Weekly Blog 7/6-7/13/2024

Today, I’ll be finishing up the eleventh comic strip in my series! I’m still very happy and excited about it. It’s so gratifying to work on something big like this and still like it’s easy, fun work. Making complete single pages is also a really nice way to work, because the limitations force me to think about what’s important and necessary to really focus things on a point that I also have to define. Plus, there’s a bar-filling element to it, where I can feel satisfied in completing a finished product in short order without getting overwhelmed thinking about how long the series ultimately needs to be. I’m also enjoying tackling the challenges I’ve come across. Like, I wanted to do a thing where a character is yelling and their words are going across the background, behind the characters, right? But I couldn’t find a way to blend the layers the way I wanted, and I ended up erasing the background from around my scanned art in that one panel, which turned out to be a fun activity. Art is cool.

I was thinking about Batman the other day. I’m one of those people who thinks Batman should be happier, and I figured out what I really mean: I want Bruce Wayne to matter and be a happy person. Like, Bruce Wayne doesn’t matter to Batman stories the way Peter Parker matters to Spider-Man stories; Spider-Man is as much defined by being a dorky screw-up with money problems and messy romances as Peter Parker is the constant parade of animal-themed science accidents. We deserve a My Adventures With Superman­-style look at Bruce Wayne outside of the one major trauma he experienced. He had a foster father in the form of Alfred, he would have had access to therapy and things to help him recover, he had his cousin Kate, and one assumes that he had family members beyond that. Bruce Wayne used to have love interests like Vicki Vale and Silver St. Cloud, but now only Batman has love interests. Bruce largely exists as an extension of Batman, and it’s sad and boring. Why are the only rich villains Batman has the Court of Owls, these faceless urban legend types? His social circle is the actual rot of Gotham, not the series of working class misanthropes that become villains and are scapegoated as mentally ill as a write off of the problems made by the business finks and politicians in Bruce’s social circle. There’s so much obvious potential in corporate intrigue at Wayne Enterprises, Bruce struggling with how he owns half of Gotham (as it’s said), and people targeting Bruce Wayne for the things he does in business and philanthropy that they don’t like. I want Bruce Wayne to be a person, a happy, multifaceted person who matters to Batman stories. His hobby is dressing like a bat to be a ninja detective who drives a muscle car with a rocket engine, why are we pretending that he isn’t wacky and fun when he isn’t in work mode?

I’ve also thought about High-Rise Invasion. For those that don’t know, that’s a horror series about people transported to a world of endless skyscrapers connected by rope bridges, being chased by masked killers. I love how the series frames the idea of the self and what their experiences reveal about themselves. It occurred to me that it’s a given in the series that there will be a lot of people who get killed or jump, that those casualties appear incidental. After all, not everyone will respond to the sudden and continuous trauma of the high rise world with bravery and grit. That said, there is a clear divide in the way Yuri and Aikawa see people in the high rise world. Yuri always tries to save people and insists that if she can show them how to find their strength, they can survive and make it out with her; we also see other characters around Yuri and Rika seconding this view, citing them as their inspiration to marshal their courage and determination. The villain Aikawa, on the other hand, sees himself, Yuri, Rika as “superior humans” that the high-rise world is revealing, and that most people are useless; the people who don’t make it and the people who are inspired to follow “superior humans” are the same to him, as well, in terms of being dead weight to the rest of humanity. The main conflict between Yuri and Aikawa is that he treats people that way, since Yuri is less interested in winning the “game” of it all. The lives lost to suicide and masks aren’t purely incidental, but we also arguably don’t get enough of a look at those people. Yuri almost became one, and we’re reminded that that’s true of most of the characters, but the people who don’t adjust to the world aren’t given a strong viewpoint character. Which is the sad fate of tertiary characters all over, you know? They’re not who the story is about, there’s other stuff going on in the plot, yada yada yada.

Anyways, thanks for indulging me in all that. It’s sometimes hard to think of artsy things to say, like I want to focus on, since I’m not posting as much art online until I can Glaze easily. I’m looking forward to the day I can release my comic strip instead of just talking about it. It’s fun to make things with your hands, you know? Dogs chew on bones, humans pick up and mess around with things. After countless eons of living creatures trying to survive until the next day, we’ve been shaped into creatures with hands and a really good hand controller, and sometimes it’s as simple as that. We separate ourselves so much from nature, we forget the kind of creatures we are. We live in a society where we have to justify everything we do as having some higher purpose, to put on this “human” mask that hides our humanity, and we take everything for granted. The world simply is the way it is, and has no value or meaning unless we can imbue it with one of our reasons to exist. But like Augbert said, that rock took the turning of a thousand-thousand things that need not have happened to come to be, so you’ll always be unhappy as long as it’s “just a rock.” So go out there and have fun doing something with your hands, because that’s what humans do. It doesn’t have to be good, let alone be worth selling, because you’re having fun. We’re not here to produce value for others, or more specifically an abstract concept of systems of value used primarily to justify why some people have more than an army would need for a thousand lifetimes and most of us have barely enough to get by. That’s all layers of cultural abstraction that we’ve allowed to take over our lives. The best relief from the stress of work and society is to do something that doesn’t contribute to it. Just be a human, have fun.