For those of you who didn’t get a chance to check it out yesterday, please head over to Nerd Report Radio and listen to my interview with Emily and Sabrina. It was a great time and they were super gracious hosts. There are some other great interviews that they have done and I would really suggest giving them a listen.
Currently Listening To: Wild Thing
I was reading a mock list for Webcomic beginners a few weeks back and I began to really think about the #33 that another author had put on that list (you will find a few from me on there and a few from Jack Cayless as well) and I realized that for the longest time, in comedy we did not expect our comedic foil to actually suffer permanent damage from any sort of pain inflicted on them. I think that the last few generations have had a sort of Loony Tunes approach to comedy: People can suffer unimaginable damage and it is funny and they don’t have to have more than a black eye following it. I think about it and I realize that I am as much a perpetrator of this sort of logic as many others. Several comics ago, I had Lee bitch slap Jerry with a laptop and there were no immediate repercussions. I think this sort of sensibility is just ingrained in how comedy and action were looked at for at least the last 20 years and that has all started to change. Now, our comedians and our heroes have to suffer actual consequences for their actions.
Part of the Modernist philosophy is that the hero can still be heroic. Captain America can exist in a glossy happy place where he fights for Truth and Justice and all that jazz and that is fine. Perhaps he could have problems because he was frozen in a block of ice for years, but for the most part he was an incorruptible symbol, much like Superman. The post-modern school of though, which many alternative creators come from (which I tend to draw Tweetics from) believe that not only should our protagonists suffer if they are hurt, but those actions should have long term consequences on them. If a man was frozen in a block of ice for 50 years, and suddenly he is unfrozen-completely out of time, should he not be suffering from some severe psychological issues as a result? If Arnie goes and fights some invisible alien, and his entire team is killed, don’t you think that some sort of PTSD will kick in afterwords? Furthermore, if there are no after effects, what does it say about the psychological profiling that was done on the Military’s behalf? I find it a curiosity that many people have, cynically, started asking these questions. What was it about the 70’s-early 90’s that made it where people wanted to forgo all semblance of reality and instead put their hope that a man could fly? It wasn’t a sense of awe and wonder, but escapism perhaps?
I tell you, here at Tweetics, I will crush dreams. If a piano falls on Jerry, guess what? He is fucking dead (or badly injured). That is my promise to you. If a character goes to jail, guess what? He will be sodomized by a carrot. I will not negate reality in my humorist musings on world domination, oh no. No, there will be no boyscout like Kal-El in my strip, reality and humor put together. That is what you get from me….what do you call that anyway?
ummm… perhaps “real humor”?