The Development Committee

Mission Statement: The Development Committee is committed to the process of developing or being developed, handling development in all tenses and meanings. The Development Committee conducts a specific state of growth and advancement while utilizing refined products to constitute new stages in a changing situation that convert ideas into resources by opening phases that manage the process of experiencing aliments and treating chemicals to making physical images.      

[thedevelopmentcommittee]

Another hot-mess fake-comic. Bits and pieces here-and-there of random things from 1724-1744, mostly American and British.

[thedevelopmentcommittee]

No new fake-comics right now. Putting off the work, it's May Day after all.

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Just another repeat set in Pittsburgh. A continuation from the last post. Still no map for this fake-comic. You get a point for every typo you fieauyeadndund.

[thedevelopmentcommittee]

Sorry for the lack of the map. This is some work I did about Pittsburgh during it's fastest growth period, which brought a lot of social tension. The city followed all the national trends of the time. The nation was industrializing and new urban culture was forming as opposed to the former agricultural folkways of the past colonists.

[thedevelopmentcommittee]

This is an attempt to tell 'King Philip's War'. This was a war fought in colonial New England between the colonists and certain Native American groups. There's always more to the story, and if one is interested, I would encourage you to read from other sources as well about it, if you don't know anything about it.

In terms of American history, if one spends any time learning about the colonial era, it will come up. It was a dramatic turning point and with a focus on generational change, I was left wondering about the effects of war and violence on this generation. Not everyone wanted the war, when it did come it was poisonous on all sides, and it had devastating effects of the american population and it also caused a lot of economic problems.

The distinctive difference between 1675 and 1676, was the change of any non-Christian power group. Natives stayed in the area but became a servant class to the colonial hegemony.

Comparing it today: This narrative has lots of imperious white men with an air of cultural superiority, something you can find examples of throughout American history. It reminds me most of the news and social media coming out of Israel and Gaza, although there are lots of differences between the two, it's not one-to-one. For me, working on this story, I ask myself how does this story help realize peaceful culture and society? This narrative is a contrast to peace and it along with every other war can fit into that question.

[thedevelopmentcommittee]

Pre-Pittsburgh: Memo and Personal Statement

This fake comic takes places two hundred and seventy ago, in my hometown. Pittsburgh’s cherished founding stories traditionally begin with a cameo from historical a-lister, young George Washington, on his hero’s journey. The Old Block House and the Fort Pitt museum literally stand today as physical testaments of imperial ambition in a bygone age that made the city what it is today. The stories of George Washington and Fort Pitt have been told over and over again since time immemorial, so what is there new to say in retelling this story in fake comic form?

First off, this fake-comic is rife with tooty-fruity images of “Ohio Country” between 1748 – 1755. Brick-by-brick and cell-by-cell the Pittsburgh tale slowly builds. While I usually start by just doing lots of studies of previous historical imagery of the place and time, my research left me wondering down other aspects less explored. While George Washington wasn’t the only military dude in the area, the traditional history tells of a syndicate of various military dudes that who came to the wild west of “Ohio Country” to establish imperial domain. There are also white traders and American chiefs as other “agents” that move the story along.

Pittsburgh is the 68th largest city in the United States, it’s one of many places that made contributions to a national historical narrative and it of course experienced national and global phenomena, aside from being home of the Steelers.

Generally, I’m more interested in social history over generation instead of the hijinks of individual military dudes. I just didn’t have the sources to make the entire narrative around Pittsburgh’s social structure of the eighteenth century. This fake-comic turned out to be more of an exercise in telling the old stories.

 The book for this time period that really broadened my horizons was Into the American Woods by James Merrell that narrates the translators and negotiators between the state of Pennsylvania and Native American groups, mainly the Haudenosaunee, who were centered in upstate New York, but had claims to the region. Merrell’s interpretation of the events at Fort Duquesne and Fort Pitt are very different from other interpretations on the cause and effects transpiring at the forks of the three rivers. The native people who lived in the region, who had broken free of Haudenosaunee and allied with the French, even helping expel Braddock’s forces in 1755 against the English. History would remember Braddock as Pittsburgh’s first jagoff.

Perhaps in second installment I can present how critical the Ohio Native Americans were in determining which empire would be the victor.

[thedevelopmentcommittee]

A continuation in the unending saga of fake comics. As always, this Anglo-centric work (written in English) left much out. The fake-comic did not fully engage in a Dutch narrative. Perhaps one day that narrative will be better detailed. 1672 was a critical year for the Dutch, especially their war with France. The African narrative is always something that could use more illumination as this period was what Ira Berlin called the coming of the ‘Plantation Generation’ on the mainland colonies. Previously the majority of the colonies labor depended on white indentured labor with the black population being a small minority. From my understanding, the Barbados plantation system began in legal form around 1660 and the racial-legal system spread to other English speaking colonies.

[thedevelopmentcommittee]

Paradise Lost - another fake-comic, or as my accountant says, “one more turd in the bucket.” As I painted through the miasma of a few more years in the seventeenth century colonial world, I had plenty of time to consider some of the meanings behind all the events. Anyone making a work like this has the time to consider what they consciously and unconsciously transmit through a narrative. The information seemed to coalesces through events in one place that alter the situation on the other side of an ocean. To consider what is real change, one is left with the impossible task of considering what pieces of the past are left to make a historical narrative and what was lost and therefore a description of change is nothing more than a hypothesis.

[thedevelopmentcommittee]

Memo: Regimes of 1658 - 1660: There’s always more to explore and inquire upon any time period, but I am pushing myself to move forward in time, only 350 years in the past. Although this project is a lot to do with just investigating the information that is out there, two major themes that appear in my mind are considering the social structures and role of institutions. This section emphasizes institutions more heavily.

While Anglo-Saxons have seen their institutions as strong, in the context of the present the institutions were still “developing”.

[thedevelopmentcommittee]

1650 - 1660s. Some work that explores the mid seventeenth century. I could have spent a lot more time going into the many different atmospheric levels of what was going on during this time period. This is about as far as I’ve gone for now and will make an attempt at a more developed picture some other time.

[thedevelopmentcommittee]

[thedevelopmentcommittee]

The Bible Colonies - not a particularly exciting or heavily researched period of colonial history, but I wanted to present a fake-comic that investigated more about the demographic aspects of the past. Historian Carol Berkin writes that the we know much about the highly literate Puritans of colonial New England because they wrote so much, perhaps an embarrassing amount.

From these records we can put some semblance of the demographic or generational history, rather than the overly exhausted great men and epic wars that tend to dominate our history books.

[thedevelopmentcommittee]

[thedevelopmentcommittee]

A comic that explores biological and physiological traits in humans, presented in the middle stone age of about 200,000 - 150,000 years ago. A previous fake-comic was centered around the biology of child birth and mitochondrial eve, this is the follow up that explores masculine aspects. This issue shows some of the more brutal sides of humanity, it’s my understanding that humans have always been just as brutal and wonderful as we have always been. From a biological and genetic point of view, the human condition has changed very little in the past two hundred thousand years.

Some sources pertaining to this fake-comic:

Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World by Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden

Lone Survivors: How We Came to be the Only Humans on Earth by Chris Stringer

The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey by Spencer Wells

Death From A Distance: and the Birth of A Humane Universe by Paul Bingham and Joanne Souza

[thedevelopmentcommittee]

In the western civilization, for better and for worse, we put a lot of emphasis on individualism. In this project I worked on many individuals, which turned into a massive hydra. Although sometimes history is told through the perspective on one individual, a great king or influential artist, reality is something quite different. The more heads to the hydra don’t seem to lead anywhere but one giant mess. If someone is familiar with some of these figures perhaps it will remind them of a deeper and more full account of the period.

[thedevelopmentcommittee]

talking about slavery in terms of economic development

[thedevelopmentcommittee]

Talking about the history of democracy