Chitter Chitter Squeek

Comic book attack zone. Actual blog laurark.tumblr.com.

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Anime I’ve Been Watching Recently (April 2023)

Giant Gorg

I’m a few episodes into this kids adventure show from the 80s and I’m obsessed with it. It’s got the typical genre crew: boy protag, girl, nerd, heavy, giant robot and dog mascot. The villain is an evil nepo baby trying to earn his billionaire inheritance by taking over a fictional island in the South Pacific for his family’s mega corporation. He is basically what the characters of Succession think they are. 

This show also contains some pretty heinous racial caricature of Black people, to the extent I would be remiss not to bring it up. It’s mostly background characters, so far main characters with dark skin are depicted sensitively. 

Here’s what I like about the show: the protagonists are constantly killing people. After the last few years of working in kids media and building a laundry list of pretty benign stuff I’m not allowed to depict in kids comics, (can’t show a kid prick their finger on a cactus, can’t show a kid use scissors that are too big, can’t show a mom greet a kid with a neutral expression, she has to be ecstatic) I have to admit I’m pretty jealous of a show where the protagonists get a tank and fire it at evil capitalists. I know this is kind of like being nostalgic for when gasoline had lead in it. 

Gorg has also had a couple scenes that were genuinely creepy and scary. Those scenes usually are completely silent, something really rare in kids cartoons. I’m excited to see where Giant Gorg goes.

Kanon

I came across this while browsing and, based solely on the image above, I correctly deduced that it was based on an erotic visual novel from the 90s. I felt like a genius when I looked it up and saw I was right, then I felt ashamed I had amassed enough experience rubbing elbows with such media that i could identify it immediately. Is there a term for this? The skills we acquire by accident in pursuit of our hobbies?

Anyway this show is complete schlock based on an eroge and it still made me laugh out loud and cry actual tears. 

I also got the feeling I got when I first read “Night on the Galactic Railroad” and other stories by Kenji Miyazawa in that I was realizing how many manga and anime had been influenced by his work. I had been encountering work inspired by, responding to, and reaching for his work for years, but I had never read the original text. Suddenly he was everywhere. Similarly, I realize now I’ve been encountering works responding to Kanon for ages now. 

I was curious about how adapting a romance visual novel for a TV show would work out. Each girl gets her own pollen, slightly interwoven with all the others, and the show spends a few episodes introducing them all at once, then goes through each girl’s story line one by one. In a VN the storyline would culminate in a love confession and the couple getting together, but for a show that still has a few more girls for the protagonist to get close to, each storyline culminates in something akin to a love confession, then the girl gets conveniently removed from the story. Mostly they get put in the hospital. 

I really like how the supernatural elements are introduced in the show, which is bit by bit, and then all at once. The girl with the most implausible, magical storyline is explored first, so the rest seem completely believable in comparison. 

The show did become a little one-note in that all of the plot lines culminate with the girl (or someone close to her) being sick or injured. There are a million scenes of girls languishing in hospital beds or tending to someone doing the same. I don’t know what any of the sex scenes in the VN were like, but this almost felt more perverse. By the end of the show, almost the entire cast is in the hospital. 

Anyway, I loved it!

Record of Lodoss War (OVA)

I first saw this years and years ago as a little kid. I got the DVDs from my local game rental place, which had a tiny rack of anime tapes and DVDs for rent. It was really fun to compare what the show actually is against my memories.

Anyway, this show looks great. At no point did the story or characters surprise me in any way. I loved looking at it but I was also enduring it.

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Spinning by Tillie Walden

Hey, why did everyone say this book was about skating when it’s really about an entire girlhood of subsumed trauma? God damn, ya’ll. The quotes on the back of the book say it’s about “trying to find your power through practice” and “sorrow, growth, and triumph” but that’s putting it so mildly it’s like saying Alien is about taking care of a cat.

The lede is so buried in everyone’s reviews of this book but Walden puts her pain front and center. The character Tillie we’re seeing has been written off as “quiet” by everyone, but is secretly simmering in agony from a homophobic culture, bullies, and an emotionally cold home. She spends every morning and night skating and she can’t admit to anyone that she hates it. She’s boxed in, she’s growing into the knowledge that she’s boxed in, and since she’s being pushed to her limit, she just submits to entropy and waits it out. Tillie doesn’t grow as much as she finally gets the nerve to express her anger at 17. Honestly, for a teen just figuring out how hard the deck is stacked against her, who has few allies, this is probably a reliable course of action. If not for Walden’s fondness for drawing huge open architectural spaces, this book would feel suffocating. Tillie describes figure skating as feeling like a series of technical moves, not as feeling like graceful self-expression, the book kind of feels like this too.

There’s an interesting disconnect between this book being a memoir by definition and how little insight Tillie actually gives us. Some trauma is referred to in passing, some is shown plainly and analyzed later. Most of the book shows a sullen, repressed Tillie who never opens up, and the actual author is careful about what she shows us in said book. It’s easy to understand why someone would build up such a shield. How does one’s identity fracture when, upon coming out as gay, their twin says “I think it’s wrong” but their cello teacher says “It’s wonderful.” Also it’s funny to read a memoir by someone so young. In the author’s note in the end of the book Walden uses the phrase “my childhood iPhone” and (metaphorically takes a huge drag on my metaphorical cigarette, breathes out a huge cloud of smoke, and stares out the window.)

The thing I love about this memoir is that Tillie fails. I don’t mean that she should have overcome the homophobic adults, demanding a child do that is cruel. I mean that she doesn’t get what she wants from skating. She fails at connecting to the girls on her team, and admits she feels like she just used her best skating friend for company. I appreciate media that portrays failed friendships, where you don’t DISLIKE the other person but you just can’t jell the way you wish you could. Tillie doesn’t become a skating star and leave all the fuckers who didn’t appreciate her in her dust, she just grows up and moves away. She doesn’t overcome, all she knows how to do is endure. Which is what most teens in suffocating situations have to do. It’s okay to just make it through, you don’t have to have an Oprah-worthy tale of rising above. Obviously we should all strive to make the culture better, but I think it’s too much to ask of teens who are the thick of it.

Anyway, read the book.

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Tangerine by Edward Bloor

A very good YA book. I’d love to write about it but I need another year to let my brain percolate and make all the connections it needs to make.

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March Vol. 1-3 by John Lewis, Nate Powell, and Andrew Aydin

Okay. It’s good, obviously. I especially appreciated on how it focused on the very concrete details of WHAT their resistance movement looked like. This is very important information. Lots of white Americans like to think of this chapter of history as like, over and done with, so when we teach history in our schools we miss some very necessary context. March includes the context of the time, which really highlights how radical using nonviolent resistance was.

I also appreciated how March included how many disagreements within the resistance there were. Sometimes people broke off to start their own factions, sometimes they stayed. Lots to think about.

My only “complaint” about March is that I wish there was more of it. I want to know how John Lewis from Troy because Representative John Lewis. How does he see the issues of the 60s linked to those today? How about his work and life as a Congressman?

My public school education covered the Civil Rights Movement in detail but never told us WHY we spent so long on it. Lots was missing, obviously. It was never, ever supposed that we, elementary school students of the American suburbs in the 1990s, would need to use these techniques to advocate for our own rights someday. A friend of mine recently told me about how it was just assumed our generation would never have a Great Struggle, like WW2 or the Great Depression, and how since the election we’re all in shock because ta-da! Here it is. Time to fight.

Read March.

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The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Accurately described as Kafkaesque. This novel is about a woman who stops eating meat after having a disturbing dream and then has mental breakdown. Only a few paragraphs are from the actual woman’s point of view, most of the novel is written with her as Object. We see her as the men in her life see her, which is a true window into hell. Her husband sees her as an appliance, simply a tool to serve his life. Her sister’s husband sees her as a magical fairy, a muse, a sex doll to be obsessed with. Both men use their fantasies as rational to do horrible things to the vegetarian.

I read this book very quickly, riveted. The best section is from the point of view of the woman’s sister as she comes for a visit in the mental hospital. The sister has empathy for the vegetarian, some understanding of the root of her problem. The sister has the same seed within her, the same agony of being crushed by the kyriarchy. (Do people still use the term kyriarchy? It’s appropriate to just say “patriarchy” here, since all of their suffering is directly related to misogyny.) Instead of having a similar breakdown she has become hard, committed to surviving. The sisters are both sides of Kafka’s cockroach: one insane, lashing out every second at life’s horror, the other outwardly calm yet fully understanding and despairing the rigged game she has to play every day for the rest of her life.

Stressfulness rating: 5/5 stomach ulcers.

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Necessary Trouble by Sarah Jaffe

Very heartening book, even though it deals with difficult subjects. Honestly it’s a warm little time capsule from not only before the election but before Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race. Those happy golden days, lol.

This book makes an effort to connect the last few years of American uprisings, including Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. It’s a crash course on the history and context of the beginning of movements. I was proud of myself for already knowing some of the facts.

What I’m really interested in is the detailed descriptions of What People Do to Change Things. That gets cleaned up a lot in history books, I really didn’t know the details of the process until recently. The Indivisible Guide is a great resource for this too, and one I plan on following.

Not sure everyone needs to run out and read Necessary Trouble right now but it’s helpful for feeling like you’re not alone.

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To All The Boys I’ve Ever Loved by Jenny Han

This is the fluffiest YA romance book I’ve read in a long time. I honestly don’t mean “fluffy” as a dig, it was very pleasant and enjoyable, and the pure emotions of the teen protagonist come across with great strength. I forgot there were books so sweet and innocent. There are a few bits of beautiful, delicate language that are great, but for the most part I wish this book had been a comic. The only objects that are described in any detail are the protagonist’s clothing. I found myself wishing this was a fashion romance comic, like Paradise Kiss. Like I’m trying to picture a niche industry of teen comics that are cheap little black and white books with fun stories. That sounds really nice.

Other thoughts, related but not about the book:

I’m going through a weird phase where I don’t want every comic to be a long heavy graphic novel, but I find myself yearning to have made a big, serious graphic novel. I have this idea that that kind of book is inherently “legitimate” but I know if I ever accomplished such a thing, I would move the goal post so even then I couldn’t think of my book as “legitimate,” “serious,” etc.

I’m thinking back to being obsessed with Tokyopop manga when I was in Junior High and how those $9.99 books were within my budget, fairly easy to find, and not so huge it was a pain to store them. I went to a talk by a graphic designer at Fantagraphics last year and when talking about Wandering Son, they boasted that “it was printed better here than in its home country.” That phrase didn’t sit right with me. Wandering Son is a long series, it ran for over 10 years in serialized format. If someone wanted to own the whole run of collected books in English, they’d have to buy each $25-$30 hardcover from Fanta. Even if money is no object, it’s a huge space commitment. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with an important book being small and softcover, especially one of a long series.

[laurark]

Laura K Plays 4: Threads of Fate / Anger — Mammon Machine: ZEAL

[This comic was funded through Patreon under Slept-In Comics, an imprint of the ZEAL project. ZEAL aims to provide high …

I forget if I posted a link to my latest piece for ZEAL here or not~~ here it is. I don’t really talk at all about the game I’m actually playing in the comic and I wanted to write down some of my thoughts about it.

This entry is about  one of my favorite games, Threads of Fate. I replayed it last year, for the first time since I was a teenager. I found it on the shelf at a game rental place when I was in elementary school and totally fell for it right away. It’s a platform JRPG where you play through the same story as two different characters, one boy and one girl. The play style of the characters is different, and the story outcome is slightly different too.

I guess what I loved immediately was the aesthetics. The costume and character design is this totally unique combination of vague-European-fantasy-land, Orientalist fake Chinese motifs, and late 90s JRPG design. The characters are all wearing these clothes that are bulky in weird ways, like who would design a character that permanently has a flannel shirt tied around her waist, but it all just works? Oversize shorts and hats that seem like precursors of Kingdom Hearts-style “belts and zippers” costumes, but for some reason the Threads of Fates character designs seem much more cohesive than those.

The color design is a big feature of the aesthetic too. There’s just a perfect balance of muted tones to make the bright ones pop. And it’s not like “anime protagonist syndrome” where only the main characters have colorful hair and eyes. I think every single character design has some kind of bright color incorporated. But the color design is so balanced that when someone has red hair it SIZZLES and a dark purple dress seems so rich and vibrant.

Also it has some of my favorite game music, this track in particular is one of my favorite songs.

Replaying the story really knocked me on my ass too. I remembered the basics of what happened, but I was really moved by how quietly emotional it is. A lot of characters are living dolls created by sorcerers, and since the sorcerers have long since died, they’re struggling to find meaning in their lives. The emotional aspect of the story comes out when you play as the boy, and the humor comes out when you play as the girl. I guess I like that instead of being a demure healing-magic type of RPG girl, she’s a super snotty spoiled princess who solves a lot of her problems by kicking people in the face.

Also, Laura K Plays is a series on ZEAL, so look forward to it every month! For at least a few more months, haha.

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Trigger no. 8, August 2012

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I love this comic.

It’s a perfect tiny glimpse of a moment in those hours-long crit sessions in art school. The characters are immediately recognizable: the long haired professor and serious department chair who are always butting heads, and the students who can only look on. You can tell they’ve spent every single thesis review in the last 15 years arguing about whether or not the size of a painting is important. I’ve LIVED this comic. I think it’s like this at all universities, not just art school. If you sit in a classroom long enough, you’ll hear each departments’ version of this conversation.

I love that we only see the ponytail professor from the side, as he never stops looking at the painting, I love that he reaches his hands to the sky in rapture. I love the frustrated person storming off. I love that the painting is never shown, but I presume it’s the image of wolves looking at each other that’s shown before the comic starts.

I love the ponytail professor’s pronouncement that it’s “a testament to love!” This comic is a testament to love! I’ve started using that phrase when I’m rationalizing an artistic decision, or even when I want to give myself a confidence boost. “This panel is composed like this as a testament to love!” or “This mug of tea I made is a testament to love!”

Full disclosure: Kevin Czap published a collection of my comics. I don’t want Mouse Color to be only reviews of my friends’ work but nothing will stop me the pleasure of rereading and discussing Trigger no. 8!

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Kaoru Mori: Anything and Something by Kaoru Mori (Yen Press)

This is a collection of short stories, including supplementary materials to Mori’s serialized works Emma and A Bride’s Story. Most of these comics were made by Mori with one of her favorite themes in mind, and man, does she love her themes. Maids, playboy bunny costumes, women in glasses, and Victorian-era England are all drawn and detailed to a fetishist’s heart’s content, but never feel flat or boring. It’s great.

It’s exactly the pigpen effect I described in this review. She’s in deep. In the autobio comic portions of the book, Mori herself describes herself as a freak. (Which made me feel a lot better because when I started reading the fourth story about maids, I thought, “Damn, what a freak.”) Mori is great at conveying the charm and appeal of her favorite subjects. I think because she simply puts her fantasies down on paper, honestly and clearly. The storytelling is mostly wordless, the reader is simply invited to take pleasure in Mori’s personal visual world.

Contrasted to The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, a book similar in its single-minded pigpen obsession, but used far too many words to try to bludgeon the reader into loving Victorian England, Mori’s appeal shines even more.

My favorite story is “The Swimsuit Bought Long Ago,” in which a woman finds a sexy swimsuit bought many years ago and tries it on for the viewer, who is revealed to be her spouse at the end. The spouse is never pictured, rather the panels are all from their POV. She constantly looks directly out of the panel, right at the reader, flirting with us. All of the women in Mori’s comics do this, even a story set in a gentlemen’s club staffed by Playboy bunnies is full of women with agency. The drawings of women’s butts and thighs are lush and gratuitous, but never feel like too much. This entire book is incredibly horny, but it’s a refreshing horniness.

There’s not that much information about Mori’s personal life available, and I don’t believe in making big pronouncements about someone’s life based on their work but..........viva comics by queer women!

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This article nails down a lot of things I’ve been thinking about lately...

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Citizen 13660 By Miné Okubo

This comic is a first-hand account of the life of a prisoner in Japanese-American internment camps during WWII.

Each page is structured the same way: a panel of artwork at the top, and a few paragraphs describing the scene below. There’s no immediate flow between panels, they could be the same second or different days. In the introduction the author explains that the first drafts of this book were drawings she made and sent to friends on the outside—and she always intended for them to be published.

My first impression of the book was that it was surprisingly unemotional and stark, but further readings give me the opposite impression. Okubo’s cartoon self reacts subtly as she observes the camp; a frustrated face at an armed guard, a sad smile at a couple dancing, tears on a hard face as she says goodbye to her home.

There’s a podcast that analyzed this book and scooped a bunch of words out of my mouth, so you should listen to it. And then find a copy and buy it.

This isn’t an analysis of the book but there’s something I remember from being in school about learning about Japanese American internment. When I was in elementary school we had a special history lesson about the camps, which I remember because our history lessons were usually out of books or watching films. But this one was a presentation, where an Asian American actress gave a slideshow and narrated a story, told in first-person perspective as a teenage girl whose family was imprisoned. The only real details of the story I remember are: they had to ask white friends to hold on to their belongings, the food at the camp had so little nutrition some people got sick, and when they were released they found the white friends had lost or SOLD some of their stuff, but she was reunited with her dog.

I think maybe we had this lesson because I grew up in Western Washington, where people where actually taken from? It was my first experience with a history lesson that felt completely real, like it was happening in front of me. I hope they’re still doing that presentation, and more like it. I know I’m not completely making this up because I happened upon this same presentation happening years later at my high school.

(Big thanks to Maré Odomo for lending me this book.)

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This song was playing while I read this and it made a pretty perfect soundtrack

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Trying to think of some smart commentary but instead I’m just going to sit and think about it.

Perfect emotional metaphor, perfect pacing, perfect inking.

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The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua

I don’t really want to write like super snappy bad reviews here, or reviews where I take a lot of words to say “I didn’t get it!” because there’s really just a lot of art that I don’t “get.”

I love it when an author is completely, totally in love with the subject and world of their book and they’re just in it like a pig in shit. Sometimes it’s not totally fun for the audience, but seeing someone just IN IT is really refreshing and satisfying. J.R.R. Tolkien is a good example of this, he’s like “Please come play with me in this fantasy pigpen I built” and some people really get it and some people don’t but you got to respect the passion.

So this book is like that, the author is totally in her Victorian mathematician pigpen.

The book is broken into short episodes, one is a factual account of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage’s lives and work (frustratingly short and truncated though). In the rest Lovelace and Babbage and other famous Victorians are cast as a kind of Steampunk Action Heroes in short stories that tangentially mention real historical facts or scientific theories. Each story has lengthy footnotes and endnotes that explain all the mentioned facts, historical points, and machines.

There’s usually three footnotes on each page. On the one page without footnotes, the characters look down and remark upon it. There’s a million words on each page. I hate it. I call this type of GN “Comics for People Who Hate Comics.” Too much info gets crammed on each page and reading flow is sacrificed. This book leans heavily toward the “illustrated document” side of the Comics Spectrum. In her bio and introduction the author seems a little embarrassed that she made a comic? I felt very embarrassed reading this book.

The last section of the book is devoted to diagrams explaining how Ada and Babbage’s theoretical Analytical Engine would have worked, down to the widget. (But it never explains what the machine was used FOR? Doing your taxes? Theoretical mathematics??? I assume??) It’s really, really hard to read.

The author makes it clear she thinks the actual historical lives of Lovelace and Babbage were boring. The “nonfiction” first chapter has stuff like characters wishing Twitter existed in their time. The jovial uneven tone is actually really unnerving. A panel and a footnote explaining that young Ada was disciplined by being tied up and locked in a dark closet is sandwiched between jokes. What effect on a woman’s life would being raised to hate her infamous father Lord Byron have? The author interprets this as Steampunk Action Hero Ada wanting to destroy all poetry, which contradicts the historical Ada’s revelation that creativity is needed to comprehend theoretical mathematics.

Probably my biggest problem with this book is the tone. Some of the jokes really are funny. The drawings are beautiful. The best part is “Ada in Wonderland” where the author debates two conflicting theories about Ada Lovelace’s life: Is she a figurehead pumped up by feminists, who never actually wrote her famous paper containing the first computer program? Or was she more of a genius than we know, and was squashed by a patriarchal society not ready for a woman scientist? That’s an important conversation needed in a book about reinterpreting historical figures, and it’s the only part the author considers with a serious tone.

I seriously did not Get this book! But I respect the passion and work that went into it. I especially respect that Pantheon would publish 300+ page hardcover GN. Lots of people must be into this type of pigpen.

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Computer Love by Ivy Jane (contains spoilers)

Read Computer Love here. Full disclosure or whatever: I did a guest comic for Computer Love.

I don’t know how professional it is to write a review of your friends’ webcomics, but I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I want a place to collect all my thoughts on Computer Love.

Computer Love is an ongoing webcomic about a future city on Antarctica and the people who live there. It’s about a lot of things, in a way that reminds me of an essay Ursula Le Guin wrote about how Sci-Fi is important because it offers the chance at writing about “open” worlds, where author is free to experiment using future tech as metaphor. Mostly CL's focus is on a group of women who become friends, and the relationships they have.

I love these kinds of stories, where it feels like the characters could go to the mall or go to Mars and it wouldn’t be out of place. The characters’ inner thoughts and the outer futuristic world are explored with equal importance. “Exploration” is a key theme.

The future city in Computer Love is rendered in a vivid electric color palette. Pinks, purples, and oranges color a city reminiscent of Syd Mead’s “Blade Runner” city, if Syd Mead had loved Hello Kitty, glitter, and dance clubs. Minimal drawing information is given, but it’s still clear to imagine this city as a possible real place. If the future pleasure city wasn’t enough of “open” playground for Jane’s story, the characters also spend time in Virtual Reality, going on dates or exploring their desires.

This comic has perfect examples of future tech as metaphor for relationships. Fen explains about her family, who woke her from cryogenic sleep and repaired her body, but don’t really see her as a person. It’s the perfect crystallization of the “these people are responsible for my life, but they are not my family” situation.

The world outside the city walls is crumbling. Mysterious creatures eat up more of the “Old” world every day and the characters must decide what to do with this information. Live fast because life is short? Live in the past, complete with VR recreations? It’s a question on my mind a lot as climate change destroys the world around me.

You can clearly see the author learning on the page. The drawing and storytelling in the early pages are clunky, but improves dramatically update by update. The story’s intrigue got me through the early part, and now Jane improves all the time. It’s exciting to see someone growing right in front of you. Jane clearly has a vision for Computer Love, and just needs to get the skills to express it.

I’m clearly projecting a lot onto this comic.  Computer Love shows a rich enough world to allow that kind of dreaming.

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The Never Weres by Fiona Smyth (Annick Press)

I got this GN from the library, sight unseen, just because it looked interesting and it’s one of the best comics I’ve ever read. Every single page drips, snakes, twists, dances, etc, but I never once was confused about how to read it. I never got lost or thrown off my reading flow.

The story is about three teenagers living in a cramped future city, in a world where a virus has made it impossible for humans to reproduce anymore. The protagonists are 15, and are part of the youngest generation on Earth. Cloning could possibly solve the population crash, but fierce debate about its ethics ties up research progress.

I think a less emotional, more simplistic version of this story would have two protagonists, one representing cloning and one representing robotics, and those two characters would argue until external forces made one victorious. Two of the teens in The Never Weres take on these viewpoints, but there’s a third protagonist who mediates and advocates to remember the humanity the people of the future will need, whether they’re bots or clones. The teens in The Never Weres seem a lot more human than the characters in lots of other sic-fi stories, where they’re thinly veiled mouthpieces. I read The Never Weres a few days before I watched Interstellar, which was some real bullshit American white supremacist daddy worship, so I enjoyed this book even more in comparison.

The Never Weres also takes the time to let the emotions breathe. The plot never drags, just enough space is given to the characters to act out and be human. Even people who might witness the end of days still spend some time blogging. One of my favorite scenes is when Xian, the girl who believes the future lies with bots, gets a disappointing message from her brother and then wrecks her apartment in a temper tantrum. A two page spread shows her frantically rip apart her packed apartment, followed by a page of four panels of her sitting down, shocked and catatonic.

I loved the real sense of place this book has, the details of the grimy sewers and city streets. While the whole book feels cohesive, each place has its own rules, i.e. the scenes taking place in the sewers all have snaking tube-shaped panels full of little details.

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geritsel:

Fritz Koch Gotha dog illustrations - just love ‘m

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I think these illustrations are actually a comic– you can see the recurring character of the Dachshund boy. This comic is about this kid who can’t do anything right: he’s scolded at breakfast, bored at school, falls in a lake during playtime, makes his siblings cry and gets scolded for breaking a pillow. Like it just doesn’t stop for this guy. The action is clear up until the last two panels, where he gets a letter from Santa Claus and then cries at the window at night. His siblings got toys from Santa but he just got a letter.

 Is he crying because the letter is scolding him and telling him why he didn’t get a toy? Or is it a “I know things are hard for you but I believe in you” letter? Which is probably the best present you can give a little kid with troubles like these? What do you see is happening to the dachshund? This is making me cry.

I just see so much happening in the last panel. That moment at night when you’re looking back on what’s been happening to you lately and the accumulation of little mistakes starts to turn into “I’m a bad person.”