing, it looked like a mouth to me :V
it's like a necker cube, you can see it one way or the other
but it never looked like a nose to me before
e: if it were a nose you'd expect it to cast a shadow
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
More to the point, the unnecessary humiliation he inflicted was still just unnecessary humiliation in the end--the court didn't specify "start by making her wash off all her makeup and telling her she's inconvenienced her peers and friends". That was just the result of him "flipping out", as Tom put it--repressing his own shame and guilt and hurting Annie with it.
He's not an irredeemable jackass, but if Donald doesn't smack some sense into him he's eventually going to walk right into Renard's "I may allow harm to come to Tony through action" secret instruction from Kat.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
i did not see the latest Back coming at all
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
this one i hypothetically could have, but i didn't, and that made the surprise better
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Dragons.
Holy fuck, that thing was disturbing. Like, genuinely unsettling.
Also: Read Vattu.
And Hunter is STILL hung up on "death row inmates," even if it means cutting out their tongues and chaining them to a wall all day, defeating the ethical purpose entirely.
Bless.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead