#i do like the idea of being a newsboy though i even have the appropriate hat

[fishofthewoods]

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[likecastle]

Witcher Noir AU, pt 13

And I’m back! Here’s some more Witcher noir AU, after a bit of a delay. Previous parts can be found here.

“You take me to the nicest places,” Jaskier says, peering up at the dilapidated façade of Amell Transport International.

Despite the fact that it’s mid-morning on a weekday, the street is empty. They passed busy warehouses on their way here, buildings teeming with workers and delivery trucks. But here, it’s a ghost town. The perfect place for a murder, Geralt thinks. He couldn’t have planned it better, himself.

“Come on,” he says, leading Jaskier around the side of the building. Not that there’s anyone around to see them, but they can’t be too careful. Halfway down the alley, they find a door, but it doesn’t budge when Geralt tries it. They make a circuit of the building, but it’s surprisingly secure for a place that looks like it hasn’t been in use since the war ended. Geralt has just about made up his mind to break in when Jaskier lets out a little gasp and grabs his uninjured arm.

“Geralt, look!” He’s pointing at a second-floor window, which stands partially open. A drainpipe runs beside the window, and there’s a scrap of blue-green fabric hanging from a rusty band of metal. “Cirilla was wearing a teal dress when I saw her.”

Jaskier looks up at him—excited, seeking his approval—but all Geralt can think of is that child climbing up to that second-story window. She could have fallen, broken her neck, contracted tetanus—the list of everything that might have gone wrong makes his mind white out. He feels frozen by it, by the magnitude of Cirilla’s vulnerability. Anything could have happened to her—could be happening right now—and he can’t—

“Geralt?” Jaskier nudges Geralt lightly. “I said, give me a boost.”

“What?” It takes Geralt a moment to realize what Jaskier is saying, and then another moment to formulate an appropriate level of reproach. “No—”

Jaskier doesn’t even give him a chance to respond. “Oh, so you’re going to shimmy up that rickety drainpipe in the state you’re in and squeeze your very comely but undeniably broad shoulders through that tiny little window? Is that your brilliant plan?”

Geralt grits his teeth. He can’t deny he’s probably not up to scaling a building right now, but he doesn’t like the thought of Jaskier doing it, either. “You won’t fit.”

Jaskier laughs, taking the jab with good humor. “Yes, thanks for noticing I don’t exactly have the figure of a willowy teenage girl. But of the two of us, I’ve got a better chance of making it than you do.”

“Fine,” Geralt grits out. Lifting Jaskier up makes the pain in his ribs flare so sharp he’s almost sick, and he’s suddenly grateful he’s not the one scrambling up the drain, though he’d be hard pressed to admit it.

By the time Jaskier’s reached the window, Geralt has more or less gotten control over the urge to retch. Watching Jaskier lean over to open the window even further doesn’t help any, though. Now on top of worrying about what might happen to Cirilla, he’s thinking about Jaskier breaking his head open. It was a terrible idea, letting him come along. Geralt should have made Jaskier tell him everything the first time they met and left him behind. If he hadn’t gotten soft and let Jaskier get the better of him, neither of them would be in this mess right now. Admittedly, Geralt’s way forward would be harder without Jaskier’s help, but at least he’d be clear headed, not saddled with the liability of someone else to look out for.

Before Geralt realizes it, Jaskier has squirmed through the window and vanished from view. Geralt hears a heavy thud, but before he has time to worry any further, Jaskier pokes his head out the window and calls, “I’ll be down in two shakes!”

Jaskier is true to his word, emerging from one of the side doors only a minute or two later, looking only slightly worse for wear. There’s a shallow gash along the side of his hand where it looks like he scraped it on the windowsill, but the self-satisfied expression on his face says he’s doing just fine, overall. He hands Geralt the slip of blue-green cloth—it’s smooth between his fingers, probably silk—and doesn’t comment when Geralt tucks it into his jacket pocket for safekeeping.

“You’re . . . good at that,” Geralt is forced to admit.

“Well,” Jaskier says, with a wicked grin, “I’ve had practice. I’ve escaped from more than one angry spouse this way—thought it’s usually in the opposite direction. Come on, I think there’s something you’re going to want to see.”

Jaskier leads him up a rickety set of steps, back up to the second floor. The room Jaskier climbed into appears to be an office, still outfitted with filing cabinets and a desk, though they’re grimed over with dust and bird droppings. One of the drawers stands open, and Geralt can see that rats have made a nest of the papers inside. He’s surprised there are any papers left at all, but the whole place looks as if it was abandoned in a hurry. He spotted crates still piled up around the ground floor, which suggests that when Amell Transport International shut down, it did so in a hurry.

But Jaskier didn’t bring him up here to look at a rat’s nest of papers. He gestures to the desk, and at first Geralt doesn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. But behind the desk, in the place where a seated person’s legs would go, the dust on the floor has been disturbed, and there’s a small purse, made of a familiar blue-green silk. Geralt’s chest constricts. The anonymous tip Eist received wasn’t a ruse, after all—or not only one, anyway. Cirilla really was here. And if she was hiding under the desk, as the evidence seems to suggest, she might not have been here alone. But what would a little girl be doing down here on her own? Of all the places to take shelter from a would-be kidnapper, why here? At least there’s no sign of a struggle, Geralt tells himself, so whoever Cirilla was hiding from, they probably didn’t hurt her too badly. Probably.

Geralt kneels down to examine the bag, grateful to duck under the desk so that Jaskier can’t see that his hands are shaking. The bag’s ornate silver clasp comes undone easily. Inside, there’s about thirty cents in small coins, a tube of barely-used shell-pink lipstick, and a crumpled napkin bearing the logo of a midtown automat. There’s a word written on the napkin in a careful, schoolgirl script, but a water mark makes the ink blurry and difficult to read. Getting to his feet, he holds out the napkin to Jaskier, who squints at it in the dim light.

“Urban?” Jaskier hazards. “Urchin? Does it ring any bells for you?”

Geralt shakes his head. The word means nothing. But the logo on the napkin, that’s another matter. He can’t believe he didn’t think of it before—the newsboy’s nervous demeanor while he answered Geralt’s questions, the speed with which he ran into the automat once he’d been paid. The kid almost even said her name, Geralt realizes now. What a fool he is. At the very least, he should have had the presence of mind to search for Cirilla close to the Palace Hotel before running off in search of other leads. She might have been right there—sitting right across the street, for all he knows. But he was so caught up in his worry, he couldn’t see what was right in front of him.

The touch of Jaskier’s hand on his arm startles him. “You all right?” Jaskier asks, his voice as gentle as his touch.

“We have to go,” Geralt says. He tucks the little purse into his pocket and heads for the stairs.

“So it does mean something to you?” Jaskier jogs to catch up with him. “You know, I’d be a lot more use to you if you’d tell me what’s going on in that head of yours. Don’t get me wrong, the whole strong, silent type thing is very becoming, but it only goes so far, you know? At a certain point, you’re not cool and mysterious anymore, you’re just being an ass.”

Geralt is halfway to the door when he notices a flare of red and blue light on a far wall. “Fuck,” he breathes. Casting around for someplace to hide the purse, he jams the delicate silk bag into a half-open crate, tucking it under the excelsior packing. “Jaskier, run.”

“What?” Jaskier gives him an injured look. “If you want to get rid of me, you can just—”

Jaskier doesn’t get the chance to tell Geralt what he can do, because at that moment the door to the warehouse crashes open, and a rush of uniformed officers spills inside, their weapons raised, shouting at them to put their hands up. Geralt raises his hands slowly, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Jaskier do the same.

*

Part fourteen

[dustedandsocial]

Need to jot something down and get it out of my system, so I don’t keep responding to terrible tweets

It seems important to at least understand the implications of basic communist principles, regardless of what position we’re in on the left currently. That does not feel like utopianism or drawing blueprints to me, it feels like something that helps flesh out our motives and strategies right now. Regardless of communism’s likelihood, those principles tell us who we are and how we should act and clarifies our struggle. 

It could be that a stateless, classless, moneyless society is a contradiction-free utopia, heaven on earth, and also no less than 1,700 years away. Yet I think people could find the contradiction-free version of communism impossible while still maintaining a desire to pursue a communist society without illusions. Furthermore, communist principles are not actually suspended in our vision of the future, they involve beliefs and actions that have been with us for probably thousands of years. Communism would be a process of realization, not an alien consciousness seeping into the world.

This is partly why I think the emphasis on a distinction between lower and higher phase communism is unhelpful. Not only for how the lower phase morphs into state socialism when in the wrong hands. But also because it sounds like it involves some kind of break between two separate societies, and that the first phase would involve guidance. We don’t need guidance to learn communist principles, they have long been a part of how humans interact with one another. But I see people get hung up on the phase distinction all the time, which in turn leads to state planning seeming appropriate. 

There aren’t supposed to be two separate communisms. The phases are a part of the same process. Any higher phase would clearly be impossible unless its lower phase was in fact the birth of human liberation. The state can’t wither away if an army of guys in newsboy caps are pointlessly forcing workers into the fields every day at gunpoint. That the state would be withering away is not an invitation for organizational hierarchy. It means that we enter the communist world as capitalist subjects, who must struggle in order to overcome capitalism’s impact on our collective consciousness and reach any higher potential. The state can’t be a part of aiding struggle because overthrowing capitalism only comes with the elimination of the state. The state is a roadblock cutting us off from any struggle to test our potential. That struggle requires the state’s elimination as a precondition.

An actual communist world could very well deepen contradictions. It could make some of our problems more complex. New problems would reveal themselves once you’ve eliminated the ones we’re dealing with now. Even abundance may not be as magical as it seems. The value in abundance is that it eliminates coercion, but it is not the goal in and of itself and it does not guarantee peace and harmony. How that abundance affects our social relations is what matters, and it hopefully would just allow us to relate to one another in new, less destructive ways. 

There’s the weird idea, even among MLs, that communism must be easy from the onset in order to be successful, that it requites preparation and a countdown clock. There’s no reason it can’t be extremely difficult, birthed in difficult, contingent conditions. We would have to go through the process of maturation without instruction and together manage our mistakes in order for the communist world to meaningfully take shape. Breht Revleft Radio wouldn’t need to stand over our shoulders the whole time. The process would have enormous obstacles, yes, and it would still likely be preferable to what we’re dealing with now. 

You can have a stateless, classless, moneyless society where everybody is at each other’s throats while in the process of laying its foundation. Why can’t you? Why does it have to be capitalism, climate disaster, and barrel bombs versus literal heaven on earth? Why would anybody need to evolve first? Because we’re scared violence might breakout? Do you know what’s been happening in Syria or Yemen over the last decade?

The reason it bothers me is that I feel like you need to get this across somehow and not let people think communism is this violent leap directly into stress-free living. Yes, that would be very unlikely! But we don’t need guarantees that our problems will all be resolved on some spiritual level. You’re never going to rid the world of contradictions. But this isn’t the fucking issue! The issue is whether or not communism, even at its predictably difficult onset, is better than what we’re living through now, or what we’re being offered. On what grounds would communism be preferable? Are the current conditions forcing our hand anyway? Is there even an other option at this point, beyond mass suffering and ecocide? Can you counter everything I’ve said and explain why running Matt Bruenig or Connor Kilpatrick or whoever for president in 2024 is going to get us out of the crisis?

I think we need some plan for climate change that affirms humanity, seeing as though humankind is what we’re trying to save. Talking about it only in terms of nature, with the always-implicit idea that we are not an aspect of nature ourselves, makes it easier for fascists to solve the problem. For me, communism is the gateway towards building up our collective self-esteem in defense against the worst impulses of the right. 

The movement towards communism would be one that solves issues by highlighting and negating the logic of capitalism through actions that necessarily plant one foot forward into a fully decommodified world. People are currently being made houseless in the middle of an economic crisis despite there being enough empty housing for everyone in the country. A communist movement would negate the logic of capitalism and fill those empty houses through force via collective action. This would loudly affirm human worth, demonstrate an alternative vision for the world, and highlight the absurdity of being ruled by an economic system, all at once.

No, we don’t want blueprints insofar as they design our future, but we can address the implications of communist principles in order to clarify what we’re actually fighting for. We need a basic life-affirming vision right now. I don’t think mild yet still impossible welfare reforms are going to cut it. If you’re still bickering with Democrats about votes and non-votes, as if you can scold them into not being a capitalist party, you should realize that you’ve hit a wall.

No clue how to get people on board with even the horizon not being perfect. It makes sense to me, but people don’t seem to like the idea! I’m told that in order to take the present situation seriously, we have to abandon ideas around a future society’s principles, even ones that actually help give us direction in the here and now. Never mind that I'm poor and vulnerable myself, struggling without ever abandoning the idea of total human liberation. I just think history shows us nothing but poor or otherwise greatly disadvantaged movements fighting for immediate gains and human liberation simultaneously. I think you see that in the movement for prison abolition right now, even if the need for revolution isn’t explicit.

I don’t think we’ll get anywhere unless there’s hard work done in clarifying communism or at least fleshing out a coherent vision around human emancipation and taking its principles and their implications seriously.

Or maybe we avert disaster by running Freddie de Boer for president in 2024, what do I know. It’s not like Liz Bruenig ever called me one of the greatest living writers of her generation.

[recentanimenews]

My Week in Manga: February 20-February 26, 2017

My News and Reviews

In a few more days and March will be here and in a few more days the winner of the Tokyo ESP manga giveaway will be announced. Never fear though, there’s still a little time left to enter for a chance to win the first omnibus in the series! Simply tell me a little about a favorite psychic/esper from a manga. (A quick note: Normally I announce giveaway winners on Wednesday mornings but, because I have an all-day job interview on the 1st, this time the announcement will likely be made sometime on Wednesday evening instead.)

As for some interesting things I came across last week: The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo has created an online archive of early Japanese animation. An English-language version of the site is currently in the works, but even if you can’t read Japanese if you click around enough you’ll find the some of the videos available for viewing. The University of Michigan’s Center for Japanese Studies recently hosted two master rakugo artists–Yanagiya Sankyo and Yanagiya Kyonosuke–and has posted a video of one of their events. The video includes a brief introduction to rakugo, a demonstration and performance, and a question and answer session.

There are also a few podcasts worth mentioning (though I haven’t actually had the opportunity to listen to most of them yet): The most recent episode of Comic Books Are Burning in Hell is devoted to the late Jiro Taniguchi. Tofugu started a podcast not too long ago and recently talked with Alexander O. Smith about What Makes a Good Japanese Translator? (Smith does a fair amount of video game translation but translates novels and manga as well. He’s also one of the founders of Bento Books.) Vertical Comics recently started a podcast, too, and the first episode of the Mangocast is now available for listening.

As for crowdfunding efforts for queer comics, the end of February has seen quite a few Kickstarter projects launch: The Husband & Husband campaign is hoping to publish the first volume of the cute and funny webcomic in print. The Dates anthology, which focuses on queer historical fiction, is back for a second volume. (Though I haven’t written a quick take for it yet, I have the first volume and it’s great.) The Go Get a Roomie! project is raising funds to print the second volume and reprint the first volume of the webcomic. And finally, Digital Manga’s most recent Kickstarter has launched–Juné Manga is working with Velvet Toucher, a Japanese artist living in the United States, to release Eden’s Mercy.

Quick Takes

Guardians of the Louvre by Jiro Taniguchi. I’ve read most but not quite all of Taniguchi’s manga that has been released in English, but his recent passing reminded me that I hadn’t yet read Guardians of the Louvre, the latest one to have been released. One of the most remarkable things about Guardians of the Louvre is its full-color artwork. The volume is actually part of the “Louvre Collection,” a series of comics commissioned by the Louvre that feature the museum and its collections. (Hirohiko Araki’s Rohan at the Louvre is part of the same series.) Taniguchi is an extremely versatile creator; while some of his manga are action-packed, others are more introspective. Guardians of the Louvre is definitely one of the latter. The story is a quiet and contemplative exploration of art and inspiration, following a manga creator who is visiting Paris on his own for a few days. He falls ill soon after he arrives but pushes through in order to visit the Louvre. And so when he seems to start slipping through time, meeting artists and historical figures associated with the museum, not to mention the embodiments of some of the works housed there, he’s never quite sure how much of his visit is based in reality and how much is a fever dream.

He’s My Only Vampire, Volumes 1-3 by Aya Shouoto. While I don’t actively avoid vampire manga, I also don’t actively seek it out. Usually there has to be something a little “extra” to catch my attention. In the case of He’s My Only Vampire, I had decided to seek out more of Shouoto’s work available in English while waiting for more of The Demon Prince of Momochi House to be released. He’s My Only Vampire is kind of an odd series and at this point the manga doesn’t seem to have a clear direction. It’s as if Shouoto is either trying to do too much at once with the story or hasn’t quite decided where it should go yet. It can still be pretty entertaining from time to time, though. Shouoto’s artwork, even though anatomy seems to occasionally go out the window, can be lovely and sensual, too. So far the best part of the manga is the three main characters–Kana, the strong and spunky heroine, Aki, the titular vampire and Kana’s long-lost childhood friend, and Jin, a high-school delinquent who has recently discovered that he is at least part werewolf. Personality-wise and the relationship-wise they’re all sort of goofy and their interactions can be quite amusing. The story is taking some darker turns, but I think I prefer its humor.

Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic, Volumes 1-4 by Shinobu Ohtaka. I know quite a few people who love Magi and have heard plenty of great things about the series but despite those facts it’s still taken me this long to finally get around to reading the manga. Magi more or less starts out as a dungeon crawl which, while highly entertaining, isn’t exactly the most compelling narrative for a series that’s already over thirty volumes and still ongoing. But after the first dungeon crawl (and I suspect that there will likely be more of those in the future) Ohtaka begins delving into the characters and their motivations while exploring the vast world in which the live. In part Magi is inspired by One Thousand and One Nights but Ohtaka does not strictly adhere to those stories and characters, instead creating a complex world that is reminiscent of but distinct from that work. Magi really is a great series, with plenty of magic, mystery, and adventure; I can easily understand why it’s so well-loved. The artwork is clear and attractive, the settings and characters are interesting and well-realized, and the story, worldbuilding, and action are engaging. I also particularly appreciate that the women can be just as badass as the men in the series and in some cases are even more so.

NewsPrints by Ru Xu. My introduction to Xu’s work was through the beautifully illustrated webcomic Saints for Rent. However, NewsPrints is her debut graphic novel. Published by Scholastic the comic is aimed towards middle grade readers but it can be appreciated by older readers, too. NewsPrints, while still being very approachable, actually tackles some pretty weighty subject matter–war, propaganda, identity, and so on. The comic is about Blue, an orphan who is hiding the fact that she is a girl so that she can work as a newsboy for the Bugle, one of the only newspapers that actually reports the truth. The Bugle has taken in and cares for other orphans as well, but Blue is afraid that she won’t be able to hide her secret much longer and may lose her newfound family because of it. The city she lives in has very firmly entrenched ideas about what is and is not appropriate for girls to do. Blue is embroiled in an extremely dangerous situation when she meets and becomes friends with Crow who is also hiding a secret, one that could greatly influence the course of the war. Though NewsPrints tells a complete story the ending is left fairly open. Apparently a sequel is currently in the works; I’m very curious to see where Xu takes the comic next.

By: Ash Brown