Posts Tagged ‘swine flu’
9 items.
I’m kinda surprised that they weren’t able to get a gun. But I guess disbelief will have to be suspended for the story to progress.
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The burden of proof in the American justice system.
I thought that movie Outbreak was really scary when I was younger.
A lot of children’s literature is kind of creepy in retrospect, but we accept it when we’re kids without thinking about it much. I don’t think that really is indicative of any kind of intentional current through it, except that a lot of the “classic” children’s stories are naturally older, and mores and opinions on things have changed while the stories haven’t. The stories stay acceptable because, like I was saying, people read them and accept them when they’re too young to look at them ironically or sexually, and then they want their kids to read the same things they read when they were little, there’s some vague idea of tradition, so the stories don’t get retired. Which is a lot like the Bible. Christianity being, if you want to look at it that way, a religion of zombie worship with a tradition of ritualized cannibalism and a host of pagan ceremonies assimilated into an occasionally nonsensical patchwork, but if you pound it into kids when they’re too young to know better then, as adults, the whole creepy freakshow actually provides them with a sense of comfort and security. Anyway, that was kind of a tangent and kind of not, because my basic point was just gonna be to say that I find The Velveteen Rabbit to be especially creepy, but I still really like it.
Things get a little bit more ominous at this point…
The plot thickens! Well, not really. I guess they’re mostly standing around cracking jokes about Jesus. Still, though. It’s all supposed to go somewhere, I promise.
This strip more or less marks the introduction of a new character, but it’s one that’s been on my mind for a long time now. For anybody who’s been reading the comics for a couple of years now, they might remember a storyline I did a couple of years ago featuring a teddy bear sold at a bookstore as a promotional item during Christmas who, after the holiday season, is no longer needed and suffers a crisis of purpose. The storyline ended when the teddy bear, seeking a new vocation and having lived his short, sheltered life in a bookstore watches Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled and, seeing neither the irony nor the tragedy of it, is inspired to embark upon a career as a blackface entertainer. Sadly, there seemed to be no place for his act in our modern world, and the story ended with him being approached by something that looked ominously like a lynch mob.
That wasn’t meant to be the end of the story, though. I had the vague outline of a whole epic adventure for the little bear, and I stopped because I realized that I liked it a little too much to continue with it as I’d started it. The bear was based, none too subtly, on a bear that had been sold at the real-life bookstore where I worked, and I didn’t think that they’d appreciate a version of their possibly copyrighted character becoming a hard-drinking alcoholic, making inappropriate advances toward a small boy, dancing in blackface, and accusing the company of implicit antisemitism for their Christmas-centric winter decorations… among other things that I had the bear doing. Some big corporations are funny about stuff like that. Go figure. So I decided that, if I wanted to continue the storyline, I should come up with my own renamed and redesigned teddy bear character. They can’t copyright the idea of a teddy bear being sold at a bookstore, I’m pretty sure, and that’s all that remains from the original concept. I hope to redo the whole origin story with the elements that I liked from what I did originally, but with this new character, and then I’d like to finally get to the big future plans that I had for the teddy bear. But until I manage to get around to all of that, this second Swine Flu comic is the next in an ongoing storyline, so stick with it and enjoy.
