Annotated 19-2
There she is, rendered for the first time in John’s beautiful sepia style!
Believe it or not, bringing Shanna into this story was Phil’s idea, not mine, even though I had already written her on and off for more than a decade before her “first appearance” here (chiefly in my first major comics series, Fans.)
What’s more, I was not an easy sell when he first suggested it, even though one of his motives was to make me happier with the story by injecting one of my favorite creations into it. (Not that he was wrecking the story just to pacify me; it was also becoming clear that we needed someone to assume the general role she takes up here.) One thing that bothers me a lot about comics storytelling is how often it rests on past achievements to the exclusion of coming up with new ideas. This approach caters to trufans but alienates new readers and therefore limits the audience.
Partly for that reason, I was never that interested in joining my properties into a single universe. Up to this point, Guilded Age had had no Marvel-style offhand references to other works of mine, not even blink-and-you’ll-miss-it name-checks or cameos. We sort of break that rule starting here, but also sort of don’t: this is not quite the same Shanna as appeared in Fans. More on that tomorrow.
(Changed the alt text because, TBH, the attitude that informed the original seems pretty dated to me now.)
Remember when itswalky.com reposted the Fans crossover and I posted a comment that said “Shanna rules. That is all”?
Shanna rules.
That’s all.
Better her than Soggies, that’s for sure.
I was very happy to see Shanna again, having been introduced to the Fans cast thanks to the It’s Walky! crossover, and it had me hoping we’d see others, but that’s how it is. Anyway, this being another version of her never once caused me to bat an eye. “Go on, then. There are other worlds than these,” has been a concept in fiction for a very long time now.
Soggies may NOT rule as long as Shanna’s around!
It’s ironic that she says that “there are no selfless heroes to charge in.” But here she, charging right on in as an arguably selfless hero.
Doesn’t she still have revenge-oriented motives at this point in time? Or am I completely misremembering that?
I don’t know that “revenge” is quite the right framing, but it’s definitely personal.
What was the original alt text?
From: http://guildedage.net/comic/chapter-19-page-2/ “Clearly, this Shanna comes from an Earth that still had journalism.”
I don’t think that’s become less biting a statement, personally.
I’ll probably get more into this in some future annotation, but in brief: while a lot of today’s journalism is mockable or despicable (“T Campbell SLAMS Journalists In Ten Ways That Will SHOCK YOU #letsquotesometweets”), I’ve grown uneasy with jokes that imply the field is a lost cause ever since attacking the press became a popular sport among those I despise a lot more.
That’s, uh, that’s some weak-ass motivation you’re describing there, T.
You’re not doing journalism a service by pretending it’s in straits less dire than it really is. The “fake news lying media” phenomenon didn’t spring into being ab ovo, the brainchild of some evil genius. It was a direct and inevitable consequence of lowering standards decade after decade.
Shutting our eyes and ears against that is not helpful in the slightest.
Softening your criticism of the media is the exact wrong way to oppose “those you despise a lot more”.
I’m sure you can appreciate the difference between “criticizing the media,” even harshly, and giving them a careless, offhand dismissal. “lol remember JOURNALISM? Yeah, that doesn’t exist anymore in OUR universe, but here’s another.” I know Phil meant this as a humorous exaggeration, but it doesn’t play that way now.
Twenty-first-century journalism has real problems, but in my genuine, open-eyed and open-eared opinion, it deserves a better grade than “nonexistent.” And among the problems it did NOT create for itself is a society factionalized enough so that would-be tyrants can pretend it’s in DIRER straits than it really is and get away with it… for now, at least. “Real journalism doesn’t exist any more! You can’t trust anything you read in the paper or see on the news! Just trust ME! ONLY ME.”
You’ll excuse me if I don’t find anything that echoes that to be all that funny, these days.
Throwing in my two cents here, because this is a topic I’ve thought a lot about with the advent of barely-attempted clickbait headlines and egotistical authoritarians turning up their agreement with offhand assessments like that to 11:
Journalism is not a continuum. It’s not even something the press participates in earnestly every day. One of the things it requires, in my book, is newsworthiness.
That is a criteria that a lot of today’s journalism – published for beyond mass consumption – fails to rise to the level of.
Is that funny? Is it remotely funny that the subject of most “news” isn’t even worth reading? I don’t think so.
However, mocking the rare earnest attempts isn’t the point of that kind of humor. I don’t think it’s debasing the media as a watchdog, or as a whole, to mock a non-effort – which to be called such, requires more than a simple lack of newsworthiness – that effectively insults the institution of the media as a bulwark against disinformation by existing.
The idea that I think you’re driving at, then, is “mock the non-efforts, not the media”. Just be specific.
Honest, unbiased journalism is not like the dodo. It’s not something that used to exist and is now extinct.
Honest, unbiased journalism is a unicorn. It never has existed and never will, but people talk about it like it’s a real thing.
Human beings have too many cognitive biases to ever be impartial. Even those who try hard to train themselves out of it will still find themselves unconsciously giving preference to evidence that supports what they already believe and avoiding use of evidence that contradicts them. Couple this with journalism’s customers being composed of people who don’t like to hear anything that contradicts their own preconceptions and yeah… impartial journalism is a myth.
We’re just currently in a phase where we’re noticing this more because the Internet makes everybody publishing their own opinions cheap and easy, so there aren’t any “gatekeepers” any more who can decide which point of view gets classed as “news”.
That’s a fair point. And don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying unbiased reporting is what separates journalism from useless blather. Sometimes it still helps to see the spread of slant across all publishers, even if what they’re reporting is, for lack of a more concise term, “a polished turd on a pedestal” when it comes to whether it benefits anyone to read about.
Newsworthiness essentially boils down to whether or not the readership is aided in the course of their daily lives by knowing what is talked about in an article. If they’re not, then it’s absent; if they are, then the piece is newsworthy.
That’s a quality you can’t intentionally manufacture, unless you’re a) more well-informed than the average person, by accident or otherwise, and b) willing to put your reputation on the line to deliver that information.
Shanna is an example of a reporter with the second quality inn spades, who nonetheless can’t deliver newsworthiness without first getting a good scoop that allows her to be well-informed.
Bias is irrelevant to newsworthiness. It doesn’t matter if she hates H.R. and games and nerds, if she delivers information significant to everyone.
Real journalism takes effort, not a certain opinion or ideology.
See, I don’t think that’s been the takeaway from the recent (and richly deserved) dragging of the media at large. Taking one guy’s words as gospel was never an option, especially not as a consequence of questions being raised about the way the media have been doing their job.
Rejecting the media is not an option, we’re inundated in information one way or the other. All we can do is approach what we see or hear with a critical mindset and whole heaps of skepticism. Reject only the archaic idea of authoritative sources, established media whose take on things is not to be questioned. That kind of “journalism” simply does not exist anymore (assuming it ever did). That’s why the original alt text, dismissive though it may be, makes sense more then ever IMHO.
(The large mainstream media outlets don’t seem to know how to deal with the situation, though. They’re desperately bailing water, to little effect as far as I can tell – I don’t see people flocking back to them because “democracy dies in darkness” and “this is an apple”.)
I’m gonna have to flatly disagree on a number of points here, I’m afraid, even though I think we’ve got some common ground on a deeper level.
I don’t know who’s in your social circle, but I’ve known far too many people for whom “rejecting the media” and “taking one person’s word as gospel” have ABSOLUTELY been options, options which they have taken. I dealt with that indirectly just this morning (in the name of others’ privacy, I won’t give further details). Those people are the core reason why no one is really betting on the Senate doing the obvious thing after last night’s House vote.
Questioning authority is good and necessary, but again, there is a difference between “established media whose take on things is not to be questioned” and simple “authoritative [not authoritarian] sources.” Sources’ authority matters, and it matters far more when they can lose it if they misuse it. Rejecting the idea of authority as “archaic” opens the door to an old anti-intellectual impulse, one that Asimov named forty years ago as “my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.”
As for mainstream media outlets… it’s mixed. The NYT and WaPo are adapting like crazy, doing better than they were in the last administration, financially speaking. Brietbart’s little more than a bad memory, though Fox News is still eating CNN and MSNBC’s lunch. The “This is an apple” campaign, though, struck me as a step in the right direction, since CNN’s usual strategy just seems to be “pretend it’s still 2001, but with tweets now.” Overall, though, I wouldn’t say any of the large outlets strike me as desperate just now; it’s the smaller ones I’m more concerned about.
I wouldn’t want this to drag on too far, so I guess we’ll agree to disagree… but just a few more remarks! BTW, sorry if I sounded a little combative before, it wasn’t my intention:
– The obvious thing for the Senate to do was always to vote straight down the party lines. It’s been done before, 20 years ago was the last instance. To pin this inevitable outcome on some unshakeable belief in the word of a semi-senile, buffoonish, frankly ridiculous figure… that’s quite a stretch.
– Asimov didn’t predict the internet, did he. The prevailing mindset online has long been “citation needed” on just about any claim. While anti-intellectualism does exist and should be seen as a problem, the diffuse public discourse that we’re seeing today isn’t really a part of that. Yes, there are still echo chambers all over the place, but they’re now smaller and much easier to burst.
– The MSM is adapting in the worse way possible, if you ask me. They’re turtling up, clinging to their viewership, pretending that their authority isn’t being challenged at all, purging dissenting voices, refusing to compete with new media on a level ground… The fact that they’re still able to make money doing this isn’t really indicative of their long-term prospects.
Belated “no problem” to your worries about being argumentative… I’ve seen argumentative, and trust me, you’re fine. I’ll likewise resist the temptation to just keep going on this, except to clarify that I doubt most senators treat the word of Donald Trump as gospel; they’re just continually mindful of voters who do.
“alienates new readers”? By… giving the reporter a name from another series? If they don’t know the reference, it’s a new character to them, just as if it had been a wholly new character. The new reader does not experience the story exactly as an older fan would, but it’s still a character with a pretty solid noir detective intro.
Death Stranding, by Hideo Kojima, has a character named “Die-Hardman” in logs you get around the end of the game, you can learn that his actual name is John McClane. The same name as the character played by Bruce Willis. He’s got a middle name that’s unremarkable, save that it likely serves to make him legally distinct. With either, if you don’t get the reference, you lose nothing. With his? If you get the reference… it… severely colors your perception of the character. Yours, if you get the reference… you… know she’s a reporter, and her inner monologue proves she’s not that Shanna. It makes you wonder what else there is to her.
Eh… It also depends on the audience, I think. I read Dumbing of Age, and sometimes when a “new” character comes in (who has previously lived an extensive life in It’s Walky or one of the other comics), Sometimes the comment section goes wild with excitement and speculation and oh-I-remember and oh-I-was-wondering-when-they’d-show-up. As a person who didn’t read those, it can feel a little bit like I’m not in the club.
There are worse fandoms with worse things to be in-group-y about, for sure! But I can understand the thought process behind not wanting to bring that in.
Well, it’s not like I don’t think it worked out! But I was mindful of the risk of that alienation, especially in Shanna’s early scenes here. For instance, if we had swapped the narrative captions around and changed the emphasis so that the last caption read, “My name is SHANNA COCHRAN,” I think that would give Fans faithful a slightly bigger jolt of excitement, but at the expense of everyone else, for whom that name would not have been a meaningful closing line.
This was the first time I met Shanna and I didn’t feel alienated. If anything, I’d like a link to Fans so that I can read that too.
It’s the inclusion of Shanna that finally made me care for the sepia storyline, which until then I tried to ignore. (The Arkerra storyline is enjoyable as fantasy on its own.) Shanna is someone to root for, while HR and Carol are just a-holes. (I had my hopes up for Carol, until that was no longer feasible.)
As someone who didn’t know who she was (even as a character in her original series), and also didn’t know where the plot was going to go on either side of the Arkerra/sepia divide, I saw her at first as a meddlesome, in-over-her-head red herring wanna-be for a real hero, especially given the existence of arcanometry and her complete ignorance of it until nearly the very end.
Which I guess, she at least was in the party along with other real heroes by the end, even if their accomplishments must have seemed a little hollow to them by the end… so that was a genius way to introduce her, even if it was mischaracterization of sorts.
I wound up liking her a lot more as the plot plodded on, which also means it’s good writing.
This appearance. Right here. This is what sold me.