Crittertongues Past: unsolicited makeover edition

Sometimes I see the "this post contains filtered tags" card and I'm legit happy that I didn't have to look at a (usually) benign thing that I just find unpleasant.

Things I don't care about for silly reasons have a way of becoming more aggravating the more I see em so heading that feeling off is really nice. It's great to know I'm avoiding that particular twinge of bile I get from scrolling hot takes on twitter or seeing a bunch of posts about a show/game/thing I'm just tired of hearing about.

Instead of inadvertently microdosing outrage adrenaline from things that bug me, it's more like, "I'm glad folks I follow can enjoy OnePiece without me having to look at it anymore. For once, thanks website!" It's like fandom compersion. One of the reasons I appreciate people tagging their fandoms over here, for discovery and avoidance's sake.

Being able to dislike a relatively innocuous thing without the need to shitpost about it feels like a dying art and this place makes that easier for me.

Second batch of Crittertongue zines are cut and ready to roll.

Roll on, buddies.

Art school was a bizarre inversion of this for me. I'd always been too reserved for my own good. I drew and read a lot, didn't care about sports or partying, and was considered pretty weird in school. Then I found myself in a class with 30 freshman art students all mooning over DeKooning, Fluxus, Matthew Barney, The Stuationists, and Jeff Koons and feeling like an absolute freak because I own guns, don't care for Jack White, and had to explain who the fuck Gary Larson is.

"Oh comics! You'd love Jim Woodring! He makes comics but they're like Art in the shape of comics. Or Chris Ware! He's like the greatest living comic artist His comics are actually about stuff."

I appreciated the attempt to connect but it sure did make me feel like, "How am I so normal that I'm still kinda of the weird one here?" I mean there were weirder people but they were the kind of weird that makes people think you'll be famous or might be legit unstable. There's being the guy who busts out deeply stoned conceptions of the universe and derails class for 20min then there's the look I got for saying guns are actually a lot of fun and it's not all about violence and masculine overcompensation.

I was not cool weird. But if I'm being honest that did make it feel a little less like my life had been turned inside out by moving away to school. Looking back, it's almost a comforting consistency.

survival horror protagonists

Art school was a bizarre inversion of this for me. I'd always been too reserved for my own good. I drew and read a lot, didn't care about sports or partying, and was considered pretty weird in school. Then I found myself in a class with 30 freshman art students all mooning over DeKooning, Fluxus, Matthew Barney, The Stuationists, and Jeff Koons and feeling like an absolute freak because I own guns, don't care for Jack White, and had to explain who the fuck Gary Larson is.

"Oh comics! You'd love Jim Woodring! He makes comics but they're like Art in the shape of comics. Or Chris Ware! He's like the greatest living comic artist His comics are actually about stuff."

I appreciated the attempt to connect but it sure did make me feel like, "How am I so normal that I'm still kinda of the weird one here?" I mean there were weirder people but they were the kind of weird that makes people think you'll be famous or might be legit unstable. There's being the guy who busts out deeply stoned conceptions of the universe and derails class for 20min then there's the look I got for saying guns are actually a lot of fun and it's not all about violence and masculine overcompensation.

I was not cool weird. But if I'm being honest that did make it feel a little less like my life had been turned inside out by moving away to school. Looking back, it's almost a comforting consistency.

survival horror protagonists

This is just what the comic is going to look like now

This is just what the comic is gonna be from now on

It's pretty consistent with her usual gear just more artfully arranged. A good outfit can do that. Lose the shoulders, drop the gorget a tad- 😉💖🐐

Getting set for Armor Prom?

Having a less action-oriented comic has been good for exploring poses that don't have to be fighting or pinups. I've seen so many of those, it's nice to think more about the mundane, challenge myself a bit, throw a little scrawn-paunch in there... feels like getting to know my characters better.

Aw, firm but respectful disagree! Their dynamic looks pretty dysfunctional but I think it's actually a mutually-reinforcing hinge situation.

Charles has stuck with Rick since they met at Oxford, so unless they met there as adults, they could've been doing this for decades. Rick treats Charles like his savage manservant but Charles clearly has enough agency to define his limits and speak up for himself. To me their dynamic reads more as a huge personality with a dominant streak who likes a good bit of push-back, and a quiet, capable, brat (for lack of a better term). They've had the bear skin argument a thousand times and they love it. Charles is like "FFS,I said I'd carry the spear, didn't I?!" but I seem to remember he's very good at throwing it so it's important enough that it isn't just a prop. Rick gets to rename Charles "Chachinga" and treat him like a servant but he won't dress him up like a doll or force him to play the role for others. There are boundaries there. I think there's enough mutual respect and affection that Rick knows Charles can and will take a lot of "abuse" but he can't make him do anything. I think they both dig it.

This also scans for me because Rick delights in stories where he's had the shit kicked out of him but not in the "I'm such a weak and powerless worm" sense. He likes feeling unstoppable. Maybe having a constant "safe" check on that larger than life self image is grounding for him. Maybe Charles' confidence and self image is reinforced by knowing this man who can drag himself up a rope with two broken arms can't make him wear antlers and a loincloth if he doesn't consent to it.

As for Marion, I think her relationship with Rick is more traditional but she knows the man she loves is a certifiable galoot, who would be all kinds of fucking dead without support. In their first episode we learn she's been going along with Rick's adventures for his sake but it's taking its toll, physically and emotionally. She pulls a Scooby-Doo scheme because she thinks convincing him a curse will kill them all if they don't slow down will be easier on him than having the conversation. Marion clearly loves Rick for who he is but also knows he'll adventure himself to death and wishes he would make more space for her. It feels like she's trying to connect with him through the love language of danger. I love that Rick is surprisingly receptive once she's unmasked and confesses. The fact that he feels bad about putting her in that situation tells me he's not just an ego-golem who demands compliance, he cares and might just be bad with normal people. Maybe his relationship with Charles is why he isn't actually just a dictatorial bastard? Or maybe he's just kinda dumb.

There but 'fore the grace of Dumb God go I...

I get the impression that Rick is so impulse-driven and insulated from normal folk that he assumes anyone who goes along with his insane adventures wants to be there. He isn't forcing them to be there per se, he just sincerely believes they're having fun too. This doesn't mean I don't think he's blameless in contributing to the situation with Marion. It means he needs to learn to see past himself lest he drive everyone who cares about him away.

His threshold for conflict has been "when someone tries to kill me," so he doesn't process people who aren't being very explicit or speaking the language of action. He's so deep in "the (adventurer) lifestyle" that normal people barely show up on his radar.

I also think this is what works for Rick and Charles. Charles cares enough about Rick and enjoys the adventuring lifestyle enough to commit to it. His standoffishness is a way of holding space that Rick engages with and they both respect. Rick and Marion haven't developed that yet.

I never got the impression that Marion or Charles resent each other for enabling Rick's bad habits or trying to tie him down, which tells me the root of the problem with Marion isn't the adventuring, it's Rick's inability to slow down and be a person in the absence of adventure. The other reason I disagree with the cuckolding dynamic is that they don't give us that element of jealousy, comparison, or competition that cucks absolutely will not shut the fuck up about. What the show does give us is fantastic fuel for poly-shipping though!

Which is all why I think they're a fun hinge polycule. They each fulfill very specific needs across all points of the triangle. Charles and Marion support each other because Rick is A LOT and neither of them has to take the full brunt of his nonsense while he has two people who care enough about him to point out when he's his own worst enemy. In their second episode, Rick admits he and Marion have separated but by the end, they resolve to keep working on the relationship and Charles is relieved to hear it. That's sweet.

I realize I've just spent my lunch break writing entirely too many words about side characters from an episode of Scooby-Doo, but I don't mean this to be laying into the cuck post to hard. It would be legit funny for Rick to walk in on them, shriek "Chachinga, you sonofabitch! How could you betray me like this! I'll kill you," grab up the spear from the pile of clothes on the floor, and Marion just tells him to go wait in the car. No. Not the chair, THE CAR. WAIT IN THE CAR RICK.

Anyway.

There's that.

Watching scooby-doo, mystery inc with my kid. These guys are a throuple, right?

Watching scooby-doo, mystery inc with my kid. These guys are a throuple, right?

hoofed mammals: graceful as hell

NOBODY needs to be defending these people. Major publishers, studios, streaming services, Tesla, Apple, Adobe, Amazon, social media companies- there isnt a single altruistic bone caught in their teeth. Profit from the output of exploited and captive labor IS their product now. When their contacts look like the one in question, the company is clearly stating that shareholders are the customers, not us!

Why else would it be anything but a stupid idea for Amazon to just nuke the majority of Comixology's self-published titles when they consolidated their services? If our experience was really foremost in their minds, why would they repeatedly purge, censor, demonitize, bury, and delete popular accounts with robust followings if not to allay the moral brainworms of shareholders and investors?

Forfeiting rights to our IP is not a "shitty deal," it's surrendering any potential ability to make money off of your own creative work. It's selling your property to a board of accountants to pitch into a portfolio. It's theirs to trot out as long as it's profitable and bury the instant its projected profit dips too close to the cost of maintenance. Hell, we've seen services drop popular series just because their projected profits started to flatten out! Mothballing it also has the added bonus of removing it from the market to further minimize potential competition. Like how there just weren't spider man movies for ages because the owner of the property didn't think it was worth developing but worth too much to sell.

They will make more money from suing you for trying to reclaim IP they mothballed than you did selling it to them in the first place. I guaranteee their budget for lawsuits is a lot deeper than the one they pay their "original" artists from.

By virtue of being a big, profitable, corporation, "their" IP is going to have an astronomically higher value in a court of law than any individual creator. The financial "damage" will be higher for infringing on their copyrights than any amount you can claim on your own. When it becomes theirs, their connections, their infrastructure, their reputation makes it an asset with much more value than you or I can possibly claim. So if you try to steal a bite back from them it's a bite of a *potentially* multimillion-dollar series. In their eyes, they bought the totality of your work, which you agreed was worth the price they gave you. It's value becomes more dependent on who owns it than whether it's even good.

You may not have the same potential to become flash-in-the-pan, short-term succesful without their resources, but you will still own your rights to distribute, alter, preserve, promote, and negotiate your share if you still own your work. That is worth everything as a creator who is passionate about what you've made and committed to protecting it.

The most effective power we can exercise as artists is our ability to say, "no" when someone else wants to pay us a disadvantageous fraction of our worth. You may lose potentially lucrative opportunities but "opportunities" presented by companies like Facebook or Twitter, whose real product is a platform for ads and data collection, with content as bait, are not opportunities to thrive on as independent artists. This specifically is an opportunity for the company to acquire property.

The myth that the publisher's strength is something for us to exploit, without them getting the lion's share is a trap that they feed from at will.

People like the poster up top are opportunists who see the process as a pipeline towards trading low-investment content for financial treats and maybe a share of ad revive. They're stalking horses for companies to exploit more talented but less experienced artists who are facing a daunting and overwhelming market where their work becomes harder and harder to show, let alone sell. A quick deal may feel like a win but it's selling the cow to save money on bottling the milk. Artists like this serve the publisher by making it seem like signing away your rights are just a necessary part of the game. However it's a game they are playing with exceedingly cheap stakes that weren't going to succeed on their own merit. So what if Mr. Business Perspective loses rights to his sexy Mario Bros. parody to a huge company? The point was always to unload it because it's a product, a bartering chip, a trinket. He's a Business Man, so he sees tactics that maximize profits to the business as maximizing their ability to buy whatever shiny tripe he cranks out. The business is his customer, not the reader. The business is his ally, not the creative community. Fuck him and fuck anyone who tells you the exposure is worth a damn if you don't retain rights to your work.

in an unexpected twist, the whole system fails catastrophically if you wear a shirt inside. otherwise bombproof.

One of the other building managers told me to deliver this to our AV Systems tech. I hope they'll know what its about cos it kinda feels like I'm delivering a threat.

A message from Dongle Corleone.

Here's 'nother one of those jobs, like roller painting, where I feel like you should gain polearm proficiency from wielding a pool skimmer. Gotta wrangle them bats, the wingéd corndog that's been stuck up in the rafters for three days, small flying drunks...

Folks in the Twit are all het up over sexualizing nuns in art, meanwhile every day we get a thousand new lewd drawings of Asuka from Evangelion who is canonically fourteen years old in every version of the show that doesn't involve a convenient time-skip.