Art and Alliteration in the Land of Tomorrow

Stuff goes here!

[artsekey]

I review portfolios as part of my job, and every year the applicants have a new Theme. They make art and write stories that somehow overwhelmingly revolve around that year's Thing.

In 2023, it was horror. Things not being what they seem; the unknown, things that go 'bump' in the night-- stories that revealed dystopian devastation as their twist.

In 2024, the theme was grief. Whether it was lost opportunity or lost loved ones, we had an overwhelming number of submissions that touched on the subject.

In 2025, the theme was not being good enough. Trying your best and failing, trying over and over and over again, feeling like you weren't 'built right' for the world-- with an even mix of happy and sad endings.

This year, the theme seems to be shame. Lots of work about embarrassment and about how trying can (and will) lead to catastrophic failure. It's not "Try anyway," it's "Don't you see how foolish trying is? Do you not see all the signs that this is dangerous, that it will fail?" where the character does fail and the lesson is "You should've read the room, idiot."

Fascinating stuff.

[artsekey]

Observed, not assigned! There is no theme.

[artsekey]

Now I'm not going to sit here and speculate on what this all means, but I will tell you one thing; we need more stories about fighting against all odds and winning. We need those stories more than we've ever needed those stories (in my lifetime). The era of 'trying and dying anyway' is over. The time for subversion for the sake of entertainment is done. We need more characters to barely tread water in the deepest seas, gasping for air. Bloodied, tired, defeated, scorned and disparaged by everyone who saw the risks and chose safety. And we need them to live. We need them to win. "But that's not realistic. That's not how the real world works."

It could be. All it takes is one other pair of hands that embarked into the unknown-- that dared to try-- to reach out to and pull them free of that sea. A little bit of community makes all the difference.

[swackon]

There is a city that this darkness can’t hide.

There are the embers of a fire that’s gone out,

But I can still feel the heat on my skin.

This mess we’re in, well you and I,

maybe you and I,

We can light up the night.

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

[wire-smith]

I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.

[geniusbee]

these are getting weird

[janmisali]

oh I know how to make a poll's results look like the letter E watch this

what is the rightmost digit of the number of responses this poll has right now? (it should be visible before you vote.)

0, 1, or 2

3

4 or 5

6

7, 8, or 9

Remaining time: 5 days 20 hours

[characterdesignreferences]

Art by Boell Oyino

May’s Theme: #TravellingBeekeeper

Presented by IDEA Academy

Discover the artists of the Character Design Challenge community and the current Theme of the Month in our Facebook Group! And when you repost your design on our Patreon page, you can also win awesome prizes every month and choose the future themes!

RULES | WINNERS | PRIZES | COURSES

[softlyfiercely]

i love how weird kids are. they make up the most bizarre stuff when left to their own devices and it's never what an adult would naively predict a kid would do in their imaginative play

my friend's 5 year old recently got a toy veterinary medicine set - it's super cool, like one of those mini play kitchens a lot of kids have, but it's set up to pretend to be a vet (it's this thing) - it has stuffed animals and things to weigh them, give them medicine, take x-rays, write on their charts, etc.

so this kid, who is five and to my knowledge has no experience in the administrative bureaucracy of modern healthcare, puts a stuffed pig named Piggy on the exam table. she pretends to draw blood from Piggy using a fake syringe, and the blood goes into a toy test tube vial that she calls "the resulter"

i'm playing with her, right, so i'm like, awesome, what are the results of Piggy's blood test? and she says "we have to send it to the scientists." so we send the vial to the scientists (put it in her bedroom) and when we get back to the vet playset i'm like awesome what did the scientists say? and she says they have not gotten back to us yet

so she rolls her eyes, exasperated, and says we have to call the scientists. she pretends to call them. apparently, they tell her that Piggy's blood test is "at the bottom of the list" and "we have to WAIT." she frowns. we wait a bit longer and call them back. they tell us it will be a while! she says we should go ask the scientists in person so we go back to her bedroom and she inquires at this imaginary lab, at which point the scientists yell at her and tell her now they will make us wait even longer!

keep in mind she is 100% directing this play. she is making all this up. she is fully in control of this game, and she has decided that what we are going to pretend is that we are dealing with this exhausting nonsense, not actually treating Piggy.

finally the blood tests come back. they are inconclusive. the scientists do not know what is wrong with Piggy. the little girl walks back to the stuffed pig on the exam table, sighs deeply, and says in a very serious voice "we can never help you."

i'm obsessed with this kid. when given complete control over a make believe scenario, instead of becoming the heroic rescuer administering effective cures, she is instead a beleaguered vet making multiple calls to an overworked lab only to be left unable to help her patient.

10/10 no notes. kids are amazing

[bread-in-the-void]

um?

[noctude]

your online pets are worried about Y2K

[orpheuslament]

losing it

[bombing]

no your honor I absolutely can make my case like an adult. first things first, fuck the defendant and fuck his family too. secondly,

[bythestardoggedmoon]

[thecrumbez]

Happy Pride Month to those two women dancing together in the foreground of the boat scene in Godzilla (1954).

I’m sorry your romantic foibles were overshadowed by a big ass atomic lizard thing.

[erratic-dragon-fruit]

out of the tags with you

[qadmonster]

Ko-fi dooble

“Bivalve False-Seraphim/Demon“

Consider supporting me on ko-fi and get your own monster dooble!

[marcheriest]

Tableau of character commissions and some patreon requests from over the years.

Character design credit is located in the alt text. I simply drew them all!

[pocketss]

Ummm she's literally sensitive :/

[sam-keeper]

Hey Look At This Comic: Hilda the 13th

I picked up Mellodillo's gag strip Hilda the 13th recently and basically from the jump I've been trying to figure out a good way to highlight it that isn't just me saying "waow cartooning good". cause the cartooning's real good! expressive and gestural but still really clear, with great sense of strip-based pacing and joke development. it might not update daily but it's exactly the kind of thing that draws me to a daily strip. Oh, and I'm really enjoying the development of the urban fantasy sapphic and witchy setting and its many quirks. Like the appearance of Hilda's mother trapped in her blocky desktop computer:

This specific strip was actually perfect for me, cause it's got such an elegant command of its space and composition. I don't think it comes across as very flashy, but it's the kind of understated control that really impresses me.

Look at the way the "camera" in the scene gradually rotates through the three panels. We start with a head on view, with each character in order of their speech bubbles. Pretty straightforward. The next panel is at something like a 3/4 view (more like 30 degrees or something ,but who's counting). This allows us to focus in getting more detail on Hilda and her mom's expressions. It's a panel where just the two of them have dialogue, so retaining the same shot composition wouldn't make a lot of sense, right? I also just like the shot. It introduces some dynamism to what another strip cartoonist might simplify to a flat composition because that's a bit easier. (If you recall I was similarly wowed by the dynamic compositions in Ted Shearer's Quincy.) Having Hilda at an angle here emphasizes her defensive posture and expression of irritation (and, I'd read, a guilty conscience). And it creates the impression of Mrs G turning to berate Hilda despite the fact that she is, remember, a flat image on a bulky computer screen! There's some real utility in the composition choices.

By the last panel Mellodillo's transitioned us cleanly a full 90 degrees from the first angle, allowing them to once again effectively line the characters up for their dialogue, with Hilda's mom moved to the left so she can more easily set up the punchline exchange. I like that here there's a bit of a zig zag motion through the panel. It's not as straightforward as p1, but that works for me--Hilda's boxed in here by her critics on either side, after all, even if she gets the last word in. Imagine if the composition remained static throughout: the word balloons would have to criss-cross each other awkwardly to accommodate the backward speaking order between Mrs G and Hilda's covenmate Cole. I guess Hilda positioned on the right would more conventionally fit her being the punchline-deliverer but I think the tradeoff to a consistent, static composition adds little and loses lots.

None of this is the kind of flashy weird paneling I tend to highlight, but that's all the more reason for me to do so, I think. It's just good solid technique that's notable precisely because it's meant to work below our direct awareness. Which I suppose makes this a bit like explaining the magic trick, but how else are you going to learn how to cast spells?

I write extremely variable length reviews of comics under my Hey Look At This Comic tag here, and also on my website, so please follow for more talk about comics off the beaten path. If this piece helped you appreciate art more deeply, consider following me on patreon, adding me to your rss reader, and tipping me.

[juliedillon]

A watercolor painting of a swimmer encoutering some sapphic mermaids, edited slightly for tumblr. (The titty-out version is over on my bluesky at juliedillon.bsky.social )