Annotated 33-11
For those not in the know, Sketchies was my first project with Flo. Originally meant as a video series, it was retooled into comics form, most of it with artist Ryan Estrada. Xan is a refugee from that series. He might be considered an alternate version, just as Shanna is not the same Shanna as in Fans, or he may just be a bit older and a little more refined in his obsessions.
In Sketchies, Xan and five other students are attending cartooning classes at Topffer University. Xan is a digital native, and sort of leaning into that identity, though he mellows a bit as he and one of the other students hit it off romantically. The vogue for remixed video-game imagery meant that, among his classmates, he was the most successful in terms of gaining readers, but totally unprepared when Nintendo sent him a cease-and-desist order. (And here he is again, going up against The Man in the form of a billion-dollar video-game publisher.)
I got a bit depressed when I started casting around for the current online presence of Sketchies and realized that it doesn’t really have one. We made ebooks of it available as part of the Kickstarter, but that was ages ago. I thought Flo was doing something with it on Gumroad, but if so, I can’t find it. In any case, I’ll see if I can bring it back for your consumption in some form before these annos are over.
(With the caveat that some of it would probably embarrass us now. It was earlier work and a different style of comedy, and I do recall one character named “Wasp” who basically lived to offend people. Even Xan is probably best read as trying a little too hard to “be himself” rather than quite as oblivious as he appears. I think that’s more or less how we wrote this version of him, as will become clearer in a page or two.)
Xan’s little anti-print tirade somehow sounds less solid in this era of dubious Facebook/Twitter news. Don’t get me wrong, I (like most people under 50) haven’t picked up a newspaper in quite some time, but I often wonder if I should
What I have learned is that the medium is not the problem but the content. My mother has become fully distrusting of “mass media” but instead she now listens almost exclusively to conspiracy theorists on social media. Hopefully, the lesson that we all will learn before we arrive at a collapse of civilisation is to exercise better our critical thinking regardless of media, channels, and appearances of the message.
As someone who’s lived in the UK for a few years, I can tell you that paper is very very patient when it comes to dangerous lies which disregard and endanger democracy itself, independent of how much that paper costs.
But: Good journalism exists, and it does not come cheap, so it *is* a good idea to pay for it, online or offline. And because getting paid is not easy these days, there’s a lot of incentive for good journalism to ever so slowly mutate into less-good journalism or maybe not validate itself as often as it should, or go with the flow in some other way. Which in turn makes it even harder for wannabe readers of good journalism to find ways to find reliable sources and pay for them in reliable ways … it’s pretty much up in the air these days.
Well, we figure out Can is purposely being patronizing to ‘test’ Shanna in the following pages but the whole argument reminds me way too much of the similar idiotic arguments I have been hearing far too much in my life.
*Xan, stupid auto correct.
Alt Text strikes again. I’m in stitches.
Yes, please do bring back Sketchies (unfinished though it was, through no fault of your own). I’ve missed it! And for the record, though I’d probably stay clear of Wasp if he were real I enjoyed him as a character. Yes, he was an in-person troll, but he was an amusing one, who played effectively off of characters such as the oblivious closeted-gay evangelical dude (whose name eludes me at the moment).