Coming Up From the Baconalia

So New Year’s happened and then I kind of went radio silent for a few weeks on here, which might feel awkward if I hadn’t resolved after the first week to just not beat myself up about the level of activity on the blog.  I’ve jumped pretty heavily into playing with my new art materials, especially the markers that I got, and so a lot of my creative energy has been focused on producing visual art over doing a lot of writing.

When I look at the backlog of comics I have to read, I mostly just feel a bit of despair at the prospect of diving into all that material and devoting brain cells to unpacking it.  I have the entire run of Pretty Deadly: The Rat to look at (I bought it monthly and just stowed the issues until the whole thing was out so I could read it in one go), and my brain just spins when I think about trying to analyze it; Kelly Sue DeConnick produces some really excellent stuff, but I always feel under equipped to tackle her work.  Slightly less daunting but still worthy of sighs of aggravation are the outstanding issues on the Life is Strange series as well as Die #10 which really does deserve some deep thought that I just have not had the bandwidth for lately.

I think the sense of overwhelm is coming from a combination of low-level exhaustion from the end of the holidays (I spent two weeks unclenching from work, and now I’m back to work while needing time to unclench from celebrations) and the general ennui that tends to pervade January.  It’s legitimately the worst time of year as the days are still extremely short, the holidays are done, and also at work we’re all scrambling to drag students over the finish line of first semester.  It’s terrible, and the sense that I should be doing more with my free time is this low-grade buzz in the back of my head that always assails me around the end of the work week as I look at the weekend and wonder if this will be the time that I jump back on the blogging treadmill.  I’m working on this post on a quiet Saturday night at the end of the month, and I honestly don’t know if I’m going to feel like writing more once this update is done.

The saving grace here is that Rachael and I have discussed this general malaise, and we agree that a lot of it just seasonal.  Eventually things will improve (I suspect that I’ll feel better right around the time I get grades finalized and hammer out some lesson plans for the start of February), but in the mean time, it’s okay to accept that this is a sort of Baconalia (that is, a festival of sluggishness that is embodied by our Bacon plushie who just sits on the couch all day).  It’s okay to take breaks from making stuff, especially when making stuff is something you really enjoy doing.  Of course, I then have to remind myself that I haven’t stopped making stuff exactly; I’ve just shifted my focus to something that’s not well suited to a blog format.  I’m posting artwork on my Twitter account almost daily, and that’s been really fun, although the eternal gnawing views monster is never happy with the modest but genuine engagements I get through that outlet.  It’s the worst to make a thing that I find generally satisfying for myself and then have the satisfaction tarnished as I wait hopefully for someone to like or share my work.  The refrain that you should always make art for yourself first is cold comfort when you don’t receive frequent external reinforcement that the art is actually good.

Anyway, here’s some stuff that I’ve made in the last few weeks.  I like a lot of it, even as I wonder how I could have executed it better.  In the mean time, I’m going to go back to doodles and television and reading comics just for fun and thinking about tabletop games that may or may not happen.

This was fun as an experiment in playing with extreme highlights.  I liked the effect on the head when it was half colored, so I decided to lean into that concept of the character’s energy blast being so bright that it whites out parts of his body.  It’s fun, though these kinds of pictures often emphasize to me how basic my grasp of muscular anatomy is.  I was really irritated that I had to keep redrawing the hand; you can see the erasure marks on the paper from where the graphite got ground in after I overworked it.  While the coloring is okay, I actually think this image is kind of boring and static; the pose feels stiff when I look at it.  I think something’s off with the perspective, like I didn’t foreshorten the torso enough in comparison to the legs to give a strong sense of the character moving towards the viewer, and as a result he just looks like he has stubby legs while he’s moving parallel to the camera.

I was playing around again with foreshortening in the torso here, and again I think I whiffed the execution.  The figure definitely reads as leaning over, but he just seems top heavy in comparison to his legs.  I didn’t get the position of the hand right, so he’s posed in the middle of sitting up instead of looking like he’s resting his weight on his elbow.

The more I look at this one the more I see problems with it.  There are still a lot of quirks to coloring with markers that I haven’t adapted to, and it’s especially obvious here where I made mistakes.  I was experimenting some with how to draw eyes here, and while I liked the effect okay before it was colored, now it looks really off.  I’m constantly having to relearn that every line on a comics-styled face ages it dramatically.  That’s pretty clear here.  Also, I think this was the picture I did in the last few weeks that made me realize I am fascinated with drawing hoods, but I have no idea how to proportion them so they look right in comparison to a figure’s head.

I am obsessed with making my full-body figures look dynamic, and I was pretty proud of how this one turned out.  There are some elements in the execution that I don’t love (that back foot swinging around looks rough in comparison with the rest of the legs, and the shoulder on the forward arm looks dislocated to me), but overall I think it’s a good piece.  I am very gradually learning how to use speed lines to imply motion.

This portrait was a lot of fun for a couple different reasons.  The first one is that because the character is a humanoid chicken, I didn’t feel as much pressure to avoid shy away from extra detailing.  He’s supposed to look a little grotesque, which is actually a very freeing effect to go for.  Also, because he has a beak instead of a fully functional primate mouth, I was forced to think through how the eyes and eyebrows should work together to communicate emotion.  I wanted him to look happy, and I think I fell short on that; he seems more surprised than anything (chickens always look surprised though).  Fuzzy eyebrows were a fun detail.

There is so much junk on the hand in the drawing; I hated doing it.  On the flip side, I like the effect and I feel like the texture of the bits on the hand do a good job of giving it a sense of volume despite the two-tone coloring.  The face came out great; that slight raise of the eyebrow like he’s a little embarrassed to be noticed is delightful.

It’s a Star Wars pastiche with X-Men characters.  I don’t feel like explaining it.  The coloring took three days of work off and on, and in the end it came out pretty decent.  I’m eventually going to have to learn a lot more about how color schemes work so I can simulate different kinds of light.  The clash between the sunset tones of the background city and the foreground characters being in apparently white light bothers me now that it’s finished.  Part of that was lack of planning, but it was mostly just my limited understanding of how to use colors.

This one was a ton of fun to draw, even if I did have to redo each hand two or three times to get their proportions with the rest of the body right.  I particularly like the way the hair turned out here.  The face is pretty good, but I think the mouth should have been slightly bigger, and I should have reduced the size of the shine on the pupils a lot.  As it is, there’s a magical girl vibe to the face that doesn’t really mesh with the rest of the body.

I’m going to brag on myself for a moment here (because sometimes it’s good to acknowledge what you do well) and say that I am getting pretty good at visualizing interesting poses.  It’s all covered up in the finished drawing, but I spent a fair bit of time puzzling out the placement of the legs to make sure I knew how the entire figure would fit together.  This whole drawing probably took significantly less time than some of the other ones I’ve done in the last couple weeks, but it feels like a way more interesting piece of art.  I’m a little bugged that I didn’t account for drag when I drew the wings though; it makes no sense that they’d be extended that way.

This doodle came together in about an hour from concept to final colors.  It was really fast work.  The proportions are a little weird (I have a tendency to over extend torsos when I’m working on a flat surface because my perspective squishes the image slightly).  I am weirdly proud of the way the sweat pants look though.  I’ve been trying to figure out how you give texture to non-fitted clothing for a while, and I finally had some success here.  The weirdly shaped hoodie makes another appearance here as well.

All The Drawings

While I continue to cast around for something else to call my drawing posts (Learning Sketchbook was great!), here’s a big post with all the stuff that I finished at the end of the year plus a few things I’ve been working on since after New Year’s.

I didn’t feel like coloring this one.  Drawing skeletons is exhausting.

Rictor and Shatterstar are very good boys who really enjoy their Saturday mornings together.

I got a bunch of Prismacolor pencils for Christmas, so I drew a Psylocke (the new one, not Captain Britain; I know it gets confusing).  The skin tone pencils are a lot of fun to work with, even though I tend to be really shy about applying a lot of color.

Finished out my sketchbook with a picture of Illyana that’s done with the same pose I drew her in back in June.  The difference in my style between the two pictures is super striking.

I also got some markers.  They are fun (again, especially the skin tones).

Apparently having markers makes me way more ambitious.  By this point, coloring takes the majority of my time when I’m working on a piece.  Part of it is definitely learning to work with a new medium, but also my drawing style is still relatively simple so that I just don’t know how to spend more time on a piece before I move on from pencils.

The inset panels are mostly okay, but I think I nailed the profile of the face in this one.  There’s a lot of experimentation in this one with how to apply markers for coloring, which I think comes across most strongly in the texture contrast between the black section and the pink.

Against Nostalgia (Part 2)

Despite being the worst of the original trilogy of Indiana Jones, Temple of Doom was the one that I remember watching the most as a kid.  As an adult I could construct a complicated rationale for this about my relative levels of comfort with face melting, heart ripping, and rapid desiccation of a live body (these movies are gruesome), but the reality is probably more simple: I could never find the Raiders of the Lost Ark video in my parents’ house when I was a kid, so Temple of Doom was my first exposure to the colonialist action hero.  Still, you’d think that the heart scene would be the most iconic thing I remember about Temple of Doom, but it isn’t; the bridge scene is.

There’s a moment in the course of the escape from the Thuggee cult where Indy and his companions find themselves trapped on a rope bridge between two groups of cultists.  One of them steps forward to confront the hero with pair of swords that he wields with expert menace.  Smugly, Indy reaches for his holster to realize that he’s long since lost the pistol he normally carries.  Another solution will have to be found.  It’s a weird moment that follows a series of beats that don’t make sense in the context of story.  So many things have happened since Indy was last fully prepared for action with his standard adventurer’s gear that it’s ridiculous he’d suddenly think, “Oh, I’ll just use my gun now.”  If you’re a person who has seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, you get the meta joke that Spielberg and Lucas decided to make here: Indy, when previously confronted with a dangerous assailant who is obviously better versed in some kind of hand-to-hand combat during that earlier adventure, decided to take the most expedient route to victory, and here he can’t pull the same maneuver even though he’d like to.  The reason it’s a meta joke and not a plausible character beat is that Temple of Doom is set five years before Raiders of the Lost Ark.  That earlier success hasn’t happened yet, so it’s bizarre that Indy acts like he knows the solution to this absurd problem and then is bewildered to find it won’t work this time.  The audience, if they’ve seen the first movie, can find the moment delightful, but they have to do some extra labor that should have been on the filmmakers in order to get a comprehensible reading of the character off the chronological order of events.

In short, Indy going for his gun and comically failing to have it is a bit of pure fan service.  It’s silly and nonsensical and even inconsequential in comparison to many of Temple of Doom‘s other sins (or even the litany of problems with the concept of Indiana Jones in general), but it acts as a moment of prioritizing audience delight over building a meaningful and coherent story.  Its foundation is the idea that folks will get a kick out of the filmmakers nudging them and whispering, “Remember that bit you liked in the last movie?  Here it is again with a twist!”  It’s fine in small doses, but overindulgence just leaves you with an empty feeling after the fact, like stuffing your face with Christmas cookies and getting caught up in a sugar fugue.

The Rise of Skywalker Theatrical Poster (Image credit: Wikipedia)

That’s pretty much the entirety of The Rise of Skywalker.  If you were to take the hundred and fifty minute runtime and chunk it up into individual thirty second nuggets, any one of them alone might be delightful.  Instead, we get to reenact the bit from The Simpsons where Ned-Flanders-as-the-devil tries to punish Homer with endless donuts.  Your mileage may vary as to whether you are Homer or someone who doesn’t have an unlimited appetite for sweet treats.  I, for one, said with all seriousness this past week, “Please don’t offer me anymore cake,” so you can guess how I feel about this last Star War in general terms.

I have spent the intervening weeks between seeing The Rise of Skywalker and working on this post thinking and on and off about what irks me so much about the film.  I can’t say it makes me angry precisely; the Discourse of Star Wars has become largely tiresome in the last few years; it’s just not fun to discuss the creative choices being made with these movies, largely because people take it so seriously.  I’m guilty of this myself (see the first part of this series); that doesn’t mean I find conversations about storytelling choices boring in general (quite the contrary), but I think I’m reaching a point in my life where I’m learning to let go of the more toxic aspects of enthusiastic fandom.  Stories are absolutely important to a person’s sense of identity, and the corporatization of a particular mythology doesn’t make it any less impactful for the people who see vital reflections in it; however, I’m just not there with Star Wars anymore, and I suspect a large part of that jading is the fandom itself.  I was so irritated with the negative response to The Last Jedi two years ago because it promised so much potential for new kinds of stories in the Star Wars movies wrapped up in a very simple theme: The Force is for everyone.  It was such an invitation!

Two years later, I’m still in love with the ideas and execution of The Last Jedi as a movie and as an entry in the flagship series of the Star Wars mythos.  It grapples with a lot of the complexities that are supposed to be present in warfare.  The Resistance is justified in its fight against the First Order (because they’re Nazis, and you always fight against Nazis), but there is no glory in the application of violence to achieve a worthy goal.  People suffer, families are ripped apart, and it’s typically the most morally bankrupt who stand to make the most profit from any kind of armed conflict.  Balanced against that very frank look at the guts of warfare that hero narratives so often gloss over is this extended meditation on interconnection as the very stuff of the Force; Rose Tico’s observation that hope lies in saving what we love instead of destroying what we hate reflects back what Luke has been banging his head trying to explain to Rey in the grumpiest way possible perfectly.  Anyone can participate in this grand thing, and the way we do that is seeking out things to love.

At this point, I think it’s gradually seeped into the general consciousness that Disney as a profit seeking entity decided to change course from all these radical reimaginings of what the Star Wars universe could be about because they feared the backlash against The Last Jedi impacting their bottom line with the final episode of their trilogy.  Sort of secondary to that big idea is the understanding that Star Wars has become a cultural touchstone which is predisposed to turning into a battleground for our ongoing culture wars.  Folks across the political spectrum want to be able to lay claim to it because there’s cultural cachet attached that can steer broader popular sentiment.  I’m fully aware that this phenomenon is one of the driving reasons I adore The Last Jedi and feel generally apathetic towards Rise of Skywalker before we even get into issues of story structure and plotting.  I could easily rant about the regression of this movie’s politics from radical inclusivity to another played out story about genetic destiny and uncritical cheerleading about war.  That stuff’s all there, and it irritates me if I think too hard about it.  What’s more interesting to discuss is the impetus for these changes in sentiment.

It comes back to nostalgia.

Nostalgia is an inherently conservative force in the makeup of the human condition.  It’s the feeling that we chase when we realize that things have gotten more complicated than we would like them to be; it’s an effective way to soothe anxiety about the ever changing state of the universe around us.  There’s comfort to be had in memory.  When William F Buckley coined his infamous characterization of conservatism as someone standing athwart history and shouting stop, he was directly appealing to nostalgia and suggesting that there might be a way to actually achieve the feeling it promises to people who pursue it.  It’s the core thing that drives people who hoard power to stomp on people who demand that power be shared among everyone.  It’s an obsession with rule by the old order reduced to the pettiness of small slights.

In The Rise of Skywalker, Rey finds herself confronted with her lineage: Emperor Palpatine is her grandfather, and for vague reasons this is a major catalyst for her temptation to submit to the Dark Side of the Force.  The intended subtext is that there’s something about the Palpatine family that is inherently predisposed to rage and passion and fear; apparently genetics matter way more than upbringing and social support systems in this version of Star Wars.  In the end, Rey rejects this proposition in favor of choosing the heritage of the Jedi (whom Rise of Skywalker seems to go out of its way to venerate following the serious interrogation that Luke and Yoda did of the tradition in the last movie) and as a cookie for saving the galaxy, she’s given permission by Luke and Leia’s ghosts to claim membership in the Skywalker clan.  Honestly, it’s a dumb, empty plot resolution that only feels emotionally significant because we already know and like most of the Skywalker family.  You can honestly say the same thing for probably ninety percent of the beats in the rest of the movie.  So little about this last adventure is built on new thought or even just realistic character sketching.  It’s nostalgia all the way down.  When Lando shows up to assist the heroes, you go, “Hey, it’s Lando!” and then you move on to a chase scene without actually spending any time with who Lando has become (because there’s been no consideration of how Lando might change after Return of the Jedi).  When Luke shows up as a Force ghost to deliver a pep talk to Rey in her darkest moment (or what passes for a darkest moment) and then raises his old X-Wing out of the ocean so she has a ship to fly to confront Palpatine, you say, “Hey, Luke’s doing a Yoda!” without pondering how he must feel literally resurrecting the symbol of his hotshot glory days so this girl he barely knows can go off to maybe get herself killed in an ill-advised solo mission (Abrams only seems capable of echoing heroic moments from the original trilogy, never the bits about how stupid and rash Luke was at the end of The Empire Strikes Back).  When Chewbacca gets the medal during the final celebration you feel satisfied that that error in the first movie has finally been rectified (never mind that we have no idea what Chewbacca and Lando actually did to warrant that kind of recognition).  The Rise of Skywalker is just a greatest hits compilation that doesn’t actually care about its central characters beyond their capacity to play ersatz versions of the old heroes, and it’s all fueled by the bet that nostalgia is the moneymaker.

At the risk of bumbling into overwrought doomsaying, I find myself growing more and more fearful of the broader pop culture trend towards nostalgic storytelling.  We’re living through some incredibly bad and volatile times, and the impulse to curl up with stories founded on past glories makes total sense.  A lot of comfort is needed.  What I fear is the general stagnation of mass storytelling in response to these needs.  Part of this is rooted in the growing anxiety that our modern mythologies are slowly being rounded up under a single creative umbrella that has no impetus to allow for experimentation and innovation.  The people who stand to make the most money are always the ones who have the fewest qualms about ignoring any kind of principles or ideals, whether those are related to how you tell a story or what ideas you give dignity.  It’s clearly how we’ve gotten two decades of JJ Abrams wandering into established intellectual properties and shouting a bunch while throwing old bits around like so much confetti.  Indy’s going to be reaching for that missing pistol forevermore.

My 2019 In Review

Let’s go ahead and get the typical boilerplate stuff out of the way: as an educator I don’t usually spend too much time dwelling on the end of the calendar year because it falls halfway through my annual project of teaching some kids some stuff and hoping that they at least retain the bits about being kind to one another and maybe how stories and language work a little.  This is an exercise I engage in because everyone else is doing the same thing, which makes it timely content.  The actual act of reflection is sometimes difficult for me, not because it’s painful but because it’s just not a regular frame of mind for me.  The whole point of keeping a blog is for me to fire and forget my thoughts.

Okay, I think that’s shaken the cynical cobwebs out, so let’s talk about the year and (I guess) the decade.  Again, it’s an entirely arbitrary benchmark that I don’t put much stock in, but folks are doing it, so let’s just try to go with the flow.

I suppose the proverbial elephant in the room regarding my year is the fact that Mom died back in May.  That was a massively disruptive event in the short term, and I had a lot of really complex feelings about the act of grieving and my perception of the social expectations surrounding it.  I went to counseling over the summer to help me process a lot of that stuff (that was good) and I recently realized that much of what I internalized as the appropriate way to grieve was directly received from my mother.  She was much older than I was when her own mother died, but it was pretty formative event in her own life.  I was still very young when it happened, but I think years of observing her building so much of her identity around the relationship with her mom put this unexpressed image in my head of appropriate grief for a parent.  It’s supposed to utterly wreck you, and the mere mention of the deceased should bring you to the brink of tears for years after they’ve passed.  It should feel like a gaping wound that everyone can see just by looking at you.  You’re definitely not supposed to be able to keep it together at the funeral.

Instead, I’ve been mostly fine.  To be sure, I miss her, and there’s definitely some sadness whenever something reminds me of her, but it’s just not the overwhelming psychic devastation that I’d been led to believe it would be.  I still feel a little uneasy discussing these thoughts because they seem so utterly alien.  Questions of whether I appear to be a bad son occasionally float around, but then I remind myself that anyone who would think that is not worth worrying about.  I’m really fortunate to have always felt totally secure in my parents’ love for me, and the distance that emerged between us as I got older isn’t unusual, let alone something for which I should feel ashamed.

So yeah, that happened this year.

Turning to more positive things, I learned how to draw this year!  I’m okay at it!  This is a skill that I completely lacked a little over a year ago, and now I have a decent working knowledge of human figures and faces.  I’ve definitely gravitated more towards a comic book style as I’ve practiced more, mostly because I enjoy comic books and that visual language is the one with which I’m most familiar.  There’s still a lot that I need to learn, obviously, but I feel way more confident after a year of regular practice.  My personal project of sharing almost everything that I’ve drawn this year has been so much fun, and it’s left me with a great visual record of my progress.  I didn’t meet my goal of completely filling out my first sketchbook this year (I have three blank pages left on New Year’s Eve, and I just don’t have the stamina to do three drawings before midnight), but I’m so happy with the artifact I’ve made for myself.  If anyone who knows me in meatspace ever wants to see a thing that I think is super cool, I’ll be happy to pull it out and show it off in the future.  I eagerly await the indeterminate moment in the future when I want to cringe at the results of my first year of serious practice.  For now, it’s probably best to let it belong to the rest of the blog: finish it and move forward to new projects.

On the blog itself, I’ve had an incredibly productive year in terms of output.  Participating in Inktober and doing my extremely on-brand obsessive completion of every day’s prompt without pause went a long way towards helping me maintain momentum through the fall when I typically get tired with the added work load of a new school year.  My output on the blog took a distinct turn away from personal topics (outside of a few reflections related to Mom’s passing) towards comics and movie criticism.  If I were to go back through this year’s posts, I would probably find remarkably little about myself explicitly on display, but there is a wealth of thinking and reaction to the things that delighted and irritated me this year.  At the risk of sounding pretentious, I find the mental grinding that accompanies engagement with someone else’s creative output really pleasant most of the time.  Occasionally it feels like work, but so does everything else.

If there’s a thing I’ve internalized over the last decade (and there are many), satisfaction with things done is a far more reliable metric of contentment than frequency of moments of delight.  This is a tangent, but I have never mastered the art of unabashed expressions of enthusiasm, and I think this is the thing that leaves me feeling most alienated from other members of various fandoms that I want to interact with.  You think this thing is cool!  I think it’s cool too!  Also, I am extremely uncomfortable with being enthusiastic about anything, so we’re probably not going to get much farther than that.

The reason I point this thing out is the stubborn desire I have for people to notice who I am based on the things I keep in my life.  My blog’s a running account of where my mind is focusing its attention, and I hope vaguely for someone to say, “I like that thing too!”

One thing which I have not discussed on the blog this year is the fact that I experimented with a thing tracker in 2019.  I’m not sure of a better name for it because it’s just a spreadsheet where I logged things that I encountered this year.  You can see what mattered to me based on the categories I maintained.

• Comic Books – 147 trades read (I’ve not tracked most of the individual issues I’ve been reading this year, so the actual number’s probably slightly higher)
• Books – 15 read (I have always felt I wasn’t a prolific reader, but I think I just enjoy books with pictures more)
• Video Games – 18 finished (the vast majority of these are games that can be completed in a weekend; there are probably four or five that have play times that approach sixty hours)
• Minutes Exercised – I quit tracking this when around halfway through the year.  I know I spent over a thousand minutes working out in that time, but my workout schedule got disrupted in the second half of the year with the move.
• TV Shows – 51 seasons watched
• Movies – 40 watched
• Words Written – 132,428 (This applies only to words that have been put on the blog, but I’ve barely done any other kind of writing this year, so it’s pretty accurate)

The most fun aspect of keeping my things tracker has been the ability to look back and recall what I’ve seen this year and when.  A lot of the television and movies happened over the summer when I spent two weeks living like a bachelor while Rachael was at a novel writing workshop.  We watched all of Schitt’s Creek in this calendar year.  There was a glut of movies that we saw in December, mostly because of all the celebrating over the winter break.  I spent New Year’s Day 2019 watching the My Little Pony movie and playing Bandersnatch on Netflix.  The comics I read tended to be parts of long running series that I picked up when they were on sale.  I have read a lot of Star Wars, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Runaways this year.

The one caveat to my logs is that I only noted new stuff that I encountered this year; there was a fair bit of revisiting familiar stories, but I didn’t make note of any of that.

Going into 2020, I’m not sure what I want to accomplish.  I think I will do the tracker again, but I’m going to have to recalibrate a little bit with what goals I want to set for myself.  There were definitely categories of things that I lost interest in tracking early on, and I haven’t bothered to note them here because there’s just no data to pour over.  Others I way underestimated what I could accomplish in a year.  Back in January I thought it’d be ambitious to read twenty comic book trades this year.  I passed that benchmark in a month.  The trick there is that I don’t know if this sort of pace will be replicable in 2020.  I read a lot of comics because there were a lot of things I wanted to read; who knows whether that will be true going forward?

On a more public level, I think my primary goal for this year is going to be resisting the temptation to obsess over national politics.  The last presidential campaign was an incredibly stressful thing, and I already have all the information I need to cast my vote in November.  The current embarrassment has got to go, and I’ll vote for whoever Democrats put forward as the candidate.  I have preferences like anyone else, but the bottom line is that there will not be a worse choice than what we already have.  Obsessing over the horse race is only going to cause anxiety about things beyond my control.

I think that’s everything to wrap up 2019.  Let’s get on with another year then.

(And for the decade stuff, whatever.  I got into my dream career, started a blog, and moved across the country to a place where I’ve never been happier.  Next question.)

Against Nostalgia (Part 1)

I wrote this essay nearly two years ago in response to both the final chapter of the Life Is Strange series (the first one with Chloe and Max and Rachel) and the release of The Last Jedi.  I had held off on publishing it because I thought I might sell it, but I was naive about the way that freelance writing tends to work.  It’s one of the things I’m most proud of writing, and after having seen The Rise of Skywalker I find myself revisiting the ideas I explored here.

These days, I’m hard pressed to explain what video games I like.  When the subject of gaming inevitably comes up with my students, it’s always a difficult dance of trying to give a comprehensive picture of what I enjoy; my tastes run in cycles through various action-adventure titles to more narratively focused experiences to sometimes just wanting to play a button masher.  About the only solid pieces of information I can give to students are that I don’t do multiplayer games, and I’m typically turned off by traditional first person shooters. It feels like this automatically rules out ninety percent of the games that my students like to play as subjects I can authoritatively discuss, and yet it’s inevitable that I’ll have kids say, “You should play [hot new game of this quarter],” because the desire to connect with someone over a shared interest forever seems to outweigh considerations of personal taste or ability.  It’s hard to convey the idea that things get more complex as you mature, and simple answers become more and more inadequate for simple questions. This is why when the question is asked, “what sort of games do you like?” I flounder for a succinct answer before throwing up my hands and saying, “I like lots of stuff, but the last time I loved a game was Life is Strange.”

It’s not unusual for me to play a game and have thoughts about it; a big part of the fun for me involves turning over things for a while after I’ve finished experiencing them.  With Life is Strange, it went beyond the normal mulling over; I spent the better part of a month picking apart the game because it gave me feelings.  You know, not just the typical reaction to a story that’s well crafted enough to make you sympathize with its characters but something that evokes a sense of wistfulness that never really comes back in the same way twice.  It’s a game that, among a lot of other things, is about nostalgia and the ineffable sadness that springs from understanding you simply can’t recreate an original experience perfectly. Max Caulfield learns, regardless of what final choice the player makes about Chloe Price’s fate, that there is no going back; her superpower is being able to perfectly relive memories, except she can’t decontextualize them from what she knows about the future.  Even she can’t scratch the itch that nostalgia always leaves as it skitters through our brains. Life is Strange says, quite emphatically, that we’re collectively doomed to chase imperfect facsimiles of cherished past experiences.

Star Wars is not Life is Strange.  It begins with a nobody farm kid discovering he’s heir to a powerful legacy and growing into the power that legacy offers through a series of victories and defeats (but mostly victories).  The scale of the story is massive, the stakes the political future of a galaxy. This is high melodrama we’re dealing with, all fit neatly into a very well trodden story structure. Star Wars is big and flashy and exciting while also being comfortable in a way that can be difficult to explain.  Over the course of the original story arc, following Luke Skywalker from farmboy to Jedi Knight and liberator of the galaxy, the audience gets invited into a classic power fantasy.  There are no moments of small feeling or sitting with slight discomfort or teasing out the nuance of a few exchanged words. Emotions are big and, for the most part, pure. Audiences loved it to such an extent that now all you have to do to call up those thoughts and emotions is mention Star Wars.

Following Life is Strange, Square Enix decided they wanted to publish a prequel.  Life is Strange: Before the Storm has the unenviable task of going back in time to tell us the story that brings Chloe to where she is when she first barges into the bathroom at Blackwell Academy looking to settle a debt with Nathan Prescott.  It introduces us to Rachel Amber, the girl who has left such an indelible impression on everyone in Arcadia Bay with her absence in Life is Strange that her presence could only be a disappointment (and yet it somehow isn’t).  In the predestined frame of tragic death awaiting one or both of these girls, Before the Storm dares to push relentlessly towards the happiness that they so richly deserve regardless of the personal cost.  In a lot of ways it succeeds, although like all prequels this story suffers from knowing what comes next. That the developers felt the need to add a stinger after the game’s final credits reminding you what’s in store for Chloe and Rachel in Life is Strange underlines this fact grossly.  A story that should be about two queer girls finding happiness despite everything being set against them is marred in ways that can’t be avoided because you can’t change what’s past.

Fans of Star Wars have grappled with this problem of prequels for two decades now; a story that they loved got more added to it, but it was done in a way that failed to meet their expectations.  While George Lucas was off chasing his own nostalgia for the movies and serials he grew up with while playing with modern filmmaking technology, the audience was waiting for their nostalgia for Star Wars to be satisfied.  If we can set aside the objective quality of the Prequel Trilogy, what we’re left with is both a creator and his audience discovering in a very rude way the incompatibility of their nostalgias.  Lucas couldn’t recreate the magic of the first movie, so he didn’t try, and fans revolted. Nostalgia became a catalyst for toxicity in the fandom. Anyone who was even vaguely aware of Star Wars fans in the ‘00s knew that a vocal portion of them were bitterly angry with Lucas for failing to deliver on their preferred vision.

Before the Storm, with its push to break new ground in a story about memory, couldn’t be the last word for Chloe and Max.  Nostalgia trips aren’t complete without some return to original form, and there’s too much inversion in the prequel for it to stand alone as a satisfying reprise of what Life is Strange captured; Max and Rachel, eternal foils in Chloe’s mind, have to be put back in their original roles as the respective presence and absence that pull her character in opposite directions.  To close out our time with these characters, we get the bonus episode “Farewell” which serves as a prequel to the entire series.

The whole episode is an extended exercise in fan service and nostalgia for the dynamics that fans of the series loved about Life is Strange.  Max is a little unsure of herself, and Chloe is full of enthusiasm and joy that covers some deep pain about being a social outcast.  The original voice actors (absent from Before the Storm because of a voice actors’ strike that happened during the game’s production) reprise their roles.  The soundtrack reverts from the hard rock that Chloe prefers to the more melancholy folk and indie tracks associated with Max’s perspective.  The side quest is once again Max’s ongoing search for the perfect photo ops. As a player you are supposed to nostalgia trip hard, and for the most part the episode succeeds at getting you there.  The pain and poignancy of the episode revolves entirely around moments of foreshadowing to which Chloe and Max are oblivious while the player absorbs all the tragic import.  Family plans that will be dashed mingle with Max’s ever present misgivings about how she can stay in touch when she’s moving so far away to continually pull the player’s emotional strings.  We get it; this is a last moment of unmitigated happiness for Chloe and Max before the universe starts to punish them for existing. We so appreciate being reminded of all the stuff that these characters suffer while we were growing to love them.

Ultimately, “Farewell” chooses to end in the same spirit as Before the Storm‘s main story: with a gut punch that only hurts because it’s powered by the memory of something that can’t be reclaimed.  If you step away from the investment in the characters for even a moment, it immediately becomes apparent that this story was structured to maximize the emotional manipulation of the player.  Of course the day Max tells Chloe she’s moving away is the same day Chloe’s father dies.  This can’t just be a bittersweet story about friendship promising to endure despite unseen rough waters; it also has to remind us of Life is Strange‘s worst impulses towards traumatizing characters just because it can.  A straightforward reading of the entire series is that the universe hates Chloe Price; the cynical reality is that the developers, who created that universe, don’t hate Chloe so much as see her as a vehicle for delivering measured doses of trauma porn.  They created a character that many players of the game love, and then they exploit that emotional connection to induce sadness in players, the vast majority of whom simply do not have the well of related experiences to be anything but voyeurs.  It’s a cruel trick, but this is a story about nostalgia, and the only way nostalgia can be enjoyed is to not notice its cruelty.

I remember feeling cautiously optimistic about the news that Lucasfilm had sold the rights to Star Wars to Disney.  This was a soulless corporate juggernaut taking over a beloved film series, but at least it was a soulless corporate juggernaut that knew how to make an entertaining movie.  Along came The Force Awakens, and fans were treated to the nostalgia trip they had been craving but George Lucas hadn’t delivered.  It was off, though. Some fans felt like too much was similar (the desert planet, the nobody discovering their heritage, the third iteration on the Death Star) while some (mostly white, male) fans felt things were too different.  Nostalgia found itself in direct conflict with the impetus to do something new. Still, the muddled response to The Force Awakens (after all the initial ecstasy of having a new Star Wars movie that wasn’t terrible wore off) pales in comparison to the anger that The Last Jedi elicited from certain nostalgic fans.

Theatrical release poster for The Last Jedi. (Image credit: Wikipedia)

The extremely vocal faction of Star Wars fans who have railed against The Last Jedi are fundamentally upset because they were presented with a story that puts nostalgia in its place as something that’s fleeting and unhealthy to dwell in; they wanted Luke and Leia and Han to remain unchanged despite thirty intervening years.  Their vitriol against a story that dared to make characters change in the same way that people change is entirely fueled by disappointment that their nostalgia wasn’t satisfied. They missed the fact that Han is mostly unchanged when he boards the Millennium Falcon in The Force Awakens: he’s returned to his original state as a shiftless smuggler just trying to stay ahead of the people he owes, and the result of this enforced stasis is that he has an estranged son who ultimately kills him.  Luke, in contrast, is totally disillusioned with the past; he’s seen the havoc that sort of reverie can wreak, and he completely dismisses the glory days as unsuitable for dealing with the present. The legend of Luke Skywalker is an illusion that’s only good for a distraction.  The new Star Wars trilogy, as far as it’s gone, says quite emphatically that enshrining the past over adapting to the present will cause heartache.  Nostalgia indulged uncritically on a massive enough scale will turn from a small cruelty into a large hatred.

And of course nostalgia is cruel.  The promise of a return to something simpler and more pure and joyful is so incredibly seductive as we grow more complicated and uncertain and jaded by our experience of the world, but it inevitably disappoints.  You can’t go back, and the longer it takes you to come to terms with that fact, the more nostalgia twists the knife. We become Max, caught between an irreclaimable past and a painful, destructive present that we didn’t really have a hand in making but we do have a responsibility to help make bearable.  

The confounding thing about this position is just how frequently we seem to get trapped in it.  Yes, the wistfulness and the reverie are appealing, but they also hurt.  The big question seems to be whether the pain associated with nostalgia gets directed inward towards the person experiencing it or outward towards others.  Neither direction seems especially healthy, and it leaves one wondering why we continue to collectively indulge in nostalgia at all. We seem to be addicted to this thing that we’re only capable of weaponizing in order to torture each other in our endless interaction with story.  It feels untenable, but in the long run it probably won’t change in any meaningful way; people are remarkably stubborn when it comes to holding on to the past.

Reading “Future Starts Slow”

I was initially really reluctant to keep going with Crowded on the blog because I honestly wasn’t sure what would be interesting to say about it, but I was re-reading the second issue the other night, and I remembered that there are so many delightful character moments packed in that I figured there might be something else I could tease out.  The big thing I realized as I was reading issue #2 is how it hits a lot of the beats that are missing in the first issue.  There was all this setup for the world and the premise in the beginning, but this is the issue where we really get to sink into the characters and their respective deals.

This cover makes Charlie out to seem very sinister, and while there’s definitely more to her than we know, this whole thing with the invaders is more of a weird, stupid accident. (Cover by Ro Stein & Ted Brandt; Image credit: Comic Vine)

The cover for the issue serves to remind us of the way the first one ended: a gang of invaders, looking for an opportunity to cash in on Charlie’s Reapr campaign, have arrived at Vita’s safe house with a load of heavy weaponry.  The paper doll cutouts for the invaders and Vita with Charlie looking over the whole scene suggests some sort of deliberate sabotage, which doesn’t quite make sense given the fact that this gang that shows up is all about trying to, y’know, kill Charlie.  In a more meta sense, the point of this cover is to highlight a defining feature of Charlie and Vita’s relationship: Charlie is manipulative and Vita is forever reacting to bad situations that her client thoughtlessly puts her into.  Besides establishing that core dynamic, it’s also pretty fun that the creative team has opted to cast Charlie in a sinister light this early on.  We gather that the massive assassination campaign against her emerged seemingly from nowhere, but there are just these tiny hints that she’s hiding something big.  It’d be pretty wild if Charlie turns out to be a villain by the end of the series, and we were getting hints of it here.  Of course, that’d be very counterintuitive since the entire premise is predicated on the idea that she needs to stay alive, but I can see a narrative arc where Vita gets betrayed by Charlie so many times that it culminates with her accepting that she doesn’t have to be responsible for everyone.

That’d get pretty dark though.

For now, things are mostly extremely light and chaotic.  The sequence with the home invaders is minimally tense because they’re clearly amateur bounty hunters who are taking on Vita, whose vulnerabilities only manifest in the form of extreme mortification that her private life is being so completely disrupted by this oblivious jerk.  Even the punchline of the scene (because it’s basically an action joke) with Vita accidentally lodging a kitchen knife in one invader’s sternum hinges more on embarrassment and exasperation than any real sense of danger.  “Please don’t let me have accidentally killed this idiot” is probably the most endearing sentiment to read from an extremely competent action hero ever (I get some mild Vash the Stampede vibes from Vita, which I suppose makes sense; they are both very much of the gentle badass character type).

The best jokes are snappy and reveal character. This one is snappy and plays differently after you read a couple pages ahead and find out how Vita got her house. (Artwork by Ro Stein & Ted Brandt, colors by Triona Farrell, letters by Cardinal Rae)

From this initial exploration of Vita as a person who takes pretty much everything in her life seriously, we get dropped into a bunch of her old interpersonal drama.  Her ex-girlfriend’s a police detective!  She gets attached to her charges!  She’s living in a bygone era because she’s just too good for this present moment!  It’s all delightfully insightful and a little bit voyeuristic.  Vita signed up for a protection job because she presumably needs the money, and now we’re just learning all kinds of very personal things about her because Charlie is a chaos muppet.

The issue’s second act moves the action away from Vita’s house to a random club that Charlie insists on going to despite having just survived a home invasion.  The sequence provides a massive tonal shift as we go from Vita’s home turf to an environment that Charlie is clearly extremely comfortable in.  She works the bouncer on the door, insinuates herself into the VIP section and proceeds to draw massive amounts of attention to herself by attempting to strangle the celebrity influencer/pop star/whatever who she’s learned backed the Reapr campaign.  It’s fun to see Charlie showing off her competencies, especially from Vita’s perspective as she desperately tries to maintain control of the situation.  That things go belly up is totally unsurprising (I think we will quickly learn that any time Charlie suggests a thing, it is inevitably going to end in mayhem), but it’s a joy to see Vita navigating the situation while managing her extreme embarrassment and total frustration that this was all avoidable if she had a client with any sense for self preservation.

Charlie is the absolute worst. (Artwork by Ro Stein & Ted Brandt, colors by Triona Farrell, letters by Cardinal Rae)

The third act resets to a place where Vita should be more comfortable, but it also creates this deeply vulnerable moment for her that gets played for laughs.  For reasons that are not yet explained, Vita has contacts with a group of teenage hackers who hang out in the back room of her local comic shop.  They provide some much needed explanation about the whole Reapr thing while being totally obnoxious brats who are giving information to a couple of characters who in-universe already understand everything that’s going on.  It’s a lovely subversion of the novitiate protagonist who needs all the basics of the world-building explained to them.  Much more interesting (to me at least) is the way this scene establishes some of Vita’s deeper sensitivities that she really would rather Charlie not know about as her client.  We get that Vita’s an excellent bodyguard, but the realization that she’s a comic nerd comes pretty much out of nowhere.  Vita isn’t just the cool action hero with the heart of gold, but she’s also coded as very specifically a member of the comic-reading community.  She’s a big nerd who enjoys her stories, and this obnoxious normie who lives in a world of shiny clubs and shallow relationships intrudes in such gut-wrenching ways.  It’s a good laugh that Charlie ribs Vita for probably owning a cape, and at the same time it’s a pretty vulnerable moment.  Most of us don’t expect our jobs to expose the most personal parts of our lives to clients and customers suddenly and incontrovertibly.  Charlie probably forgets that Vita is into the funnybooks ten minutes after they leave the comic shop, but it’s still a deeply anxious experience.  This relationship is going deep in all the wrong ways, and I’m totally here for it.

They are both adorable and I want Vita to just have a few moments’ peace with her comics. (Artwork by Ro Stein & Ted Brandt, colors by Triona Farrell, letters by Cardinal Rae)

Learning Sketchbook 21

There are phases where you plateau when you’re developing a new skill, and then there are phases where it feels like you’re just taking off.  After last week’s relatively low output of two drawings (to be fair to myself, the one I spent the most time on did have two figures who are interacting with each other), I upped it to six.  A couple of them are definitely the result of quick drawing sessions, but the last four have felt significantly more dynamic and visually interesting than anything else I’ve done in a while (and I didn’t use photo reference for them either).

After doing a few figure drawings, I find that I like to reset with a portrait.  It’s fun to work on a face in detail and try to draw out the parts that convey more subtle emotions.  For this week’s portrait I drew Rogue, and I used a photo reference to get the basic shape and expression, but then I elaborated on it with her traditional trappings, like the big wavy hair with the skunk stripe and the green accents.  It’s pretty obvious to me that I rushed this one (from roughs to colors, I did the whole thing in under an hour), and I feel like with some more care it could have turned out much better than it did.

This minimalist sketch of Daken was another rush.  It’s probably my least favorite of the set, but I think I did a decent job with the musculature on the back.  Drawing his tattoo was fun, especially because its abstractness and intricacy means that there’s no real set way to do it.  Much of my drawing time was spent just looking for good reference panels of his back, which are harder to find than you’d think.  I feel like the proportions of the arm are slightly off, like if he were to lower it down by his side it’d be far too long in comparison to his torso.  Oh well.

Here’s where my drawing week started to get really good.  The character is Tempus, who I drew during Inktober this year, so I wanted to try to do something different with her.  I think it’s really fun to draw characters having fun instead of just fighting, so I imagined what sort of outfit she might wear for a night out dancing.  There are elements that are still recognizably Tempus, from the tennis skirt to the purple and white vertical stripes on her top, but it’s generally a far more casual look.  I didn’t use any reference for this pose, so I’m actually very pleased with how it turned out.  If I look at it long enough, I think I’m probably subconsciously mimicking the finishing pose from Yuri’s short routine in Yuri!!! On Ice.  I just realized that; no wonder it looks good!  My primary complaint with this piece is that I didn’t really get the angle of the head right, so the silhouette of the nose feels off.  Tempus is white, but I think I ended up making her look more East Asian in the end.  Still, I feel like the gestures are really strong here, from the arm across the stomach to the set of the shoulders (I don’t think I typically do good shoulders).

This is the high point of the week.  It’s a real delight to periodically draw a character who’s relatively famous in X-Men fandom, and to have such a clear vision from the beginning of what I wanted to do with the picture.  Rachel Grey as Phoenix has gone through a lot of iterations since she first appeared in the ’80s, but I thought it’d be fun to go with one of her less prominent looks.  There was a brief period just before she got written out of the ongoing plot in the late ’80s where she fully embraced Phoenix as her legacy identity (I think this might have been the first time she actually adopted a genuine costume too) where she had this really rad, super simple outfit that was basically a workout leotard with a gold bodice and red limbs and just a hint of styling on the neckline with the stylized raptor head.  She wore gold gloves in the original look, but I’ve always liked the look of long sleeves hooked over the thumb, so I streamlined a little bit.  The pose is probably inspired by stuff like the double page spread in All-Star Superman where Superman’s flying towards the sun.  I think what I’m happiest about is the deeply androgynous look about Rachel here; she was always a gawky looking character before Alan Davis redesigned her for Excalibur, and I appreciated that nonstandard look.  The Phoenix in the background probably could have been done with more care, but I reached a point in working where I was just ready to be done so I could move on to something else.  I still like it a lot (and the shot works in both portrait and landscape orientation!)

While Phoenix was the highlight of the week, it wasn’t the last thing I did.  This picture of Juggernaut feels very classic to me; I didn’t play with the costume design at all, and I went for a pretty straightforward action pose, but it generally works.  The eyes are too wide set, but there are some range of motion issues with the Juggernaut’s design that can be hard to contend with when you think about him in action rather than as static images.  It was a lot of fun to draw someone with super bulky muscles though; the proportions feel way more forgiving than on someone who is supposed to be thin.

I really like everything I did with this picture of Wind Dancer (her power is that she can manipulate the wind; it’s very what it says on the tin), but after I finished it I realized that I really need some kind of background to give context.  She’s supposed to be flying, hence the back bend and the arched foot, but because there’s no background there’s the problem of the picture reading like she’s just doing a really bad en pointe (or whatever you call that ballet position).  I tweaked her costume a little bit, but she’s such a minor character in the broad X-Universe that most folks wouldn’t notice.

I have space for thirteen more drawings in my sketchbook, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to fill them before New Year’s (especially because the holidays are going to be so busy with Dad coming to visit).  I’m trying to take a laissez-faire approach to it to it, but I also know myself, and there is definitely the possibility I’m going to mildly fixate on it as we do our usual celebrations.