#i have been doing a lot of paint pouring art recently (perhaps i will post some someday)

[dykeogenes]

with the caveat that i am not a computer scientist or in any way qualified to speak on machine learning. i think perhaps googles ai summaries are bad because nowadays when you google a question, most of the results are themselves already ai generated. which smells like. a real big problem to me. who is, again, a person who not qualified to smell it.

[wordsinhaled]

Oh I would love to hear more about "Morpheus is aware he has acquired somewhat of a reputation." 👀<3

ahhhhh okay so this is ... THE COFFEESHOP AU, the one inspired by the art by @levionok where hob is a barista and dream's a pastry chef, and in the same universe as tomorrow is a place we are together and this post

and... that is actually the only line i have written? oops... BUT i do have a lot of backstory that i've rambled to @ghostboyjules about on discord so i will paste that here!

i actually drew a tiny bit of art for it and it's tentatively called "when coffee dreams it dreams of chocolate"

so i was thinking about pastry chef/chocolatier morpheus in the coffeeshop au and that he probably got into Food and Cooking because it's like... random ingredients coming together to make something beautiful and he sees it as his creative outlet but he's awful at expressing himself still... so he's like, oh, okay, ingredients make Sense and are Precise and have Defined Results Every Time... and he's like a kinda creative type who reads a lot and pines after people from afar and his whole life everyone's just been like, "so that bloke morpheus is kinda weird or what???"

but then he gets to culinary school and people are like "oh. he has VISION" so he hides behind that a bit

and he sorta ages into somebody who can make it Look Cool but at his core he's still. just. just awkward as hell. blasting his goth and new wave music in his kitchen... expressing his feelings through pretty chocolates.... lurking through the bookstore. going to goth clubs just to Feel the Music

but in pastry school he can make beautiful things with ingredients and pour his love into them and all of a sudden people are like "oh, the 'hmm' is Vision and Genius" and it's easier to let them believe that than to be like "no, the 'hmm' is just me"

then hob meets him and is like "oh, he's a lil 'hmm' and i LIKE IT"

in this AU calliope became an event planner or something, or maybe even like an Actual Chef. they initially met in culinary school and were like oh, haha, your parents liked mythology too, huh?... and they were together and in love and married and had a restaurant together—some kind of bistro or something—but then they had like, clashing Visions and a huge falling out that made waves in the culinary world and kind of gave morpheus a name for being haughty and proud

so now nobody wants to work in partnership with him but they grudgingly respect him because his artistry is amazing. and calliope and morpheus actually do have a son, but calliope has sole custody

hence the anonymity, not giving hob his name at the coffeeshop, because morpheus moved and started over and now he runs his own bakery. but it just opened recently and he doesn't want scandal to follow him. he just wants to bide his time and remake his own legacy

i imagine that it's like, the kind of thing that is high-profile if you're in the industry but if you just own a random little coffeeshop you wouldn't know him type of deal

his bakery is a lil artsy place with murals on the walls that he also painted and he plays goth and new wave playlists over the loudspeakers and all the staff get to dress as counterculture as they want. he's a little insane, basically. and @valeriianz - sweet dream from the neighbors AU is TOTALLY a vibe... i imagine this place being a bit like that?

i imagine he also does stuff like encourage local artists to do street art on the walls outside, so at random hours of night there's just folks with spray paint and paint buckets and ladders, vibing and eating lil baked goods and "love my way" is blasting out the front doors and morpheus is sitting on the stoop just hanging

that's probably his shop opening party. he plans on it just being one night for opening but all the artists are so happy to do it and they ask him to consider making it a regular thing and he's like "...i will consider it" and then it becomes a once a month thing. (perhaps this is how hob finally sees him in his element - he invites hob to come to one of the paint nights and hob brings a ton of delicious coffee for everyone without being asked and totally falls (even more) in love. everyone raves about the coffee and asks hob to come the next month and morpheus is like "oh no... this is a Thing now..."

in the future, after they're together, hob can serve coffee at these art nights regularly and morpheus can know the healing feeling of having someone still want him and want to share things with him and collaborate with him even after truly knowing him

so before they know it hob is in the inner sanctum - up in the middle of the night while dream makes melted chocolate for dipped strawberries at the bakery, and hob sits on the counter reading him walt whitman

"you know, just because i make excellent coffee doesn't mean you don't need to sleep, love."

"i am in the midst of creation, hob."

"your sister won't like it if i let you keel over from exhaustion."

"my sister is not here."

"mmhmm, and i am."

(cue morpheus standing between hob's knees where hob sits on the edge of the counter. taking the book out of hob's hands with the hand not covered in melted chocolate so the book is safe from harm. hob taking hold of his other hand and carefully licking the chocolate from morpheus' fingertips

and in the end they do end up in bed, so hob counts it as a victory)

[tfwlawyers]

Not me singlehandedly going through your entire parent trap au I’m so invested even though like half of the posts are from 2015 💀

THESE THINGS HAPPEN I get such a kick out of knowing this au is still making its rounds though 😭😭

and yk what just because I know I’m never going to do anything else with this, have a 3.5k attempted scramble of fic for this au I tried writing back also in 2015. i was even less of a writer back then than I am now so it’s absolutely terrible but have at thee

“Oh, wait...” Trucy winced and tapped her earring. Apollo’s eyes widened in realization. “Looks like we have one more thing to do tonight - it’ll be super quick, I promise.”

“Oh no,” Apollo said, visibly paling, “there’s no way you’re doing that to me-”

“Then cutting my hair was a total waste,” Trucy huffed, tugging at a newly shorn lock, “because there’s no way I can go to camp with pierced ears and come home without. Come on, Polly, where’s your sense of adventure? It’s just one little pinch!”

“Just one?” he asked hesitantly, eyes now trained on the sharp needle laying on the table.

Trucy paused. “Well... I guess it’s technically two. I really only wear the one earring, but both my ears are pierced.”

Apollo sighed. “Great.”

“Nah, I got this,” Trucy said, grinning toothily. “I went with Aunt Maya when she wanted to get hers pierced, even though she chickened out at the last second.” She picked up the needle and a book of matches from the table, eyes glinting. “I had to get mine repierced because of infection the first time too. Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”

-

“Put that apple slice back,” Apollo said, narrowing his eyes at the piece of fruit in Trucy’s hands. “They’re acidic, I don’t need that anywhere near me and oh God you’re really going to shove a piece of metal into my ear, aren’t you-”

-

“You sure I look okay?” he asked, patting down the skirt. He squinted down at the stark white boots he’d thankfully fit into. “I’m terrified to walk in these, they look like death traps -”

“Which is why we’re practicing,” Trucy said primly, wiping her hands on a gel-stained rag. She still didn’t quite have a grasp on the correct ratio of product to actual hair, but she was much better than when they had started five weeks ago. “Now, walk towards me.”

-

“One last thing, I guess,” Apollo said, removing his bracelet and handing it to Trucy, watching as she carefully slid it on. He rubbed his now bare wrist absentmindedly, feeling strangely naked without it.

“So... this is really it. We’re really doing this.”

“We’re really doing this,” Trucy confirmed, bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet. For all her apparent enthusiasm, she looked as nervous as he felt. The studs in her ears reflected the morning light.

“Give papa a hug for me,” he said, smiling weakly.

“Give daddy one for me too,” she said.

They hesitated a moment more before Trucy threw her arms around her brother’s shoulders. Apollo’s arms immediately snaked around her waist, drawing her in tight. They clung to each other, silently willing and praying this was somehow going to all work out - that they wouldn’t just to get to meet their other parent, that they wouldn’t only get a few short weeks with the other father they hadn’t even known had existed, but that they could find some way to reconcile the two, that they wouldn’t have to lose anyone across the wide expanse of the Atlantic ever again.

-

“You’ve had your ears pierced,” he said almost absently, cradling her head between his hands and gently turning her neck back and forth to better view the studs. He clicked his tongue. Trucy felt her heart sink.

“Do you... hate them?” she asked tentatively.

Edgeworth’s eyes snapped to hers. They were the same soft gray color as the paint Daddy always kept too much of around the house. “On the contrary - I find they suit you incredibly well. Please tell me you didn’t get an infection.”

Her face split into a wide smile.

-

Apollo thumbed through a stack of canvases that had been shoved into a corner. There was a thin layer of dust of them; if he had to guess, he’d say they hadn’t been disturbed for at least three months - not a particularly long stretch of time, all things considered. They were clearly less polished works, lacking the technical skill and attention to detail that made Phoenix Wright a name to be reckoned with in the art community, but they were still beautiful in their own way. Paintings of vineyards and what looked like London, towering skyscrapers and calm seas and -

His father.

Apollo blinked.

The portrait of Miles Edgeworth drawn in rich oils did not blink back. Nor did the three that followed.

-

“There were a lot of paintings of the same person in daddy’s works. Some guy with grey hair,” Apollo said, struggling for nonchalance.

Maya’s grip on the mixing bowl faltered. “Is that so,” she said carefully.

“Was he one of daddy’s favorite models or something he just never told me about?”

Maya pursed her lips and continued stirring with a newfound vigor. “You could say that.”

-

“You’re not Apollo?” he asked, voice thick. “You’re Trucy?”

She smiled weakly. “That would be correct.” One strand of hair fell lank across her forehead - how did I not notice, Apollo hasn’t used nearly that much gel in years - and he absentmindedly tucked it behind her ear. He felt her press into the warmth of his hand, as if she were afraid he might suddenly vanish across the Atlantic again.

“I hope you don’t - I hope you don’t hate me,” she said, voice beginning to waver, “it’s just that Polly and I met at the camp and the whole thing sort of just spilled out. I’ve wanted to see you for so long, and Polly felt exactly the same way about Daddy, so we sort of just - just switched lives and hoped it wouldn’t take you so soon to notice. I really hope you don’t hate me, because I’ve wanted to meet you basically my whole life and I hope that maybe one day you can love me for me and not Polly and -” (this is ALL from movie tho so mix this up)

Edgeworth’s left hand came to cradle the rest of Trucy’s face, cutting her off mid-sentence. “Oh, my dear,” he said, cautiously tugging her forward. She came willingly, all but sprawling across his chest, tucking her head underneath his chin and wrapping her arms around his middle. “I’ve loved you since the day you came to me,” he whispered into her hair, blinking away the beginnings of tears he felt gathering at the corner of his eyes. He felt her tighten her hold and he did the same.

-

He poured himself a thumbnail of scotch, perfectly content to pretend he didn’t have tickets to a plane back to a state he had vowed never to set foot in again departing in less than four hours. “He was rather handsome,” he found himself admitting, absentmindedly swirling the glass and taking a sip. He paused, staring at nothing and mumbling to himself, “...had the most crooked smile. Always made me weak at the knees.”

“What was that, sir?”

Edgeworth snapped his attention back to the other man; he’d nearly forgotten Gumshoe was even in the room. “Nothing, nothing, never mind, have you seen the tickets?”

Gumshoe shrugged. That was Trucy’s cue.

“Almost ready, papa?” she asked, stepping smoothly into the room from her hiding place behind the thick wooden door. Edgeworth looked just as wild-eyed as she’d been hoping.

“Yes, of course, I’m almost finished packing -”

She didn’t even have to look at his still mostly bare suitcase to know he was lying.

“ -and you did tell your father we were coming, didn’t you?” he finished, placing his drink on a nearby dresser and running his fingers shakily through his hair.

“Absolutely,” Trucy promised.

“Ah,” Edgeworth said, fiddling with his waistcoat buttons. They looked like they’d been polished recently.

“Liar,” Gumshoe leaned down to whisper. She shushed him.

-

“Might I suggest we continue this little gathering inside,” Maya said, already beginning to shepherd the twins - the twins, she was going to need another vacation just to process the fact that they were together again - into the room. She twisted back around to look at Edgeworth, still shoving Apollo (that was Apollo, right?) forward. “Hi,” she began again, offering a free hand, “you probably don’t remember me -”

“Maya!” he interrupted, smiling warmly and bending to kiss her chastely on the cheek. His breath was sour with vodka and his glasses clunked awkwardly against her face. As he turned and stepped fully into the room, Maya’s cheeks(rp) began to hurt from smiling so fiercely.

“I knew I always liked him,” she said to no one as she closed the door.

-

This was ridiculous. This resort was full of entirely too many people who favored the same sort of eccentric clothing that man had even fourteen years ago, a disproportionate amount of them with the same slate grey hair. He almost would have written that (awkward*) expression seen from across Dahlia’s shoulder/a hotel lobby as a figment of his overtaxed imagination had it not been so much realer than the stacks of canvases in his studio. Which meant Miles was here, but he’d swept the first level of the hotel twice already after begging Dahlia to take to her room for a bit, the pool area was as depressingly empty as the inside was, and -

There he was.

Across the pool, descending the steps carefully from the inside lounge area and walking on the balls of his feet like he always did when he’d had a bit too much to drink (and why did he still remember that) was, without a doubt, Miles Edgeworth.

Phoenix suddenly found it difficult to breathe.

Edgeworth was halfway down the opposite path before Phoenix realized he should probably do something.

“Excuse me,” he said, shouldering his way through the crowd. It would be rude and more than a little intrusive to just call out his ex-husband’s name in the middle of a resort, right? Perhaps not as rude as nearly shoving the poor bellboy into the shrubbery, but, well, desperate times called for desperate measures.

He didn’t immediately notice the odd assortment of friends and family and a lumbering man in striped green swimming trunks perched on pool chairs as he stepped past, but they certainly noticed him.

“Daddy, are you okay?” Trucy asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said vaguely, refusing to take his eyes off Edgeworth. He was abruptly terrified he might vanish again if he did.

He

“Nick, watch out -”

“Hey, pal -”

“Daddy -”

With that, Phoenix collided into a passing service boy, arms pinwheeling wildly as he fell directly into the pool behind him.

-

“Hello Miles,” he said, smiling sheepishly and wringing out his tie. He fought the urge to rub the back of his neck and settled for clenching his hands into tight fists instead. “Or do you people call you Edgeworth now?”

“Miles is - Miles is fine,” Edgeworth said weakly, trying to look anywhere but Phoenix, as if this was a perfectly normal conversation they should be having for the first time after fifteen years. “My father still calls me Miles.”

-

Something warm coiled in his chest. It felt infinitely more dangerous than it had fifteen years ago.

“You always had a smart mouth,” he murmured, rubbing a swathe of cleaning ointment along the cut on Phoenix’s forehead. Phoenix hissed.

“So glad you remembered,” he bit through gritted teeth.

“Hush.”

Phoenix hmmed but stayed silent for a few more seconds, staring at Edgeworth as he dug back into the first aid kit. Edgeworth tried not to flush under the scrutiny.

-

Phoenix held his wrist in a loose grip. He should have felt clammy from the pool and the rapidly descending night, but he blazed oddly hot against Edgeworth’s skin.

“Miles, I-”

“Feenie? Who is this?”

“Dollie!” Phoenix said, shooting upright and wincing at the sudden dizziness.

-

Edgeworth’s burgundy coat was hung carefully over his arm, too thick for the warm California night. The buttons on his waistcoat glinted from a nearby streetlamp’s glow.

Phoenix swallowed.

-

“Do you have any idea where they’re taking us?” Edgeworth asked, leaning in slightly. Phoenix’s (nose twitched? something about scent memory?) and he refused to let himself acknowledge that Miles’s choice of aftershave hadn’t changed since the day they’d met. He abruptly remembered the taste of cheap wine and overly sweet cake on his tongue, felt the ghost weight of a ring fifteen years gone.

He hastily turned away.

“No idea.”

-

“Grandfather chipped in a bit -”

“Apollo,” Edgeworth warned.

“Alright, so Grandfather chipped in a lot, whatever, we’re poor teenagers, the point is,” he said, emphasizing the final word by pulling the ship’s impressive doors open with a firm tug, “it’s ours for the night.”

Phoenix whistled shrilly in appreciation, instinctively reaching out to ruffle Apollo’s hair. It was a testament to how important the night was that Apollo merely batted Phoenix’s hand away. “Seriously, dad,” he mumbled. His scowl was clearly forced, however; he felt oddly warm that he was able to finally use that word at all.

-

“Subtle,” Phoenix remarked.

“Mm,” Edgeworth agreed. “I don’t suppose we should let their efforts, however misguided they may be, go to waste, should we?”

“You just want to know who else they roped into this ridiculous scheme of theirs.”

“Oh, because you don’t.”

“I,” Phoenix said, moving to the chilled champagne propped by the windowsill and popping its cork, “have a perfectly healthy level of curiosity. It does not involve wondering what’s going on in my kid’s head. Trucy is a teenager. That’s terrifying.” He carefully poured the sparkling drink into two glasses and offered one to Edgeworth.

“I find that somewhat difficult to believe,” Edgeworth said, striding forward and taking the  proffered glass. He made certain their fingers did not brush. “Thank you.”

-

They waited until she had hastily bowed out of the room before turning their focus back to each other. “Miles, that’s why we came up with this arrangement in the first place,” Phoenix continued, nonplussed.

“Really?” Edgeworth carefully picked up his glass flute, trying to ignore the tremor he felt running through his hands. “I thought it was because we’d agreed to never see each other again.”

Phoenix’s heart clenched. “Not ‘we’, Miles,” he said slowly, spreading his hands on the tablecloth and feeling like if he missed a step here, he would risk something he couldn’t afford to lose again.

Edgeworth took a shaky draw of wine. “You know,” he said slowly, seemingly forcing himself to meet Phoenix’s eyes, “that part is unclear to me as well.”

“Oh, you don’t remember the day you packed?” Phoenix asked.

“No, I remember that day perfectly. Did I hurt you when I threw that - oh God, what was it -”

“It was Kamisar’s Modern Criminal Procedure. It left a dent in the wall from where it rebounded off my head.”

“Oh,” Edgeworth said, at least having the grace to look properly abashed. “Right. Sorry.”

Phoenix shrugged. “It’s not like I was making it that easy on you.

-

And....” Edgeworth trailed off, twisting a napkin between his fingers. “You didn’t chase after me.”

Phoenix felt (something) shift. “I didn’t know that you wanted me to.”

-

“A toast to -”

“Our children,” Edgeworth cut in. He ignored the tightening in his chest at the our.

“Our children,” Phoenix repeated slowly, as if the words didn’t quite match with what his mouth had wanted to say.

“We both got where we actually wanted to go.”

Phoenix’s eyes never wavered from his. “We did,” he said, voice strange.

They toasted again and finished their meal in silence.

-

“Apollo, what are you doing in those clothes? We’ve got a plane to catch.”

“We’re getting totally ripped off,” maybe-Trucy said. “Daddy said we’d get our camping trip and we want to go.”

“Wait, hang on,” Phoenix interrupted, “what camping trip?”

“The one Aunt Maya and I make you take us on every year before school starts,” almost-definitely-Trucy said. Phoenix began to lift his finger in triumph, sure he’d found his kid -

“ -the one behind the house that runs all the way up to Gourd Lake, remember when you fell in that one year,” I’m-not-too-sure-if-this-one-is-still-in-fact-Apollo finished.

Phoenix’s arm fell listlessly to his side. Edgeworth snorted.

Phoenix shot Edgeworth a look. Thanks for helping, one of these is yours. “This is entirely unfunny, you’re going to make your father miss his flight,” he said, shifting his attention back to the twins. Honestly, he was an Ivy University graduate and Miles was a world renowned defense attorney, how were they being duped by their own kids -

“Apollo -” Edgeworth began.

“Yes?” they both said in unison.

Edgeworth groaned. “They get this from you, I’m sure,” he said.

“It’s not my fault you’ve apparently been raising a devilishly deceptive teenager,” Phoenix quipped back, never taking his eyes off the twins. He could feel the beginnings of a migraine pound at the base of his neck. “He’s probably rubbed off on Trucy.”

The twins grinned.

Phoenix rubbed a hand over his eyes before stooping to their height once again. He stared hard at each of them, looking back and forth between their faces. “This one’s Trucy,” he said slowly, pointing a finger to the sibling in orange. “I’m positive.”

“You know, I hope you’re right, Daddy. You wouldn’t want to send the wrong kid all the way back to Germany - ”

“ - would you?”

How was any of this fair?

“Here’s our proposition. We go back to Daddy’s house, pack our stuff, and the four of us leave on the camping trip.”

“The four of us?” Edgeworth interjected. They ignored him.

“And when you bring us back,” maybe-Trucy-maybe-Apollo continued, “we’ll tell you who’s Trucy and who’s Apollo.”

“Or,” Edgeworth said, carefully stepping around and in front of Phoenix and crossing his arms firmly across his chest, tapping his finger rhythmically against his arm, “new plan. I take one of you back to Germany with me whether you like it or not.”

Two identical sets of eyes twinkled back at him.

(He felt a migraine beginning to pound in his left temple.)

-

“You can cook now?” Edgeworth asked.

“Oh yeah,” Phoenix said. “I can make pasta. And pasta. Probably more pasta, if you ask really nicely.”

“Hm,” Edgeworth said, eyebrows scrunched in mock thought, “pasta sounds good.”

Phoenix grinned, bumping Edgeworth’s shoulder. He was warm through the cotton. “Pasta it is.”

-

Edgeworth looked across the seat at Apollo. His glassy eyes reflected the flickering street lamps as the taxi sped down the empty street.

“Apollo, I -” he began, deflating as Apollo turned further away. It’s entirely justified, he thought despondently. I’d hate myself as well.

-

“Grandfather?” Apollo called, shrugging out of his heavy jacket and hanging it on the coat rack. The house was silent.

“I’ll check the study,” Edgeworth said, tugging his jabot loose. Apollo nodded and headed towards the direction of the kitchen, toeing off his shoes on the way. Pushing open the wide doors that led to the study, Edgeworth saw someone reading a paper at the desk. He cocked his hip against the door and crossed his arms. “Hello, father. We’re back.”

The newspaper lowered. It wasn’t Gregory.

“Hiya, papa,” Trucy said. The corners of her mouth were quirked despite her obvious attempts to reign in her expression. “Did you know the Concord gets you here in half the time?”

Edgeworth slipped against the doorframe. He felt the knob dig into his hip. “I - yes, I’ve heard that.”

(Edgeworth was acutely aware of the doorknob digging into his hip from when he pressed against it. “I - yes, I’ve heard that.”)

Apollo walked into the room, drawn to the sound of voices. When he saw Trucy his face split into a blinding grin. “What are you doing here?”

Trucy neatly folded the newspaper on the desk and clasped her hands in front of her. “It took us about thirty seconds after you left that we decided we didn’t want to lose you two again,” she said, eyes crinkling.

Edgeworth swallowed past the sudden lump in his throat. “We?” he said, voice cracking.

“We,” a new voice agreed.

From the corner of his eye, Edgeworth noted Trucy moving to stand by the far wall of the study, giving the vaguest attempt of privacy. It didn’t matter. His eyes were trained on Phoenix, tracking his movement as he crossed the room.

-

Phoenix peppered his face in light kisses, smiling into the curve of his throat and pressing his lips to the thrumming heartbeat beneath his skin.

They eventually pulled back, desperate for air. Phoenix’s eyes crinkled - crow’s feet, Edgeworth thought wildly through his haze, he’s got crow’s feet now, I haven’t seen him this close up since - and he rested his forehead against Edgeworth’s.

“God, I’m never letting you go again,” he whispered, hands snaking around the other man’s back to pull him even closer.

-

“You want to toast with this? I’d have thought you might want to upgrade to something with a little more class.”

Phoenix smiled sloppily, pressing a chaste kiss to his temple. “You’re the only one I said I’d drink it with, remember?”

Edgeworth smiled back. He took the proffered bottle warmed by the weather and tugged his husband into a proper kiss, matching rings glinting in the dying sunlight.

[lifeofkaze]

An Art of Balance #9

Orion Amari x MC

 A/N: I swear @kc-needs-coffee I’m almost done borrowing KC, I just enjoy her so much xD

Warning: use of alcohol

 Word Count: ~ 2.600

______________________________________________________________ 

Chapter 9: A Knight in Shining Armour

Tired and beaten down, the Hufflepuff team trudged back towards the castle. It hadn’t taken the Ravenclaw seeker much longer to capture the Golden Snitch after KC’s Bludger had hit Lizzie. None of them was in the mood for much talking. Losing this match was a heavy blow to them.  

When they neared their Common Room, they could already make out the loud music and sound of chatter behind the narrow passage leading up to the entrance. Upon entering, they found themselves in the middle of a full-fledged post-match party taking place inside the round room. Their peers had set it up while they had been trying to wash off the pain of the loss. To the people of their House it didn’t matter if their team won or lost. They always found a reason to celebrate anyway.

Before long, Lizzie found herself chatting away with Penny and Tonks. The butterbeer in her hand spread a comfortable warmth from her stomach into the rest of her body, numbing the pain still throbbing inside her bruised shoulder.

Her foot was lightly tapping to the rhythm of the music that was blasting out of the enchanted speakers Face Paint Kid had mounted above the huge fireplace. They obscured the huge portrait of Helga Hufflepuff, who had retreated to a picture of her friend Rowena Ravenclaw near the Astronomy Tower. She couldn’t stand this ‘modern nonsense people called music nowadays’.

Lizzie had just downed the rest of her drink, when Penny nudged her and nodded inconspicuously towards one of the ledges that were protruding from the walls of the Common Room.

Skye was seated there all on her own, as had been her habit for the last weeks. She was nursing an empty mug in her hands and seemed to be brooding on something, deeply lost in thought.

“Someone should go talk to her,” Penny proposed softly. Lizzie contemplated passing on the task, but eventually her conscience got the better of her. She lifted her glass towards Penny and Tonks.

“I was going to get a refill anyway.”

She left her friends standing and made her way through the thick crowd towards the refreshment table, grabbing two fresh butterbeers before heading over to where Skye was sitting. She noticed people were giving the gloomy looking girl a wide berth and braced herself for being snapped at. But when Lizzie sat down next to her, she just accepted the drink Lizzie offered with a thankful smile.

The two of them were as used to fighting with each other as they were to making up again. There was no needs for many words or apologies. Lizzie held her mug out to Skye in a silent offer of reconciliation and Skye simply clanked hers against it before both took a deep swallow of the sweet liquid inside.

“Seems like Orion was right after all.”

Lizzie wasn’t looking at Skye as she spoke, rather staring at the bubbles rising up from the bottom of her glass. She was slowly swivelling it, watching the light from the fireplace illuminate the golden drink.

“This stupid quarrel likely cost us the match today. We can’t win if we don’t work together. It made getting our hands on the Cup just that more difficult.”

Skye chuckled wryly. “I’m always in for a challenge. How about you?”

Lizzie grinned back at her. “You know me.”

They sat in comfortable silence for a while before Skye spoke up again. “Just wish I could have shown Rath the ropes. We’ve lost more times to Ravenclaw than I care to admit.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Lizzie sighed. “At least, KC and I can now talk to each other again like the civilised human beings we are.”  

Skye snorted. “Your choice of friends has always been questionable.” She was acting up this time, Lizzie could hear the teasing in her voice.

“That’s why I’m friends with you, I guess,” she shot back.

Both of them started giggling, all the tension that had built between them over the last weeks suddenly dissolving into fits of laughter. They were drawing wondrous glances from their peers.        

Calming down, Skye’s face suddenly grew serious again. “Sorry for what happened today. Shouldn’t have said all those things to Orion. Or you. Not a good move from me.”

“You should tell him that, not me.” Lizzie gave her a sideways glance. “I was a bit harsh to you as well. Sorry about that.”

Skye raised her mug. “Forgiven and forgotten. Glad we could solve this mess.”

Lizzie leaned closer to her. “Speaking of solving the mess…” She motioned to where Penny was standing with Tonks, watching them through the crowd. “You should go talk to her. You can’t hide from Penny forever; I’m sure you will find a way to work things out.”

Skye had suddenly gone pale, a pained expression showing on her face. “I don’t know, Jameson, you sure about this?”

Lizzie just shoved her off the ledge for an answer. Shooting another uncertain glance over her shoulder, Skye made her way towards Penny. With a relieved sigh, Lizzie leaned back against the cold stone wall, propping one foot up on the ledge before taking another sip. Finally things were starting to get normal again.

Her sitting alone didn’t go unnoticed, however. Within minutes she could spot Everett breaking from the crowd and heading towards her, fresh mugs of butterbeer in hand. Lizzie groaned inwardly. She wasn’t particularly keen on getting into a conversation with him. She didn’t mind her new teammate during practise, but Lizzie had started feeling uncomfortable with the way he had been looking at her recently.

Gulping down the remains of her drink, Lizzie tried to get up as fast as she could. But before she had a chance to escape into the mass of students, Everett had reached her and slid down onto the ledge next to her. He sat a little bit too close for Lizzie’s liking.

“What are you doing, sitting around as lonely? Fancy a drink?” He held the mug up for her to take.

Lizzie couldn’t think of a valid reason to refuse and gave in to her lot. “Sure, why not. Thanks.”

She awkwardly accepted the butterbeer, not quite knowing how to start a conversation with him. Her not being overly keen on it didn’t help either.

“You played well today,” she tried treading on safe ground. Nothing wrong with a little Quidditch talk.

“Not as good as you, though. You were fantastic!”

“Hmm,” Lizzie hummed in response. That was a flat out lie. Today had been one of the worst matches she had ever played. She had performed just as poorly as Skye and Orion had done, perhaps even worse.

Everett didn’t seem to sense her disagreement, however. “You were almost as good back when you played Beater. Crazy good aim. I could use a bit of improvement in that area.” He smiled mischievously at her. The uncomfortable feeling in Lizzie’s stomach increased.

“Maybe you could show me how, some time? So I can better protect you.”

Of course Lizzie knew he was referring to Quidditch, but somehow the way he was stressing ‘protect’, combined with her general discomfort around him, rubbed her the wrong way.

She bristled at him. “I don’t need any protection, let alone yours, thank you very much. I can perfectly handle myself,” she snapped indignantly.

Laughing, he raised his hands in defence. “Relax, kitty cat, no need to get all angry. Doesn’t suit your pretty face.”

“You want to be a better Beater? Here’s my tip for you: more practising, less flirting.” She set her drink down with a clank and got up. She had enough of his attitude for the evening.

But before she could make off, Everett had grabbed her wrist and pulled her down next to him again. Lizzie raised her eyebrows, her face anything but friendly.

Feeling the need to change tune with her, Everett ran his hand through his dark hair. “I’m sorry, don’t run away just yet,” he smiled apologetically.

Lizzie was still on edge, but her posture gradually softened again. She noticed he had pulled her down even closer to him than she had been before.

With a wink, Everett reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulling out a silver flask. The light of the fire place was reflected in it as he was brandishing it in front of her face. “What do you say? Let’s have a drink on peace?”

Her eyes followed the blinking flask as he poured a shot into his mug. Lizzie wasn’t one to object to a little extra punch when it came to her drinks but she really wasn’t interested in talking to Everett anymore, let alone drinking with him.

She shook her head. “No, I’ll pass. I’ve had plenty already. I don’t want to end up doing anything stupid,” she added lightly.

Everett’s smile grew wicked. “Like this for example?”

He quickly leaned forward, putting his hand against the stone wall next to her face, effectively blocking her means of escape. To her horror, he started leaning in to kiss her. It was all she could do to duck under his arm supporting his weight to get away. Coming so close to him, a familiar scent reached her nose, fresh and spicy at the same time. It made her hesitate for a split second.

She knew the scent, but it thoroughly confused her to smell it on him of all people. It reminded her of the component of the Amortentia she had had problems placing.

Using her hesitation to his advantage, Everett got up as well, grabbing her arm before she could dart away. Anger flashing in her eyes, Lizzie tried to yank herself free.

“Is there a problem?”

Orion had suddenly appeared next to them. He looked calm and collected as ever, but his posture was tense, the tone in his voice firm. Lizzie sent a quick prayer to the heavens for sending him along just now.

Everett didn’t seem as happy. “Nothing to see here, Amari,” he snarled, but his territorial demeanour didn’t so much as make Orion flinch.

“That is fortunate, because I am aware that McNully’s Kneazle is up in our dormitory, chewing away on your Transfiguration essay. I believe, it is due on Monday?”

The aggressiveness visibly drained out of Everett as he turned pale. “It took me three weeks to finish that assignment! I’m going to make a hat out of this fleabag!” He raced towards the round door at the far end of the Common Room and vanished behind it.

Lizzie’s brown furrowed in concern. “He’s not going to do anything to Kneil, is he?”

“Don’t worry, Kneil is somewhere in the castle, probably hunting his dinner,” Orion smirked in response. “To be honest, McNully saw Everett hitting on you and sent me to your rescue.”

“How gallant,” Lizzie giggled.

Orion wasn’t even trying to hide his grin. Instead, he nodded towards her arm. “How is your shoulder feeling?”

Lizzie shrugged it off with a laugh. “Better than Everett’s ego, I image.”

Her eyes followed the path he had taken through the crowd. “I wonder what’s been going on lately; Everyone seems to be out of their minds,” she mused.

Including her, apparently. She could still smell the lovely scent lingering in the air, just as strongly as it had been before. She fought the urge to inhale deeply.

Orion laughed lowly. “That’s how it goes. I remember my fifth year vividly. Between O.W.L.s and people getting interested in dating each other, it was… “ A mysterious smile played about his lips for a moment, amusement sparking in his eyes. “Let’s say it was a singular experience.”

Lizzie remembered what Rowan had told her about Orion having a history when it came to dating. She felt self-conscious invading his privacy like that, but her curiosity and the fair share of butterbeer she’d drunk by now got the better of her.

“So, did you get to do some?” she asked in what she hoped was a nonchalant tone.

Orion took a sip from his drink. “Did I get to do what?”

Lizzie felt herself blush, glad the light emanating from the roaring fire hid the changing colour of her face. “Dating, I mean. Did you get to go on some?”

One corner of Orion’s mouth quirked up, the mischievous sparkle in his dark eyes intensifying. His lopsided smirk gave him a totally different presence than what Lizzie was used to seeing on him. Despite herself, she found herself staring at his oddly compelling smile, quickly shaking out of it as soon as she realised.

“A bit here and there.”

He knew his ominous answer only intensified Lizzie’s curiosity. So before she could ask, he added “Nothing serious, mind you. No real commitment from both sides.”

Not satisfied at all by this vague answer, Lizzie blinked at him, now even more curious than before. It felt completely out of place discussing this topic with her Quidditch captain, but she just couldn’t resist.

“You never mentioned seeing anyone. Why did you never tell us about any of them, or bring them to one of our matches?”

He slightly shook his head, his face changing to a more thoughtful expression. “Nothing worthwhile ever came of it. And I don’t know whether I would’ve been able to balance both things at the same time. Being the team captain and just me.”

Somehow, Lizzie was not entirely sure they were still talking about the same thing they had in the beginning of their conversation. She had noticed the tinge of frustration creeping into Orion’s voice, however.

Before she could reply though, a hand snaked around her waist and Rowan appeared at her side. Lizzie let out a small gasp of pain as she rested her head on Lizzie’s injured shoulder, a girlish giggle escaping her mouth.

Although Rowan didn’t exactly dismiss alcoholic drinks as a whole, Lizzie knew her to be rather restrained when it came to drinking at parties, especially since she had been appointed prefect. It made seeing Rowan as drunk as she obviously was even stranger.

“Lizzie, there you are! I have been looking for you all over the place,” she shouted into Lizzie’s ear a lot louder than she had to. Lizzie tilted her head away from her to protect her eardrums from bursting.

“Skye has been looking for you, you should go find her,” Rowan explained, her voice slurry. She tried to talk matter-of-factly but the slight swaying as she stopped leaning on Lizzie for support vastly undermined her effort to appear sober.

Scanning the crowd, Lizzie could see Skye joking around with Tonks and Penny. Apparently, they had been able to calm the waves. It did not appear to her as if Skye was searching for anyone though, let alone her.

She started telling Rowan, but was silenced by the pointed look her friend gave her. Her eyes flickered to Orion for a moment, who was watching them patiently. The penny finally dropped on her.

“I’d better go and see what she wants then.” She winked at Orion, her hand resting on his arm for a moment. ”Thanks for being my knight in shining armour.”

She left the two of them standing, while she made her way towards her friends, the spicy scent that had shaken her earlier still hanging in the air.

[meloncubedradpops]

Repo! The Corona Opera

For every rotation that Earth has completed around the sun since the dawn of humanity, humans have created art to cope with the realities surrounding our everyday life. We weave stories in songs, movies, plays, books, paintings, and so forth, that help digest the world around us and provide an entertaining escape from the cruelties we endure. Some stories take place in abstract universes or in the future, and we rely on what we know in our present reality to build upon these fantasy societies. My favorite movie, Repo! the Genetic Opera, certainly makes this list. We are currently experiencing perhaps the most surreal year of our collective lives, and with each passing day I argue that we find ourselves closer to the world crafted in Repo. I have seen this movie, at least 20 times. If you haven't watched Repo! the Genetic Opera or you haven't seen it in a while, I recommend giving it a view. The movie is unique in that it falls under three distinct genres: musical, horror, and sci-fi. And while the jury is out on whether our future society is going to go full on gothic aesthetic, I can say that the Repo! movie experience offers a glimpse into a dystopian fascist post-plague world wrapped in unapologetically hilarity with a heaping side of camp. It doesn't offer any spiritual cleansing that our souls collectively need, but it does show us what a new normal could look like if we really go off the rails.

As things stand, right now, so much of our daily lives and culture are impacted by the coronavirus. All of our institutions have been impacted, from school, to work, to family, to the way we interact with strangers, and especially our economy. We have all felt the effects in one way or another, and honestly? Most the impacts are of our own undoing, for better or for worse. I am going to write three pieces analyzing Repo! the Genetic Opera. First I will create the foundations that bridge our contemporary life and the world of Repo! Second I will explain how the Repo! universe operates under the definitions of fascism. And third I will weave together parts one and two into our contemporary world (particularly in the context of the United States) to highlight the dark path we heading towards. My viewpoints are of mine, and my own alone. Let's dive into part one.

Part I Repo! the Genetic Opera takes place in the year 2056. Humanity was on the brink of collapse as a result of a medical crisis that caused massive organ failure.

I never gave the premise much thought, at least not until recently. We aren't given much detail beyond the fact that entrepreneur Rottissimo "Rotti" Largo solved this crisis through his company GeneCo. GeneCo provides organ transplants that can be repaid through a payment plan. Witnessing the coronavirus unfold in real time and seeing its wrath, particularly on severe cases, honestly makes me wonder if the writers had some sort of "super plague" in mind when creating this universe. For the purpose of this analysis, I will assume that humanity suffered at least one infectious disease crisis. And just to reiterate covid-19 particularly, we really *don't* know what it's going to do to us long-term. Let the parallels begin. 

The world in Repo! the Genetic Opera, operates as normally as the citizens possibly can, which appears to be quite limited. I have noted how dated some the technologies look.

For a world 30 years in the future, it lacks cell phones and easy access to internet. When we enter Shilo's world (aka her bedroom!) she watched Blind Mag sing on a busted up tiny ass TV and the program itself looks like an ad on Home Shopping Network.

The Graverobber is shown reading headlines on a newspaper. The news reporters shown in the ribbon cutting ceremony during the 1st Italian Post-Plague Renaissance have old school cameras with flashbulbs.

The most contemporary technology appears to be a Wish.com version of an Apple watch, and even that looks like a leftover prop from Spy Kids.

Obviously the people who made this movie intentionally inserted these anachronisms, but why? This is a science fiction movie after all. I speculate that they reverted back because the impact from humanity's crisis resulted in an overall professional "brain drain" from the sheer volume of professionals that dropped dead. In fact every scene depicting medical procedures looks dimly lit and lacking in sanitation. We will see this as we struggle to contain the coronavirus, at least in America. Healthcare workers have already died from this thing, and I am sure many prospective college students will have second thoughts about a career in healthcare. I mean hell, look at no other than GeneCo itself. That company employs workers called "Genterns" who are most definitely not in full PPE. I don't doubt their medical expertise, but they appear to be disposable (please see: that time Luigi killed one for NO REASON in "Mark it Up").

On that note, it really was quite incredible how China built the pop-up hospital in Wuhan in under 4 days, but it was also not the most safe or structurally sound building by far (it collapsed, people were hurt!). Maybe at this point, the people in Repo! don't have much of a choice. I am sure there were likely legit hospitals, but the fact that the Renaissance had gross surgery tents is a bit unsettling.

This is a world that is completely built upon the social more of valuing your health above all else. There had to be a turning point in the GeneCo business model where they really played on up-selling organs for the benefit of "genetic perfection". "I needed a kidney transplant desperately. GeneCo showed this single mom sympathy. This makeover came for a small added fee. Now I look smashing on live TV!" Imagine signing the documents for your power of attorney while actively going into renal failure, when your doctor chimes in with an up-sell for breast implants. When all is said an done, your body is now not only functioning again, but you're hot! Even in a post-plague dystopia we are still holding value to having a nice rack. What's not to love about GeneCo? Obviously we know right away that GeneCo has a dirty side. Rotti Largo personally lobbied to make organ repossessions legal, and he does not hesitate to recollect his property. The concept itself is, of course, wild. In America, our healthcare system is incredibly broken and expensive.  You would wonder how it could get worse without us backpedaling many steps on the industrialization timeline. And in a lot of ways, I could see a company like GeneCo thrive here. We already hate the poor, and we have political think tanks that salivate over the idea of cutting social programs that keep people alive. Our president has wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act while many people are unemployed during a pandemic. In Repo! we hear about those who don't pay, but obviously there are plenty of people who do. Those who can will happily pay, either for vanity reasons or to stay alive.

And while society cites Rotti as being a "hero" for humanity, we see more and more evidence that the crisis is both not under control and life is cheap.

His son murders multiple people, in front of others, with seemingly no repercussions. In the scene where Shilo meets the Graverobber for the first time, adjacent to the graveyard and tombs owned by wealthy families who could afford grave markers, lies a poorly constructed wall hiding thousands of corpses piled on top of one another. We even get a glimpse of a truckload pouring more onto the pile. I would not be surprised if there is a disinformation campaign there keeping the public in the dark (although you'd think the smell would be unbearable at this point).

There are multiple indications that propaganda works in society (still), and no one is getting the full picture of how much of a raw deal the people in Repo! have. We see poster after poster about GeneCo, in the literal absence of other corporations. 

And a lot of them bear resemblance to 20th century Russian propaganda. It would be a real shame if the goals outlined The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia were actually realized. Imagine going to visit your mother's grave and hearing commercials for hardcore analgesics play through the cemetery. Also, there's a police presence too. Apparently the police are called Genecops and have authority to execute any assumed graverobbers on site.

Imagine the hellscape it would be to live in a world where your loved ones may have died from a terrible pandemic, and you face a non-zero chance of an over zealous cop murdering you thereafter, and because their qualified immunity bypasses the judicial system entirely...oh wait. Anyways let's circle back to the Graverobber character.

Graverobber's role in Repo! appears to be minor on the surface. Rotti's daughter, Amber Sweet, appears to almost despise her relationship with him. And that relationship involves him supplying Amber with what he describes as the "21st Century cure". This cure you ask? A super effective painkiller with the clinical use to accompany GeneCo surgeries. This drug is called Zydrate, and it has a street version that he acquires and sells, with clients including Amber Sweet.

Graverobber makes his living sucking the glowy blue brain corpse goo and injecting them into people on the streets. Yum!

Not everyone who needs an organ transplant can pay for it all upfront. Luckily for them, GeneCo provides payment plan options! The caveat to this is if you fail to make those payments, legally GeneCo can come and repossess your newly acquired organs. If you find yourself past due, you will soon see the last face before your doom, the Repo Man. He will harvest GeneCo's property, and it won't matter where you are or what you are doing. There is no anesthetic, and you will likely die! This was all made legal through Rotti's lobbying efforts.

Society, as it's set up today, allows for property repossessions. This can be as straightforward as a repossession of your vehicle to as heartbreaking as a foreclosure on your home. At the end of the day, the impacts of that are difficult and life changing. Currently millions of people in America are out of work, and the threat of losing everything is at stake for many. We could lose our homes, our vehicles, and our sense of purpose. And while many government bodies have created temporary moratoriums, they have not provided any substantial financial relief to keep the proverbial repo man at bay. What went wrong in this dystopia to normalize the concept of death due to nonpayment? Fascism! Ah yes, the dreaded f-word. In my next essay, I will outline the 14 characteristics of fascism and how it relates to the universe in Repo! After I will relate that to our modern world so that we can try and stop this from becoming our reality.

[thewadapan]

I rewrote the most infamous Transformers comic of all time.

I wanna give fair warning here. See, when I started working on this comic, I wasn’t really expecting it to turn out quite as dark as it did, and I suspect neither are you. After all, this is The Beast Within, right? The story where Grimlock goes crazy and talks in Comic Sans? How bad can things get? It turns out that - with just a few decisions made in poor taste - the answer is “very”, to the point where I feel the need to stick some kinda content warning at the top of this post. Unfortunately, I also feel like I’ve got a responsibility to the story, and there’s no way for me to do so without ruining it, so this is the best you’re gonna get.

This isn’t the first time I’ve made a comic like this. All the way back in 2016, I made “its christmas... so what??”, a kinda-bad re-lettering of a four-page ‘80s Marvel comic called “The Night the Transformers Saved Christmas”. I wasn’t too happy with the result, so half a year later I tried again - producing “PASS”, a re-lettered version of an obscure six-page UK-exclusive Marvel comic originally titled “Peace”.

“The Beast Within (My Pants)” is quite a different, uh, beast.

Each of the three comics I’ve produced was intended to be the last of its kind - standalone, yet fitting into the same overarching continuity. You can read any one of them alone, or you can read all of them in the order I made them. They’re individually available as albums on Imgur at the following links:

“its christmas... so what??”

“PASS”

“The Beast Within (My Pants)”

Alternatively, you can download the whole set as .cbz files - renamed .zip archives of images which you can open with a standard comic book reader.

It’s not too late to turn back.

Still with me? All caught up? Good. You’re probably wondering what the hell I was thinking...

I. I Have Summoned You Here For A Reason

Our story begins all the way back in 2004. The UK company Metrodome, looking to spice up their DVD box-set releases of the original ‘80s The Transformers cartoon, hired some local talent in the form of Mr. Jamieson (owner of a then-notable fansite) to write up some bonus features. They also commissioned him to write a mini-comic to be packed in with the set - with art by Mr. Gibson, a self-proclaimed fan since childhood with seemingly no other ties to the franchise.

The comic wound up being published in two parts (the second being subtitled “Consequences”) across the “Season 2 Part 2″ and “Seasons 3 and 4″ box sets. As a kid, I actually owned the latter of those box sets, and would watch it almost religiously - to what I can only assume must’ve been great annoyance from my poor parents - but I have no memory of it including a comic of any kind. Maybe it did, but it got separated at some point, and is lying around in some forgotten folder. A damn shame, that is. No, seriously.

I’m sure some record of the fan response at the time exists out there, in the doldrums of one of the many hard-to-search often-defunct forums which existed back then. I can’t really be bothered looking for it, sorry. You’ll have to content yourself with this TFWiki talk page for “The Beast Within” from mid-2007, which speaks of “Consequences” in hushed tones - as though it is a fabled artifact, prophesied to bring about Armageddon.

Another record - this one from 2009 - comes in the form of an eight-page TFW2005 thread ominously titled “Anyone afraid of the Dinobot combiner?” If you’re reading this commentary, you’re already strapped in for the long run; I recommend reading the thread in full. Well, okay, I don’t: it made me wince throughout, and I’ll be explaining the salient bits here, so there’s really no point subjecting yourself to it.

User “Razorrider”, after reading the TFWiki article on the Beast, opened the thread, noting “I don’t feel afraid of him myself.” The reactions soon started to pour in - some agreeing that the design was in fact “awesome”, others describing it as “hideous”.

Just going off my own personal opinion here, I think it’s fair to say that effectively nobody on the first page of the thread had any idea what they were talking about - and the pages that follow fared little better.

I think the main issue stemmed from the fact that a lot of those users didn’t think to explain the metrics by which they judged a “good” design (or, indeed, a “bad” story). When one person says “I think Optimus Prime has a good design”, they might just mean “I think he looks cool”, or they might mean “I think his proportions and colours give him a heroic stature which reflects his personality”. In that sense, a “good design” is one that communicates aspects of a character visually, even if it’s ugly. The Beast is hideous, yes, misshapen, yes, and it looks like the result of a teleportation accident, fine - but those are all intentional design decisions that perfectly reflect the nature of the character. In the foreword to the first part, Mr. Gibson notes the following (you’ll have to imagine that it’s written in Comic Sans for yourself):

Creating ‘The Beast’ was probably the most interesting aspect of the project. I wanted him to be a grotesque, twisted character that contained the design elements of the Dinobots he is created from.

People proclaim that the Beast “should never have existed” - a line from the comic’s narration, note - but somehow fail to realise that this is the comic’s own intent.

(Compare the Beast’s design to that posted by one user on the second page of the thread, which - minus an admittedly-inspired Triceratops-fist - just looks like an upscaled version of Grimlock.)

Okay, the alarm bells should be ringing in your head now. This is all starting to sound disturbingly like I’m some sort of The Beast Within apologist, isn’t it? How slippery is the slope that leads from “the Beast is a good design” to “The Beast Within is a good comic?” Have the hours spent poring over this thing in MS Paint turned my brain to mush, capable of only vague all-caps-Comic-Sans-penned ponderings?

...Well, yes, but- look, just stick with me!

The most accurate recurring statement in the thread - though perhaps not in the way it is intended - is that The Beast Within reads like a work of “fanfiction”. See, Transformers is a franchise with an ever-growing history, and many of those who work on it now have been lifelong fans themselves. This is true of many franchises which have stumbled into the new millennium, finding themselves seemingly unable to die. We live in an age of fanfiction - yet some fanfictions are fanfiction-ier than others.

When compared to the likes of Star Wars and Star Trek and Marvel’s comics, one sees a marked difference in Transformers. Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, every story Hasbro put out seemed to fit vaguely into a single guiding narrative - each distinct strand of their multimedia barrage falling into contradiction with one another, yet still seeking to adapt some underlying premise. The 2001 series Robots in Disguise - in the West at least - saw a complete departure from that narrative. The ramifications of that strange borderline-afterthought cartoon cannot be understated, yet in retrospect feel like they’ve been a part of the franchise for as long as anyone can remember.

Almost every year since, Hasbro has effectively wiped the slate clean. Each new series tries to be its own thing. Continuity between series - if it exists - is understated, ignored, or overwritten. To date, this is still something that confuses us geeks; so used are we to the mired pits that are the canons of Star Wars and its ilk. This can be frustrating - there are only so many times one can retread the same story - but so too has this rare cycle allowed authors to really explore the concepts and themes presented by the premise of “car robots” to a level of depth which I believe is simply unattainable in franchises which adhere stringently to a single narrative.

That’s the bright side.

In practise, many Transformers stories have become increasingly myopic - existing only in service of themselves, or (more often) in service of older (better?) stories. The single most influential of these stories is almost certainly 1986′s The Transformers: The Movie, and it’s that influence which is felt most strongly in The Beast Within.

Of the countless insights offered by Terry van Feleday - if you don’t know who that is, don’t worry, I’ll explain later - I find that this one rings most true:

When Optimus Prime du jour mouths off “One shall stand, one shall fall” for the twentieth time, there is simply no longer that understanding that he will not be the one who stands.

Where so many modern Transformers stories are misguided recreations of the animated movie, The Beast Within is a reaction to it. But we’ll get to that. First, let’s talk a little about the story’s artwork.

Mr. Gibson himself, I believe, deserves almost none of the criticism he’s received over the years for his work on this comic. Though his layouts are occasionally cluttered, and he does seem to have been trying a little too hard to emulate the style of Pat Lee (the man behind Dreamwave Productions; license holder for Transformers comics at the time) in the first part, his panels have a strong sense of energy and tone.

Though he didn’t exactly get to explore a broad range of emotions over the course of the comic, he managed to keep the characters expressive - always a challenge, when dealing with visors and mouthplates - and, crucially for a cast of this size, on-model. Look at the fury on Razorclaw’s face! The way Prime’s fist flies out of the panel! Menasor, torn in two! Predaking’s sundered legs! The mishmash of heads inside the Beast! The sickly colours of the second half! While it lacks the practised ease seen from some fans-turned-creators on more recent books, it’s still impressive work.

Regardless, Mr. Gibson’s first outing with Transformers proved to be his last. He didn’t end up getting paid work from Dreamwave Productions as he’d perhaps hoped (though in retrospect, neither did most of the people who illustrated for that company, so that was probably for the best). There’s no mention of The Beast Within on his personal website, which bills him as a “children’s picture book illustrator”, amongst other things. To put it simply, the guy’s always been a talented illustrator, and his style’s come a long way since this comic - the portfolio work on his website is very impressive.

(On a whim, I went back to late 2004 on the internet archive, and did in fact find the comic’s first spread buried at the back end of his portfolio. The entire website is a product of the early-2000s - there’s a link labelled “Go to Flash site” in the sidebar, though the page it takes you to sadly seems to have been lost to time. It all seems like it was borne of another age entirely.)

Anyway, let’s get back to that TFW2005 thread. The thing that makes it particularly notable is that, on the fourth page, Mr. Jamieson himself wades in to try and set the record straight. It goes about as well as you’d expect.

For a lot of people, I think, the idea of interacting with an author might seem strange. They’re aware of J.K. Rowling’s online antics, and are becoming increasingly comfortable with celebrity interactions on Twitter, sure. But there’s a difference between those kinds of interactions and the kind that take place on forums or in chatrooms - places where everyone’s on a level playing field. I come from those corners of the internet, and am lucky enough to have had conversations with lots of people who’ve made things I like, and have seen almost the full range of approaches those people take when dealing with their audiences. It’s safe to say that Mr. Jamieson’s approach in that decade-old thread is just about the worse one there is: over the course of just five posts, he smugly lashed out at the people in the thread, whipping them into a fervour that lasted for three more pages after his departure.

Regardless of whether or not Mr. Jamieson was correct - in the attacks he levelled at the other users, in the defence he offered for his work - there can be no question that this kind of behaviour is grossly inappropriate.

(Whether it is more or less appropriate than digging up old threads and archived web pages in an attempt to justify a bastardisation of a much-maligned comic book remains to be seen, I suppose.)

The key point that Mr. Jamieson kept returning to is that he sought to avoid the dreaded “info dump” (a hallmark of early Transformers stories), and didn’t want his readers to be “spoon fed”. A recurring criticism of the story is that it seems to begin halfway through, with little explanation for what’s going on - but I, like Mr. Jamieson, don’t think that complaint holds water. The Beast Within begins “in medias res” because we already have the context: eighty issues of a comic, ninety-eight episodes of a cartoon, and - crucially - a movie. Everyone knows the story of the Transformers, because the story of the Transformers - ironically enough - never really changes. “Is it ever really over, Jetfire?”

(That’s the last line of the original version of The Beast Within, by the way. I had to add the comma in myself.)

Like the impact of Robots in Disguise, the impact of The Transformers: The Movie is kinda hard to see unless you were there at the time - and I wasn’t - but in 1986, it did something which was profoundly shocking to thousands of children: it introduced them to death.

That’s about all I’m going to say about the movie itself, because much more experienced critics than me have already mined it for every ounce of subtext. I’ve already quoted the work of Terry van Feleday, who did some excellent scene-by-scene analysis of the film in a thread all the way back in 2010 - and I’ll come back to her writings a few times in this post. This very year, sorta-famous YouTuber hbomberguy released his own long-form take on the movie - what I find interesting when comparing the two interpretations is that van Feleday struggles to find much merit in the movie outside of its opening, while hbomberguy employs a reading that allows him to be much more optimistic and charitable even towards the end of the movie.

In a way, I think Mr. Jamieson had an intuitive subconscious understanding of the subtext which both of those critics later brought to light, an understanding which directly informed the premise of The Beast Within. In the same way one can read the monster planet Unicron as a physical manifestation of death, so too can one view the Beast - and Mr. Jamieson (almost certainly unconsciously) posits that, although death does not belong in a children’s cartoon, it is an inevitability that all children must eventually face. It is the dark spectre that lurks beneath the surface of every childish thing made by an adult.

An author places some of themselves in a book - but the reader withdraws something of their own perception as well. I wondered what I might see in the book: a child believes a lie because they know no better; a grown adult sees the lie because it fails to line up with experience. In this way, a child’s story could be so many different experiences. With enough subtext, a thing made for a child becomes an entirely different world to an adult. [...] There’s no telling when subtext will defeat the facade of a thing.

(I’ll tell you what that quote’s from later.)

I wonder, perhaps, if the endless swathes of edgy reimaginings of children’s stories are something of a mass outcry from those who grew up being told - every Saturday morning - that when people got blown apart, they’d be put back together by the next week’s end. What was it like for those children, in December of ‘86, to learn that some people could never be rebuilt?

II. It Pleases Me To Be The First

It occurs to me that I never did really do a commentary on “its christmas... so what??”, although I did talk about it a little in the commentary for “PASS”. Its title is a reference to the famous (well, you know what I mean) cover of “Stargazing” (issue #145 of the original UK run), which featured a banner reading “IT’S CHRISTMAS!” over an image of Starscream, arms out, yelling “SO WHAT?”

(Side note: at first I thought that I hadn’t read that particular story, but it occurs to me that as a kid I used to borrow a lot of Titan Books’ reprints from my local library - and I do in fact have distinct memories of reading Transformers: Second Generation, which did collect “Stargazing” amongst other Christmas stories - so I guess I probably did read it, even if I don’t remember doing so.)

The Women’s Day comic is something of a curio, as explained in this excellent article (which reprints the comic - with its original text - in full). It’s basically the only US strip which was published outside of the eighty issues of the run proper. This rare, standalone nature is something I have sought across every re-lettering I’ve done - from the UK annual-exclusive not-by-the-usual-author set-in-the-future “Peace” to the UK DVD-box-set-exclusive set-in-an-ambiguous-cartoon-inspired-continuity The Beast Within. These works feel like they’ve been lost to time - and corrupting them feels like unearthing buried treasure (and smearing it in turds). But I’ll get to that.

Back to “its christmas”. As I explained last time, I just went through the comic panel-by-panel and changed stuff to whatever I thought would be funny. I didn’t edit the two-line introductory blurb (which ended up informing the backstory detailed in the new set of AtoZ profiles). I barely paid attention to established portrayals of the characters beyond Soundwave’s association with music. I had no large-scale plans.

There’s a lazy (and poorly-conceived) gag where the little girl calls Bumblebee “gay” (also note that at the time, I misinterpreted the art in the third panel of the third page - I thought it was the girl speaking, when in fact it was her mother - leading to some erroneous dialogue), which in retrospect feels like a less-drawn-out version of the excruciating opening scene from Freddery McMahon’s Combiner Wars abridged special. That spoof somehow manages to be less funny than its source material, and I sometimes think that the same holds for my own creations.

Still, that’s not to say that “its christmas” doesn’t do anything that I like. I’ll admit that lines like “lol without mustard christmas will be CANCEL suck it nerds”, “toot toot here come some flutes”, and “help me drag it to the hospital” still kinda make me laugh. I like the way Bumblebee drowns out the little girl’s insults by tooting loudly at her. The final panels - wherein the humans steal Bumblebee’s blood as the other Transformers watch impassively - have an offbeat intensity to them, and when it came to writing Bumblebee’s AtoZ profile it was those which I chose to call back to.

If I had to sum up “its christmas” in a single word, I’d pick “childish”. The jokes, the characters themselves, the entire concept behind the comic - all feel kinda immature, and that was kinda by design. Summer Meme Sundae was a terrible piece of work, but - if I had to ascribe a theme to it - that theme would be growing up; realising that you’re running out of summer holidays. “PASS” and “The Beast Within (My Pants)” kept that atmosphere, but became increasingly cynical and obscene. That was just the natural direction they had to go in.

III. Every Place Reminds You Of Some Place Else

I’ve long had an idle fascination with abridged series, and have toyed with the thought of making an abridged series of my own. Most notably, I’ve long fancied the idea of abridging Machinima’s Prime Wars Trilogy of Transformers cartoons. Here’s an extract from a message I posted in Allspark Chat (the Discord server associated with the Allspark Forums):

I'd probably try and keep Megatron mostly the same as he is in the show as it is. Optimus'd be kinda murderous - you can tell he can't wait for Rodimus and the rest of the Council to kick the bucket so he can retake unilateral control over Cybertron. I'd maybe try to go for something of a more sympathetic Starscream - he wouldn't actually have any plan, he just has Cybertron's interests at heart and ends up trying to use the Enigma solely to rid the world of Megatron and Optimus forever. Windblade'd maybe be trying to force some hero's journey stuff - picking fights with progressively bigger opponents in a misguided attempt to prove her narrative worth

As pitches go, it’s not much. It doesn’t help that, as I previously mentioned, Freddery McMahon himself - pretty much the only name in Transformers abridging - has already tackled the series; his style of parody isn’t really to my taste, but his production value is fairly impressive and would largely overshadow any improvements I made on a script level. I feel like the Prime Wars Trilogy has potential, because it’s a fascinating piece of media, but I find myself unable to answer the question of how to parody something that already feels so much like self-parody. Sound familiar?

By the time the last entry in that series - Power of the Primes - was wrapping up, I'd been posting semi-frequently in the Allspark’s threads with a borderline-apologetic tone. Takes included:

The emptiness of Cybertron lends it a Beast Machines-esque tone

The Mistress of Flame’s death is cathartic

You can see right through the script

I want to get off Machinima’s wild ride

Wow, Windblade sure screams a lot, doesn’t she

The finale of Titans Return is good, actually

Hearing Megatron say “piss me off” is an unpleasant surprise

Hey, this soundtrack’s pretty good

Wait, no it’s not, but Galvatron’s implied reversion to Megatron is

Narrative emergence gives rise to Buddhist allegories in TFTM

Grimlock acts like his cartoon self - but only around friends

Okay, for realsies, the soundtrack’s good now

They’re right to kill Sludge; he’s the least toyetic Dinobot

I’d probably describe a lot of what I saw in the Prime Wars Trilogy as a kind of narrative pareidolia - only instead of seeing faces in inanimate objects, I was seeing value and meaning in an indefensible web series.

The problem with abridged series is that they require a ridiculous amount of effort. You need to be a good writer in the traditional sense, but you need to be able to work around the visual material available - you’re gonna have to edit everything yourself, you’re probably gonna need to do custom animation, and you’re certainly gonna need to wrangle a cast of voice actors. All of that for ten minutes of animation that’s probably gonna get taken off YouTube within ten minutes of upload. It’s just not feasible - and yet there’s part of me that loves the idea: commentary and content, all rolled into one.

To pretend that it was Combiner Wars that led me to create “The Beast Within (My Pants)” is a little misleading, however. The real answer - I’m sorry to say - has more to do with ponies.

See, every now and again I get very acute nostalgia for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, which was perhaps my first brush with fandom - or at least, proper fandom. It’s heard to measure these things, y’know? Anyway, when that happens, I realise that I don’t really want to sit and watch a cartoon for little girls, so I usually just listen to some fan-made music or - as was the case last time - rewatch one of the abridged series based on the show. I use the word “series” here in plural because there were in fact two (well, two that matter): Friendship is Witchcraft and The Mentally Advanced Series. There’s long been quiet debate over which of the two is the (soundwave) superior series, and I’ve historically believed that they’re (buy some) apples and oranges. The latter is a more thoughtful parody of the source material, while the former is more polished and standalone.

However, after blitzing through Friendship is Witchcraft once more in its entirety over the course of a couple of days, something about it clicked for me - a bigger-picture thesis - and I realised that it had much more to say about its source material than I (or, well, most people) had given it credit for. It was at that moment that I felt the awful urge to create a My Little Pony fanwork of my own.

(The quote I used earlier, about subtext in children’s stories, was spoken by Princess Celestia in Rainbow Dash Presents: The Star in Yellow, a Mentally Advanced Series special inspired by a fanfiction which, fittingly enough, was written by Matt Marshall (AKA Blueshift/blue/Yartek/RockLordsRock), who was also the man behind the infamous “JaAm” relettering which effectively inspired all of these projects of mine. It’s like poetry.)

As we’ve already established, making a fancy-schmancy animation was out of the question - but a crudely-edited-in-MS-Paint comic was the next best thing, clearly. I started glancing through IDW Publishing’s official My Little Pony comics - having purchased a few in a Humble Bundle many years ago - but, aside from a couple of promising stories, quickly realised I didn’t have much hope. The comics are just, to put it frankly, not as good or as interesting as the show, and the fact that I’d need to adapt at least two issues at once (over forty pages) to tell any complete story made doing so an unappetising prospect. Furthermore, IDW’s comics are still very much in print, and (as the abridged series show) any such parody would stand on shaky legal ground.

Seeing as I wasn’t about to delve into the dark realm of prose any time soon, and the idea of messing with some other fan’s work rubbed me the wrong way, I decided to give up on my equine dreams and instead turned back to more familiar territory. I glanced over the list of old Transformers Marvel comics, but nothing like those I’d previously relettered stood out to me. I perused the short stories included in Dreamwave’s 20th Anniversary Transformers Summer Special. I even looked into some Fun Publications stuff. Nothing sparked my interest.

Perhaps my most promising lead was “An Arcee Sort of Day”, a vaguely-maligned (as in, “meh”) three-page standalone comic released mere months ago by IDW as part of an anthology - but the poor resolution of the available scan (the comic had been released in its entirety as part of the free preview for the anthology) meant that editing it would be a nightmare, and there was very little in the way of dialogue for me to mess with besides. More than that, the idea of directly mocking a comic from a compilation designed to showcase female creators (particularly one featuring Arcee, who’s been a controversial character in recent years) struck me as tasteless in the extreme. If only I had an easier target!

Oh wait, I did.

IV. Let The Slaughter Begin

If I actually ever read both parts of The Beast Within before starting work on this project, I don’t remember doing so. I do remember reading the Beast’s TFWiki page when I was much younger, and remember feeling like the wiki’s take on the concept seemed disproportionately harsh. To be honest, it was quite vindicating to read the source material and discover that I still agreed with my younger self’s assessment - the problems with the story are not on a conceptual level, but in the execution.

I barely gave myself time to digest the story before diving in and working out how exactly I could mess it up. I knew from my previous comics that the Autobots would all be unrepentant shitheads, so the natural choice was to portray the Decepticons as favourably as possible. Where the Autobots are callous, poorly-spoken, stupid, and divided, the Decepticons would be caring, articulate, intelligent, and united. In the story’s context, these traits would be weaknesses: remember, only the Beast has the killing instinct needed for decisive victory in this endless children’s story. I also knew that everybody in the story would hate Grimlock, and that - unlike with Roadbuster in “PASS” - they’d be right to do so.

That was pretty much the extent of my planning. I gathered up all the pages and started clearing out the text from the speech bubbles. Already, I had something of a problem: the use of the infamous Comic Sans MS font in the first part of The Beast Within was one of its most iconic features, and I wanted to retain that, but my own previous reletterings had canonically established Times New Roman as the “voice” of the Autobots. In fact, as far as those older comics were concerned, Times New Roman was the voice not just of the whole Cybertronian race, but also of the narrator.

The only lines which used a different font were those where I’d chosen to retain the comic’s original lettering, and with Roadbuster’s dialogue. It’s hard to articulate what exactly the joke with Roadbuster was - he seemed like the odd-one-out in the opening panels of the story, so I ran with that by having him be persistently ostracised by the other Autobots. The twist, as you find out when he finally speaks, is that he seems to be the only Autobot who’s unambiguously a good person; the rest bully him for effectively no reason.

In the commentary for “PASS” I released earlier this year, I explicitly ask:

If these are the Autobots… then what were the Decepticons like?

My own gut feeling was, I think, that they were people like Roadbuster - genuinely good individuals who never wanted a fight - and so for this comic I knew I had to give them Roadbuster’s Arial voice. I also knew that I’d have to keep the Autobots’ Times New Roman voice for the most part. The only question, then, was what to do about Grimlock, the combiners, Jetfire, and the narration.

(It’s worth noting that Soundwave and Triton were both Decepticons too, yet they both spoke in Times New Roman. The Doylist reason for this is simply that, at the time, I was happy to have everyone share a voice. In Triton’s case, the Watsonian reason is that he’s trying to mimic the Autobots’ “accent” to better fit in. If I had to make up a reason for Soundwave, I’d say that he’s only recently defected from the Autobots, as a reference to van Feleday’s insane Soundwave-as-an-ex-prisoner-of-war theory. Had Soundwave had a speaking role in the comic, I’m sure I would’ve explored that backstory in his AtoZ profile - but alas, it wasn’t to be.)

In fact, there was initially some ambiguity over who the comic’s narrator would be - if I used Times New Roman, would I have to keep the voice of the same narrator as in the previous two comics? In the end, I decided to draw from my source material: the on-panel narration would be Grimlock’s inner monologue, rendered in full Comic Sans glory, while the "Interlude” would employ a more omniscient third-person voice. That third-person voice is, I think, distinct from the narrator of the previous comics, and feels like a more solemn version of the narrator of the AtoZ profiles I released alongside the commentary for “PASS” (or, indeed, the latest batch included here). Remember, I wrote the first two comics years before all of this recent material. More on the text-only pages later.

When he speaks out loud, Grimlock uses the regular Times New Roman of the other Autobots. In fact, the only dialogue which uses Comic Sans is that of the Beast, which I view as the true externalisation of Grimlock’s feelings. You can also view it as the “real world” (as depicted in the text-only pages) leaking through into the comic’s reality, in much the same way that an aware-of-death adult perspective seeps through into a seemingly-innocent children’s cartoon. The other combiners simply use a slightly bigger font than the individual Decepticons. Oh, and all of the combiners use red text.

In the original toyline, Jetfire was something of an odd-one-out, as he was really a Macross “VF-1S Super Valkyrie” toy licensed by Hasbro from Bandai (who had in turn purchased the molds from the recently-bankrupted Takatoku toys). Both Whirl and Roadbuster have similar origins. I was under no obligation to do anything special with Jetfire’s dialogue, but because of the way he’s introduced in the comic - and as a nod to his shared real-world history with Roadbuster - it felt right to give him his own voice. Though he still uses Times New Roman, the font is scaled up and he speaks entirely in capital letters. His dialogue was a challenge to write, as most of his speech bubbles are very small, but I think this worked out in my favour: his speech often ended up butting up against the bubbles’ outlines, giving the impression that he’s always speaking just a little bit too loudly.

The lettering in the first part of the original comic - aside from being technically legible - is generally shoddy on every level. For emphasis, it alternately uses italics or inconsistent font size. Occasionally, the dialogue switches to lowercase, which kinda gives the impression that everyone’s been shouting the whole time. Most of the text is left-aligned. Some bits of text seem to have been squashed. Most of the narration boxes are parallelograms, but some are plain rectangles. Red hand-lettered text is mostly limited to the combiners’ speech, but also sees use a couple of times for Megatron and Optimus Prime. Some of the combiners’ speech just uses normal red Comic Sans MS text. Meanwhile, the second part switches entirely to black hand-lettered text - presumably from Mr. Gibson - which is a marked improvement in terms of tone and consistency, if a step down in legibility.

It’s interesting to me that, despite my version of the comic sharing the dearth of commas and full stops which plagues the original, it reads very differently. For all its stylisation, it’s my hope that each line I write for these comics comes across realistically - not in the sense that it’s something you’d hear someone say, but perhaps in the sense that it’s something you’d maybe read on the internet. More on that later - first, some miscellaneous notes on the comic’s text:

When I first wrote it, I used the style of self-censorship from “PASS” (and, by extension, the rest of Summer Meme Sundae) wherein the first letter of any curse is replaced by an asterisk. It was one of my prereaders, Tindalos, who noted that “the censoring kinda takes a bit from it”, and I decided that I agreed with him - it felt like I was holding back. You can decide for yourself; I’ve collected the pages with lines that were revised between drafts in an album.

Through pure coincidence, it’s Springer (well, Bulkhead) who gets the first line of dialogue in the comic - just like in “PASS”. In case it’s not clear, the joke is that he thinks he’s safe on the floor and berates Jazz for not doing the same thing, seconds before getting stomped by Megatron. I think this sequence perfectly encapsulates a big part of what I wanted to show about the Autobots: they all criticise one another relentlessly, despite being deeply flawed themselves. It’s a dynamic that, to me at least, actually evokes that of the Autobots in Michael Bay’s movies.

The line “thats me grimlock in the corner losing my religion” is, of course, a reference to R.E.M.’s song “Losing My Religion”, which was itself included as part of writer James Roberts’ “soundtrack” for More Than Meets The Eye. Though he did not appear in the issue for which Roberts selected the song, Grimlock was a recurring character in that series. Hopefully my depiction of the character surpasses that one - though if you ask the people I usually talk to, I wouldn’t be setting the bar particularly high with that comparison.

Optimus uses the insult “grimdick” shortly after Grimlock’s narration provides the example “grimcock”. I intended this to show that, while the dynamic between the two’s been cemented for a good while, Grimlock is always a step behind and still can’t predict Prime’s actions.

Snarl’s line was originally “hey speak for yourself swoop me and grimlock are tight as *hit”, which expresses effectively the opposite sentiment to his final line. The idea that Snarl was okay with becoming part of the Beast was intended to add a bit of brevity to the sequence - but I decided it was better to keep as much emotional impact as possible in the moment.

A more minor change a couple of pages later is Grimlock’s line “how do they do it”, which replaced “love is stupid”. I wanted to expressly draw a parallel between the Beast’s combination and Predaking’s.

The line I’m happiest with is “eat shit megatron this is what you get for being such a fucking weapon”. One of my friends occasionally cracks out the word “weapon” to describe someone - and what better application for it is there than a guy who literally turns into a gun?

Megatron’s line about the “black hole” in Optimus Prime’s spark is a twist on Megatron’s own canonical link to a black hole - an aspect of his original bio which was revisited by Roberts.

I struggled to think of Menasor’s final words. The longer I stared at the panel where he gets torn in half - from which I’d already cleared the speech bubble - the more I was struck by the emptiness of the scene. If one considers Menasor to be a symbol for the Decepticons as a whole, then his silence in that panel is my way of showing that - from this point forth - the Decepticons no longer have a voice; the second part of the comic shows naught but their corpses. Death exists, and nothing is good any more.

None of the text on the final page of the first half remained unchanged between drafts. I wan’t happy with Optimus Prime’s original line at all, and the internal monologue “don’t you deserve happiness” felt a little too serious. The phrase “no u” is the archetypical low-effort comeback, and seemed like the perfect beat to end the first part with.

Prime’s line “gotta jettison some dead weight” is a nod to Astrotrain’s iconic line in The Transformers: The Movie: “Jettison some weight, or I’ll never make it to Cybertron.” I had to check for the exact quote just now and found “jettison transformers the movie” in my search history, so obviously I’d done the same when writing the panel. More than just being a trite reference, I was hoping to draw an obvious parallel and to contrast the unilateral decision Optimus Prime makes on the following page against the more shall-we-call-it-democratic process the Decepticons used in the movie.

I’m probably a little too proud of “big red irredeemable fucking monster of a robot semi fuck”, which is a line that could absolutely only exist in this travesty of a comic.

Jetfire’s use of the phrase “GOTTA BLAST” is a reference to a line spoken by the titular character of the early-2000s CGI cartoon Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, one which has turned into something of a meme. When I wrote the panel, I intended to imply that Jetfire was aiming to crash into the city - but I think it ended up doubling as foreshadowing for the fact that Jetfire flies his passengers into the sun. Additionally, the meme often sees use as innuendo, which shines through in the following panel: Jetfire expels propellant into the Beast’s face while Bumblebee remarks “gah okay i did not want to see that”. The less said about the sound effect “CHOOOM!”, the better.

Remember how all the text in the first part of the original comic was left-aligned? So’s the text in my version! MS Paint simply doesn’t have the option to change the alignment of your text - I actually had to throw in extra spaces at the start of each new line, eyeballing things until I had an approximation of centre alignment. This is something I never did with “PASS”, and I found that doing so gave me more freedom to squeeze more stuff into the speech bubbles.

As immortalised by countless memes, you can’t rotate text in MS Paint either. I tried to use this to my advantage on the comic’s first page, where the steps between the words in Grimlock’s narration give them a faltering quality.

Grimlock’s narration actually ended up being one of the most challenging parts of the comic to write. I wrote a draft of the first page pretty quickly, but decided I wasn’t happy with it and that I’d have to replace it later - which I did, but only after having written pretty much every single other bit of dialogue.

I think the central conceit of “PASS” - that somebody’s farted and the Autobots are trying to find out who dealt it - didn’t solidify until I reached the second page and looked at Rodimus Prime’s body language. In much the same way, the crux of “The Beast Within (My Pants)” didn’t solidify until it came to writing Swoop’s line.

V. Me Grimlock Not Nice Dino

At some point during the creation of “The Beast Within (My Pants)”, I started thinking a lot about incels.

(To be clear, this is the part of the commentary where things get a bit weird, and I start talking about storytelling decisions which I think were made in poor taste but which I don’t think come across overtly in the comic itself. Feel free to skip ahead to the next section. Or, y’know, stop reading entirely.)

Grimlock is childish, despite his age, and is desperate to be liked - no, respected - at any cost. His only asset is his BRUTE STRENGTH. He hates Prime, but wishes he was Prime. He has trouble treating any of the other Autobots like people. He rages against an outgroup whose ideals are - at least ostensibly - rooted in empathy.

I wouldn’t say “I wrote a comic where Grimlock is an incel”, because that’d be a pretty stupid thing to write and I’d feel pretty stupid saying it.

Looking back at a lot of my previous work on this blog, some things do crop up again and again. In abstract, I’d say that the idea of a character seeking friendship and/or respect - and failing to understand why they can’t find those things - is one that I’ve revisited a couple of times. This was a strong theme in the latter half of Another Son - a story which dealt heavily in misanthropy - which featured a character inspired by Sam Witwicky from Michael Bay’s Transformers. The protagonist of Retrace Steps spent the whole story unable to even ask the question “why am I alone”. Many of the characters in Are You Happy - particularly Mr. Hernandez - deal with similar problems to varying extents.

So this makes, what, practically four stories in a row? I didn’t set out to approach things this way again with this comic, but from the moment I wrote Swoop’s line I knew I didn’t have a choice. When people talk about the Beast’s combination sequence, they talk about how violative it appears. Metal tentacles spring from Grimlock like one of Alien’s chestbursters, penetrating or melding with the other Dinobots’ bodies. After that, the resulting monstrosity ambles around, horrifically murdering its former peers. As much as I can have the characters in the story play this stuff off for laughs, I’ll never be able to erase the undercurrent.

This isn’t supposed to be a direct mapping - a perfect metaphor - and by the time this commentary’s done I hope I’ll have pointed in the direction of some alternate perspectives. It just seems important to put my cards on the table and say that, when I was working on this comic, this is the kinda thing I was thinking about. We thought children were safe with Transformers, and then a gun came and shot people they cared about, and for some reason we were surprised to see that they got upset.

With all of that in mind, I take some solace in the fact that I actually found getting into Grimlock’s head to be extremely difficult. His dialogue was a breeze to write, sure - that’s the outsider’s perspective - but actually trying to construct his thoughts in anything approximating a convincing manner was very difficult. The first draft of his narration literally included the phrase “we live in a society”.

VI. Such Heroic Nonsense

I’ve already touched on Terry van Feleday’s opus a couple of times, but I think it’s worth delving a little deeper into how exactly her analysis influenced this comic. For some reason the idea that nearly five-hundred pages of borderline-conspiracy-theorist-level ramblings about perhaps the most maligned movie franchise of the 21st century might be a tough sell is one which I can’t quite wrap my head around. I’d say that it’s because I’ve read the thing and already know that it’s good, but in truth I was pretty much sold from the moment I found out it existed.

Anyway, I frequently get into not-quite-arguments with internet strangers about Transformers, and during those discussions I frequently find myself saying “a good Transformers story should do X”, and then I have to resist the urge to add “like Michael Bay’s movies” because doing so would completely delegitimise the point I’m trying to make. The problem is that, because I’m deliberately omitting the context of my opinions, they come across as being even more bizarre.

I think that same problem exists in some capacity with this comic, where I’m drawing on sources which are intuitive to me but completely alien even to a typical Transformers fan. I’ve yet to even mention the other primary inspiration for this story, which is even more arcane.

Perhaps it’s important to stress that van Feleday doesn’t offer a typical "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron" take. Rather - and I realise I’m about to butcher this - she shows how the humans in Bay’s movies give increasing amounts of power to an alien cult leader because their only alternative is to get wiped out by an alien warlord. So in terms of this comic, “Autobots bad” is very much rooted in her reading of those movies, while “Decepticons good” is just something I thought would be funny.

Well, not exactly. I’ve already mentioned Combiner Wars; something that continues to baffle pretty much everyone who watched that show (and its sequels) is that, while it seems to have no idea what it’s doing most of the time, its portrayal of Megatron is an absolute riot. He is absolutely the protagonist of that series, the Only Sane Man in a world of bizarre psychotic caricatures. I think the same kinda holds in the continuity of my comic, only he’s had more time to bring the people he takes in around to his way of thinking.

Let’s not forget the official “good-is-bad” continuity of Shattered Glass, which - while heavily compromised - was the source of many interesting reinterpretations of popular characters. Effective reinterpretations require you to forget what you know about a character and strip them back to the core signifiers, which you can then put to different use. One of the posters in Terry van Feleday’s thread, “Lobok”, observes:

I like the idea that Bay or the writers looked at Optimus Prime and thought "What would a guy who calls himself that really act like?" Imagine you knew or heard of someone, a human, who called themselves the equivalent of "The #1 Bestest Superior" or "King Supreme Ultimate" - do you not picture either a 7-year old boy or a mentally deficient oo-rah alpha male? Maybe the two combined? Seems much more apt than a wise, noble father figure.

Of the course, I don’t for a second think that Michael Bay had any such thought - but the connection still exists for the audience to make. Therein lies one of the greatest unspoken strengths of Transformers storytelling: the sheer breadth and depth of the signifiers at play. Much of what van Feleday did in her thread was to boil down the concepts found in Transformers stories to reveal those core signifiers.

(Almost a year ago, I wrote a piece for the Refined Robot Co. blog which explored some of her findings by delving into the subtextual meanings of the countless alternate modes worn by Megatron over the years.)

By the same token, I think there’s something to be said for the way Grimlock’s alternate mode ties into his portrayal in my take on The Beast Within. He turns into a dinosaur - something which is rooted in the past, extinct, unable to develop - while most of the other Autobots turn into modern vehicles. Kids may love dinosaurs, but they’ll likely grow up to have a stronger interest in cars or tanks. Grimlock is immature almost to the point of childishness; his beast mode is the lizard king, and he doesn’t understand why you won’t bow.

(Obviously I’m making some big generalisations here for the sake of a point - the other Dinobots have their own prehistoric disguises, and kids’ interests develop in varied enough ways that perhaps this link is only noticeable to those who experienced the transition I describe. When I was much younger, I was obsessed with dinosaurs, and would consume all the dinosaur-related media I could get my hands on. Eventually, however, my crippling fear of sea monsters led me to stop reading books about them - I'd turn the page, see a full-spread painting of a pliosaur taking a bite out of a pterodactyl, and shit my pants. Okay, no, that’s a huge exaggeration: more likely it just got to the point where I knew basically all of the cool dinosaur facts already, and suddenly the deep lore of the grim darkness of the 41st millennium or whatever seemed way cooler. I just find it funnier to imagine that my prosperous future in paleontology was averted for fear that I’d discover the last living specimen of a plesiosaur.)

VII. Where’d You Learn To Talk Like That

Back in “PASS”, I think there was some question as to who exactly was the coolest dude; the biggest guy. Rodimus was in charge, but the others didn’t really respect his authority in the end. Although Triton was an underdog in that story, he wasn’t at the bottom of the pack - no, that role went to Roadbuster. Everyone seems to like Ultra Magnus, but it’s never really made clear as to why that is.

Grimlock’s personality and role within the Autobots was pretty much the first thing I solidified when it came to writing “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. I knew that he was the lowest of the low; the nail in every Autobot’s tyre. As Grimlock evolved, so too did Optimus Prime - the second-most-prominent character in the comic. "The #1 Bestest Superior" became a murderous jock, and the Autobots became his cult of personality.

Speaking of cults of personality, I’ve been posting regularly in the Homestuck Discord server since November of last year. There’s no other place like it on the internet, and - truth be told - I’m not sure any explanation of it I could provide would suffice. The server was created by some guy called Makin - at least, we're pretty sure he’s a guy - who nobody’s ever met but who seems to have an uncanny knack for managing online communities.

Major events in that server have been comprehensively catalogued since July of 2017 by long-standing moderator “Drew Linky” in his journal Several People Are Typing. Between the entries and the related materials, it’s probably around half a million words in length. There’s no other document like it on the internet.

For the first fifty or so pages, Drew had no intention of making his document public. Apparently, one of the reasons he wrote it in the first place was as a way of holding Makin accountable - the guy used to be (and sometimes still is) a bit of an ass. Now, I wasn’t around in 2017, so I can’t really comment on the accuracy of the document’s early entries - but as a newcomer I was struck by how different Drew’s depiction of the server was to my own experience there. If I had to guess, I’d say his style of prose and the cherry-picked nature of the document make it seem like a much more hostile place than it actually is.

In particular, Makin effectively starts out as journal’s main villain (alongside various problem users and Homestuck creators) - a capricious and unknowable entity with absolute power over the server - and many of the entries deal in some way with what users jokingly refer to as his “redemption arc”. Of course, in reality, he’s just some guy, and everyone knows that real people don’t have character arcs.

I still haven’t finished reading SPAT, but I was doing so around the time when I was working on the comic. At some point I started to draw parallels between my bizarro version of Optimus Prime and the journal’s bizarro version of Makin, and I decided to play them up. Much of Prime’s dialogue is inspired by Makin’s style of speech, using phrases like “shut the fuck up”, “nobody cares”, “holy shit”, “get fucked”, “lmao”, “literally”, “literally [...] who”, “guys”, “rational” and “you’re welcome”. I just checked and at the time of writing, with the exception of “literally who” and “you’re welcome”, he’s used every one of those phrases within the last week. Oh, and while the word “suckers” isn’t really a Makin quote, in Homestuck it’s associated with the not-quite-biggest-bad evil empress. It bears mentioning again that the complete lack of punctuation in the comic’s dialogue mirrors the most common style of typing I see online, where people drop their capital letters and full stops.

(In fairness, a lot of us kinda talk the same way in that server. I remember one time Makin said “I also need to worry about lmao becoming some kind of anime catchphrase for me”, which cut pretty deep as I’ve been overusing that phrase instead of “lol” or “haha” or whatever for ages. Look, it’s just a funny word to me: in my head I pronounce it “luh-mayo” instead of “el-em-ay-oh”. Like “I throw my sandwich in the air sometimes / saying aaay-oh / I ordered maaayo...”)

In the comic, the self-aggrandising Optimus Prime is hostile and dismissive to those around him. It might all be a front, but it might not. Even though Grimlock hates Optimus, the Dinobot seems to agree with him a lot of the time, and the narrative itself never really manages to conclusively condemn his actions. The name “Optimus” echoes the word “optimise”; so frequently thrown around in rationalist circles. One could even go so far as to say that Optimus Prime’s ultimate goal in the comic is to kill death-in-the-form-of-a-shitposter.

In seriousness, I’m drawing these comparisons in a pretty tongue-in-cheek way. I don’t actually think that the Homestuck Discord server is a cult of personality - even if, to check the user-contributed “SPAT Epilogues”, some of its populace seem determined to behave like it is. Even if this section of this commentary exists. At the end of the day, I’m gonna write what I know, and I like to think that I know a little about online communities and what happens when they go wrong. I wish I could say that “The Beast Within (My Pants)” is a cautionary tale to that effect, but in truth I don’t think it offers any conclusive answers in the same way that “PASS” perhaps did. “Only worry about the opinions of people who actually care about you,” maybe? “Death is an abomination and we shouldn’t let it anywhere near our kids”, perhaps? “You can’t force other people to like you”?

“You can’t force other people to like the things you made”?

VIII. Burnt-Out Toaster Ovens

In the re-released version of “PASS”, it seemed right to throw in something in the way of extra content. I had fond memories of the Seacon profiles published alongside the original “Peace”, and lifted the format to create short bios for all sixteen characters who appeared in the comic. These fitted neatly on a four-by-four spread (though I ended up merging Topspin and Twin Twist’s profiles and throwing in an extra one for Computron, who did not appear in the comic proper).

From the start, I knew I wanted to do something similar for “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. In fact, I already had two text-only pages to work with; each part of the original comic was prefaced with a prose introduction and a note from Mr. Gibson. I decided that I could rework the text-only pages and add another spread of profiles, using the freedom granted by prose to explain away many of the comic’s oddities.

It took me some time to carefully erase the existing text from the scans that I had, using nothing but the brush tool in MS Paint. It took me even more time to work out some potential approaches to take with the text itself. Eventually, I came up with the following ideas:

A flashback depicting Grimlock and Swoop’s breakup.

A conversation between Grimlock and Jazz (or, perhaps, Slash).

“How Ratchet Got His Head Back”, the interlude which I ended up using.

A synopsis of events between “its christmas... so what??” and “The Beast Within (My Pants)”, which ended up being my first stab at the introduction.

Some in-character commentary as Mr. Gibson, which I did end up including.

From the moment I conceived it, I was pretty set on “How Ratchet Got His Head Back”, and it ended up being a breeze to write. I didn’t end up getting a chance to squeeze in the title - a reference to an issue of More than Meets the Eye - as it didn’t really fit the original format of the page. The introduction, on the other hand, proved much more challenging. My main problem was that, were I to preface the story with a text page, I’d be asking them to read a bunch of probably-mostly-serious words before allowing them to read the comic proper. Not the best first impression!

Nonetheless, I gave it a go - you can read my first attempt in the album of the draft pages. It mostly served to lay out the continuity between my three comics. Rodimus Prime’s crew were abandoned on Cybertron by Optimus Prime (presumably Hot Rod changed his name in Optimus’ absence). Megatron, Optimus and their crews crash-landed on Earth, and millions of years later the events of “its christmas... so what??” occurred. Meanwhile on Cybertron, it took a few million years for the other Autobots to wipe out the remaining Decepticons, as seen in “PASS”. Humanity was wiped out by Optimus in retribution for their transgression (a nod to Mr. Gibson’s depiction of Earth as an empty wasteland), prompting the conflict seen in “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. Much of this timeline remains implicit in the final version of the comic.

When I wrote it, I was pretty happy with the way this information was conveyed in the first draft. It was the ever-ardent Gitaxian - one of my long-time prereaders - who made me realise just what a mistake I’d made:

Something was rubbing me the wrong way about that first prose page and I finally realized what it is / Expositing that Optimus is horrible right off the bat takes away a good chunk of the impact the comic had before you added it

He was right. My prereaders’ initial response to the comic was that Optimus Prime’s motivations were completely opaque, and I overcorrected, not realising that his inscrutability was one of the things that made him interesting. You kinda want him to behave like the Optimus Prime you know and love, but he keeps doing weird things and you never really find out why.

Suddenly, I was back at square one - no closer to having a clear idea of how to introduce the comic. Another of my prereaders, gearshift, had the solution:

It's Transformers or some shit. You've seen the cartoon right? The one with the tape guy? Yeah, the tape guy is barely in this one. What do you mean no sale? Look, fuck, it's got the dinosaur guy. He's right on the goddamn cover, you like the dinosaur guy right? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Bitch.

I liked her pitch because it seemed like it’d do a good job of filtering out readers who wouldn’t enjoy the comic. To quote Alexander Wales, author of Worth the Candle:

I kind of hate blurbs and taglines, especially for something so large and varied as Worth the Candle / My ideal synopsis would tell people what kind of story it was without actually telling them that much about the story; it would select for all the people who would fall in love with the story, and select against all the people who would find it a waste of time. / How to actually write that ... I've got no idea.

(Side note: I’m one of the people who fell in love with that story, to the point where I’ll use any opportunity to recommend it to others. It’s maybe my favourite thing written by anyone ever.)

A closely-related issue is that of content warnings: so far as I’ve been able to work out, there is no warning which I can give for “The Beast Within (My Pants)” which adequately selects against people who won’t like it while also preserving its conceptual twists and avoiding colouring the audience’s interpretation.

Getting back to the actual content of the introduction - I wound up writing less than I would’ve liked, leaving the page looking a little sparse, but hopefully making things easier for the reader. There’s relatively little to talk about in the way of trivia here. When I wrote the phrase “cut right to the spectacles” I was probably thinking of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Cut To The Feeling”. When I mentioned “moist towelettes” I was probably thinking of Hawthorne Wipes. The phrase “truth time” was an iconic - to me, and literally no-one else in existence - line spoken by the trolling narrator of a crack story written by a high school friend of mine, the energy of which I feel like I’ve always been channelling with these comics.

The interlude, on the other hand, is crammed full of references and was a breeze to write. It was the first piece of prose I completed for the project. In general, I was trying to write in a verbose style that would be simultaneously at odds with the bulk of the issue and reminiscent of the prose of veteran Transformers scribe Simon Furman. He was known for using certain distinctive phrases repeatedly in his writing - one such phrase being “like some vast, predatory bird”. The phrase “neither sufficient inclination nor wingspan” is supposed to subtly evoke another Furmanism: “CANNOT, WILL NOT”.

In all likelihood, the interlude would not have existed had I not noticed that Ratchet’s head was in its cartoon colours in the first part of the story, but in its Marvel colours for the second. I had the idea to explain that error away in story - tying into the general schtick of “correcting” the comic - and did so by way of a reference to Ratchet’s original toy, which had a sticker with a face on it behind the windshield rather than a proper head. I was also determined to highlight the fact that Predaking’s legs remain standing for like three pages; I think this minor detail in the artwork is pretty indicative of the fact that Mr. Gibson did a good job.

The way Swoop’s contribution to the combiner is described as “puny” ties nicely to the history established between him and Grimlock in his profile. I like the way the Beast tries to hit Optimus Prime with a “truck-sized fist”. The “antimemetic shielding” was my attempt to explain the recurring disappearances of Optimus Prime’s trailer in a novel way - I did so by namedropping the key phrase from qntm’s There Is No Antimemetics Division; the trailer’s there, you just can’t perceive it and forget that it exists. Finally, “dull surprise” refers to the vague expressions that characterised Dreamwave’s house style.

For the most part, I was able to retain the ordering of the pages as in the original comic, to keep things print-friendly. The one exception to this is the prose page for the second part, which I unfortunately had to move forward so that its cover could fall across a spread. The original comics must’ve included something in the way of backmatter - art cards, perhaps, or adverts - which made up the space.

The huge cast of The Beast Within made creating a profile for every character an impossible task (especially when so many are just crowd-fillers like some of the Technobots were in “PASS”) - but it was perfectly possible to provide one for each non-combiner character with a speaking role.

(If you’ll indulge me in one last barely-relevant tangent as we head into the final stretch of this commentary, there are some rather odd inclusions/omissions in The Beast Within. On the Autobot side, pretty much every 1984-1985 character appears, with the exceptions of Trailbreaker, Hoist, Tracks, Smokescreen, Grapple, Beachcomber, Seaspray, Perceptor and Omega Supreme. The Autobot combiner teams are absent with the odd exception of Silverbolt. Twin Twist - who had been pretty much entirely absent from the original US fiction - makes an odd appearance without his partner Topspin. Steeljaw is the only one of the four 1986 Autobot cassettes to appear. Meanwhile, on the Decepticon side, oddities include the toy-inspired versions of Viewfinder and Spectro (most of the rest of the cast use cartoon-inspired character models) and the omissions of Spyglass and Buzzsaw. Some Decepticon combiner team members - Motormaster, Wildrider, Breakdown, Blast Off and Swindle - only appear in combined form. Just two of the four 1986 triple changers - Springer and Octane - appear in the comic, looking slightly out-of-place in a cast consisting mostly of characters present in the first two seasons of the cartoon. Oh, and the Deluxe Vehicles and Deluxe Insecticons are absent, but that’s to be expected in a cartoon-inspired setting.)

Here’s the first draft of Optimus Prime’s profile:

Unpredictable. Unstoppable. Unrepentant. Many words have been used to describe OPTIMUS PRIME, yet the abrasive leader of the Autobots remains something of an enigma even amongst his followers. He has ruled Cybertron for many millenia, by dint of the fact that he's apparently the only Cybertronian with a shred of competence.

It’s a product of the time where I wanted to really flesh out Optimus Prime and communicate his thoughts clearly to the audience, and as such is pretty blunt with how it characterises him. The final version is a little more subtle, drawing in elements of the scrapped introduction. I figure I may as well go through the other profiles one-by-one to give a sense for what I was thinking:

Megatron initially had a much more personal bio - which seems to have been lost to time - but I wound up cutting much of it to make space for elements of the story’s scrapped introduction.

Starscream draws inspiration from van Feleday’s interpretation of the character - she posited that Michael Bay’s version of the character was actually the Decepticon most loyal to Megatron. The contrast between that interpretation and pretty much every other in the franchise’s history (excluding Shattered Glass Starscream, of course) is pretty funny to me. I tried to use the phrase “fools errands” in as benign a way as possible, which I felt evoked a more traditional relationship between him and Megatron. “Starscream, you fool!”

Razorclaw has little in the way of characterisation in the comic beyond “noble warrior”, and his profile is a wholesale reference to The Chronicles of Narnia: he stands in for Aslan; the rest of the Predacons for the Pevensie siblings. So yes, this version of Razorclaw is a Christ-like figure. As for the witch... maybe Blackarachnia? Eh, who cares. Oh, and the idea of combining with a dead bot was one which cropped up a few times in IDW’s comics, most notably with the Combaticons in Mairghread Scott’s Till All Are One.

Onslaught was in a similar boat to Razorclaw. I found myself drawing from Till All Are One once more, hinting at a (complicated?) romance between him and another teammate.

Blitzwing has only one speaking role in the comic - a shared line with Megatron and Starscream - but I decided to count it for the sake of having a nice set of sixteen characters once more. In Transformers Animated, Blitzwing had multiple personalities, and would change forms depending on which was in control. This interpretation of the character has seen plenty of criticism, so I deliberately tried to come up with something new. I quickly settled upon the idea of tying his vehicle forms to his mood, a metaphor which seemed to dovetail nicely with the way aerial alternate forms were treated in “PASS” and which also allowed me to cement the Decepticons’ supportiveness.

Bulkhead was borne of the realisation that Springer appears prominently in both “Peace” and The Beast Within. This inconsistency is entirely the product of my decision to place my versions of those comics in the same continuity, and I decided to correct it in the tradition of “Bluster” and “Firster Aid” by having them be two separate (but related) characters. I named the new Springer after Energon Bulkhead, who was inspired by “Generation 1″ Springer - the name’s since been used more prominently by an Animated-original character and variations thereof, and is effectively fair game for “Generation 1″ stories. His actual characterisation was inspired by Springer’s behaviour in “PASS” - I liked the idea that Bulkhead bullied Springer, and Springer bullied everyone else in turn. Oh, and I wanted to tie their helicopter modes back to Blitzwing’s profile on a thematic level.

Bumblebee is the only character from “its christmas... so what??” to recur with a speaking role in “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. After scrapping the original introduction I’d planned for the comic, I was left with a single profile to bridge the gap between the two stories. My original idea was that, for their negligence in allowing the humans to steal Bumblebee’s blood, Prowl, Tracks, and Hoist would have been executed by Optimus Prime - though I’m sure he didn’t pull the trigger himself, it’s safe to assume that he didn’t warn them before setting off the nukes.

Ratchet has a characterisation inspired by something “Jonny Angel” posted in van Feleday’s thread: “Ratchet is an ambulance who practices no medicine”.

Jazz is an extremely prominent character in the comic, despite the fact that his only line is a scream in the opening panel. The comic relies on the wider context of the brand to let the audience be invested in him, but in a vacuum it’s kinda funny to see the Autobots fret so much over an effective nobody. Pretty much the entire joke in my version is just a reference to Ryan Gosling’s misguided quest to “save jazz” in La La Land - some of his character’s lines are lifted wholesale to comprise Jazz’s profile, which takes pains to avoid using any kind of pronouns (thereby maintaining the confusion over whether or not “Jazz” refers to the character or the music genre). His profile was the first I wrote.

Ironhide has a role amongst the Autobots loosely inspired by that of Drew Linky (or at least, the version of Drew Linky presented by SPAT) in the Homestuck Discord. I thought there was some symmetry there with Ironhide’s history in IDW Publishing’s comics.

Skids was a tricky character to portray, but ultimately his profile turned out to be one of the ones I’m happiest with. It’s kind of a loose riff on his portrayal towards the back end of James Roberts’ stories, where much of his arc revolved around his relationship with Nautica. According to Word of God, he had unrequited feelings for her - I decided to amp this up by giving him unrequited feelings for everyone. To tie this back to Homestuck, think Eridan/Cronus. Oh, and in terms of the Homestuck Discord server, think your typical hornyposter (and then follow the implications through in terms of Optimus Prime/Makin). The actual name “Skids Maximus” is a play on the way the suffix “Maximus” has historically been used for some combiners, “Optimus Maximus” in particular. I’m convinced I’m not the first person to do a joke like that, but nobody I asked could think of any older examples.

Grimlock was fleshed out pretty well by the comic itself, so I took his profile as an opportunity to expand upon the history of the Dinobots. I saw them as being akin to a group of friends who stuck together throughout school, winding up as an impenetrably toxic and incestuous mess with a ton of deep lore. In a way, there was a time when I was the Grimlock of my group of friends... but we all grew up.

Swoop is Grimlock’s ex-partner, a concept inspired by the other Dinobot combiner we all wish we could forget about. I’m pretty happy with the use of the word “bottom” in this context.

Snarl is based on a combination of various people I’ve known in real life - people who are perfectly nice and reasonable but have zero patience around certain other individuals. From the outside, it’s behaviour that comes across as pretty damn harsh, but - and please note that this is not an endorsement of such behaviour - it’s usually the product of a long period of aggravations.

Jetfire was the last character introduced in the comic, so it felt fitting to save his profile until last. His biography is effectively a mashup of his portrayals in the original cartoon (where he gets frozen in the Arctic Circle) and in Revenge of the Fallen (where he was a Seeker who wound up on Earth), a combination which neatly parallels Bay’s Megatron’s origins. It also references J.J. Abram’s infamous “mystery box” storytelling device, which I intended to mirror the offbeat lack of closure in the comic itself.

The final challenge I faced - one which had hounded me throughout the development of the comic - was what exactly to title it. Titles considered included:

“The BEE” (Tindalos’ suggestion)

“The BEE Within”

“The REEEE Within”

“SHIT” (Gitaxian’s suggestion)

“IM THE BEAST”

“AWWW SHIT” (Fear or Courage’s suggestion)

“AW SHIT ITS THE BEAST”

None of these resonated. Then, almost a whole month later, out of nowhere:

This was the entirety of Daniel111111222222’s contribution to the story - and what a contribution it was.

There were several reasons why I loved his idea. Firstly, it was easy to edit: most of the other suggestions would’ve required me to move lots of letters around, while this one would simply require me to append a few. More importantly, it felt like the title of a Chuck Tingle novel.

The subtitle for the second part - “No Pants” - seemed like a natural choice after that, the idea being that it evokes Grimlock’s inhibitions falling away with his transformation into the Beast. It narrowly edged out “Pants Off”, which I managed to squeeze into the final version of the introduction.

The parentheses in the comic’s title were my own addition, and in retrospect I kinda regret them. They seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’m not sure why. I was wrong to try and improve upon perfection.

IX. Why Throw Away Your Life So Recklessly

So far, the bulk of this commentary has mostly focused on the aspects of this project which I think went pretty well. In a way, that's probably fair enough, because - on balance - I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

At the same time, I can't help feeling that “PASS” - a comic which I probably threw together in the space of one day two years ago - is both funnier and more meaningful than the one which I spent a couple of weeks on.

When I started working on “The Beast Within (My Pants)” towards the beginning of May, I expected to have the project finished and out of the door by the end of the month. If you glance at the release dates of the various things I made, you'll see that I like to put out major projects on the last day of a month - it's a way of setting myself a deadline and it lets me associate a given project with a given period of time.

My first draft of the dialogue was released to prereaders on the 11th of May; my second on the 13th. Around that point, exam season started to kick in and I decided to prioritise to other projects - the Retrace Steps commentary and the Are You Happy retrospective - which both ballooned out into much longer pieces than I'd planned. I successfully met my self-imposed deadline for those projects and pushed back the release date for the comic to the end of June. I released the first drafts of the text-only pages on the 9th, but the profiles didn't follow until the 24th. By the time you read this, I'll have been working on the project on-and-off for over three months; despite the fact that I was ostensibly on vacation for most of that time, I was somehow busier than I tend to be at university.

For context, it took me just four months to adapt Retrace Steps from a short film script to a webcomic (well, “webcomic”), and that was a process which actually required original artwork. At the time I noted that I needed to re-evaluate the way I approached commentaries, as the amount of time required to produce one of a high standard seemed only to increase - they're extremely valuable to me, and seem to be well-received by the few who read them, but are they justifiable if they take longer to create than the things they comment on?

All of this is my long-winded way of saying that I've probably spent more time thinking about The Beast Within than the vast majority of people who know about it, and that I kinda regret that. See, in the sense that The Beast Within provokes a visceral emotional reaction, it’s a “good comic” - but so too does a punch to the face. The Beast Within is not a good comic. It’s mean and deconstructive and poorly-done. My version is borne of contrarianism and hubris, and softens the blow not one bit.

At the time when I was writing Grimlock's dialogue, I found that my own typing style was becoming increasingly acidic.

The truth is that “PASS” is probably the most successful thing I have ever made, and I wanted to make a comic which would put it to shame, and I failed miserably. In fact, I feel like I’ve made something which only I could ever enjoy. It’s derivative in the extreme. As my deadline for this project drew closer, I resorted to drafting bits of the commentary on my phone in public, and at one point somebody idly asked me what I was writing, and - after failing to think of a convincing lie - I said something along the lines of “it’s kinda a long story, and I wouldn’t enjoy telling it, and you wouldn’t enjoy hearing about it”. They seemed perfectly satisfied by that answer, but I wasn’t.

Must we justify the things we create? Mr. Jamieson’s attitude seemed to be to say “screw you, I don’t have to justify myself to stupid people” (while pointing at everybody else in the room). My attitude, as evinced by this commentary, has been to justify every aspect of everything I make in excruciating detail, so that if you tell me “I don’t like X” I can say “I already explained why I thought X was a good idea” and you can say “well you were wrong” and I can say “maybe”.

You’ve probably twigged that, throughout this commentary, I’ve referred to the creators of The Beast Within only by second name. At first, perhaps, it came across as some mark of mocking respect - like citing a scientific source - but the real reason is cowardice, not confidence. Some people occasionally put their own names into Google. There’s a couple of people to whom I really don’t want to have to justify myself.

Over a decade after the release of the The Beast Within, Hasbro released a brand new set of Dinobot toys which combined to form Volcanicus. The creators of the Prime Wars Trilogy and of the Earth Wars mobile game gleefully included the new combiner in their stories, and the fandom at large embraced it wholeheartedly.

As her thread drew to a close, Terry van Feleday wrote something which I think about often:

Of course [...] let’s not forget that no matter the amount of earnest work put into something, sometimes it just turns out shit. There’s a strange perception I noticed in critical response where people seem to find it difficult to consider something both earnest or satirical and, well, not very well made. Sucker Punch can’t be an honest indictment of cinematic objectification and a somewhat poorly conceived, almost hypocritical attempt at being more clever than you should. Transformers can’t be an inversion of the traditional hero/villain narrative showcasing the effects of authoritarian propaganda and a meandering, under-focused, often poorly communicated, destructive mess. Maybe it’s a strange entertainment-version of the Just World Fallacy where lacking results must necessarily result from lacking effort, or maybe it’s modern audiences’ strange worship of subversiveness, where a work critical of old tropes must by default be better than the works it’s commenting on throwing to the dustbin of history, but either way, people are extremely resistant to the idea that films they found emotionally dissatisfying could express depth and meaning and tend to dismiss them as another ‘genre film’.

Mr. Gibson is a children’s picture book illustrator. The Beast has no place on his website.

X. Proceed On Your Way To Oblivion

TFNation - the UK’s biggest Transformers convention - has become something of an annual pilgrimage for me, and (as of the time of writing) I’ll be making that pilgrimage in a matter of days. If you see me there, feel free to come over and punch me. Or, y’know, just say hi. I’ll have some limited-edition printed copies of “PASS” to give out. For more information on that - and for infrequent Transformers-related musings and updates on future projects - wander on over to my twitter!

What are those future projects? Well, after the convention I’m planning to release an original short story. It’s not very good, but it��s got a few stylistic similarities to this comic (read: lots of swearing). I might have a little bit in the way of Transformers prose coming out down the line, but can’t really elaborate further on the form that’ll take. I’ve been planning to get back to Huskyquest for ages, and hopefully I’ll finally be able to do so once I settle back down at university. After that, I plan to focus my efforts on prose, so you may as well expect more radio silence from me.

If you’ve made it to the end of this almost-fifteen-thousand-word monstrosity, you, uhh... win all my internet points? Sorry, that’s all I have.

Remind me never to do this again.

[nicholaspopkey]

A letter to Caro

Dear Caro,

Hoping to respond in some adequacy to your beautiful letter (see below), I’d first like to point out the irony of two millennials writing to each other in this ancient yet digitized form of correspondence. While you and I have exchanged postcards in the past, does this fact exempt us from having to put pen to paper to create letters? Does this posting count as a letter, or is "letter" just a label?

Thoughts coming to me now, hardly relevant. As for teaching me the word tenido, I couldn't thank you enough. It made me think of 'he tenido,' which of course means 'I have had.' It was funny to me, because a tenido is something I have never had. My references for the softness and satisfaction of such a settee come from fond memories of blanket forts I made as a kid. The euphoria of collapsing onto your plush daybed in its enveloping coziness! 

Your letter felt like a childhood memory focusing soft to sharp. I could listen for ages to your descriptions of rainy days, their 'heavy sheets' and the 'cold seeping in,' as well as more stories from your past detailing your appreciation for precipitation.

I understand your frustration with a lack of female representation in both required and popular reading. I agree that female authors should be prioritized and celebrated just as much as male authors. Unfortunately, opportunities to become an author continue to abound much greater for men than for women. It was powerful to read you come to the realization that even your own list of favorites would be majority male if stretched out long enough, since the numbers are so far in their favor. The goal you made to try and discover more female authors is commendable and should be pursued. 

As it turns out, Agatha Christie, like Sylvia Plath, had a husband who put her through very difficult circumstances. Her disappearance, motivated by her adulterous husband asking for a divorce, was seen by the public not as a reaction to an unhappy relationship but, rather unfairly, as a publicity stunt. Murder On The Orient Express is now at the top of my list. On the same list of best-selling fiction authors, I stumbled upon Barbara Cartland, another woman I didn't hear about growing up. She was a famous romance novelist who holds the Guinness World Record for most novels published in one year.

My dad stocked the fridge with a Costco-pack of kombucha. It was a really sweet gesture, because he knows I love this bohemian tonic. Normally I'd wonder as to how I could finish them all by the time I go back to L.A., but I'll be here until the 29th, so I know it's enough time. He's enlisted my help moving furniture around the house as he redesigns his study. My dad has a pet rat named Monty, who originally belonged to my sister. She couldn't take him with her from Boise to Santa Barbara, because her roommate didn't want to live with a rat. This roommate is quite another story altogether. As she gears up to move out, their relationship sputters with drama and turmoil. Monty climbs around in a cage in my dad's living room next to the lawyer's bookcase, filled with his rarest anthologies. 

So far I've seen my mom twice. Today at the bookstore we shared a cappuccino, then ended up sitting in her rental car discussing gift ideas, the lighter side of some extended-family dynamics, and plans for ten years from now. We're driving to Tetonia, ID on Saturday to visit her mother, my grandmother. My sister will also be there, although my aunt, who recently had her first successful art show in fifteen years, will be staying in Boise to paint. She said the sales from the show disappeared pretty quickly, so financial burdens must be weighing heavily on her at the moment, although she happens to be working a lot, as well as making art. I’m happy to be home. Looking forward to hearing back from you.

With love, 

Nick

@carolovesapples

______________________________________________________________________

RE:

Dear Nick,

I have set my timer for one hour, and I am beginning by writing you this letter. I’ve brought out all the fluffy blankets in my apartment (I have three, total) and folded them neatly in a tendido on the floor. A tendido, in case you weren’t aware, is a pile of blankets, usually folded in half, which act as a makeshift mattress so you can sleep on the floor comfortably. Quilts, comforters, and sleeping bags can also be used. Air mattresses do not count, as they too closely resemble an actual bed. So here I am, sitting on my tendido in front of my bookcase. It is raining, and I’ve been watching tv all day. I’ve opened my blinds and the windows so I can hear the rainfall outside. It’s lessened now to more of a trickle, but just a second ago it was really “coming down out there”! 

I recently watched the movie Paddington, in which a rare bear from Darkest Peru travels to London and finds a home (much like I intend to do, one day). In preparation for his journey to England, he learned 107 different ways to say, “its raining!”, one of which is “perfect weather for ducks”, which is my personal favorite as ducks are my favorite animal. So, here in Los Angeles, it is perfect weather for ducks, and for that reason I am sitting down on my tendido in front of my bookshelves perusing three books: 

1. On Filmmaking, by Alexander MacKendrick

2. Notes on the Cinematograph, by Robert Bresson, a French director, and

3. How to Win Friends and Influence People, by the one and only Dale Carnegie.

It’s not really about the books, of course. It’s about the rain. When I was little, on rainy days we used to open the garage door and the back of my mom’s minivan, and we would sit in the trunk and watch it come down. My dad would make hot chocolate, and we’d watch the rain, pouring down in gray sheets on our little street. Rainy days have always been my favorite days. They’re the best days for reading, when the cold seeps into the house and you curl up with a book and fluffy socks and a bag of hot Cheetos. They’re also great for writing, because as anyone who has ever listened to Florence + the Machine knows, water is one of the most poetic concepts there is. And then there’s photography, of course. The lighting on rainy, gloomy days has always been my favorites. In fact, every time I’ve traveled to a new place I’ve loved, it’s been raining. New York, Boston, Park City, Minnesota, London. I feel at home in the rain. It’s a familiar comfort. Maybe it was the novelty of a rainy day in Southern California, but they have never ceased to feel special to me. Additionally, rain means I can wear my rain boots and step in puddles, and my yellow raincoat, and I can feel as close to Paddington Bear as I ever will. If you take away anything from this letter, it should definitely be that Paddington Bear is my new hero. 

I’ve an announcement. It is this: in between ending the previous paragraph and starting this one, that I took a quick break because it occurred to me that I still hadn’t read your post on “The Mind’s Free Market” and now having done so I am feeling: very proud, and impressed, and quite frankly, rather envious. But mostly proud and impressed, those are the important emotions. The envy is a thing I feel often when I encounter good writing. It is a good sort of envy, one that pushes me to be better. The thought process goes like this: I’ll read something that resonates (or hear it), and my mind will be blown that the author could so perfectly capture the thought or feeling that their writing evoked in me. Perhaps I am putting the cart in front of the horse here: I am reacting to what is written and marveling at how the author created that reaction in me, when in reality, I will react however I will react and then attribute it to them. They couldn’t have known I would think one way or another about it, but the important part is that any good writing will pull from you some sort of emotional reaction. 

Side note: Yesterday I was hanging out with a friend who didn’t know who Sylvia Plath was, and that made me simultaneously sad for both him and the American education system. To expand: why is it that the majority of writers we study in middle school and high school are mainly men, if not all? I am trying to think about it and I cannot remember a single female writer we read before I went to college. I know why it is, of course, as the accomplishments of men have always been much lauded over the accomplishments of women in any field, but it is still incredibly frustrating. 

As I finished typing, Maya Angelou’s name came to mind, but so far no others. I remember reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald and of course Shakespeare, and Albert Camus’s L’Étranger. We did read Agatha Christie in seventh grade and she remains one of my favorite authors to date (I am looking at five different novels of hers on my shelves as I type this). But we focused so much more on the male authors that no one remembers the few women we did study. I’ve mentioned Agatha Christie’s name on several occasions to various different people and nine times out of ten, no one knew who she was, which is absolutely ridiculous, especially because she is the world’s best selling author, tied only by William Shakespeare. AND as if we needed any more evidence of the women’s accomplishments being downplayed over mens, in any online list regarding the world’s best selling author you will find Shakespeare’s name listed above Christie’s even though they are both estimated to have sold from 2-4 billion books, Christie having written 85 before her death to Shakespeare’s 42. Additionally, “Agatha Christie” comes before “William Shakespeare” alphabetically, and unless someone can show me evidence that Shakespeare has sold more that Christie I see this as a great affront and a deliberate attempt to downplay women’s accomplishments in favor of a man’s. 

Update: I have looked and found that on Christie’s website it IS stated that she is outsold by only the Bible and Shakespeare, so the point is valid, but I spent a full ten minutes on my rant about their rankings so I’m leaving it in with this correction. I still would like to see empirical proof however, that Shakespeare has definitively sold more than Christie. If you subtract the number of people who bought Shakespeare solely as a class requirement, I’m sure her number would overshadow his, but I am biased. Anyways, the few people who did remember who Agatha Christie was only did so because of the remake of the film adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express that came out last year, but lets face it, it never stood a chance because the original starred Lauren Bacall and Ingrid Bergman and Albert Finney, and the remake stars Johnny Depp, who hits women. 

In closing, we should incorporate more female authors and writers into our curriculum. I’d heard of Virginia Woolf in when I was in school, but we never read her in class. We spent a week or two on Emily Dickinson. We were never read the Brontë sisters, nor Jane Austen. And they’re the more well known authors. 

Anyways, when I read Plath or García Lorca or any of my other favorite poets and authors I always feel a yearning to be able to articulate my thoughts and emotions the way they do. I will conclude this letter with a list of some of my favorite authors writers, and lyricists, in no particular order. 

Agatha Christie

Florence Welch

Sylvia Plath

Maggie Stiefvater

Mary Oliver

Albert Camus

Robert Frost

Kurt Vonnegut

Alex Turner

I have many more but I’ve arrived at an almost even number of men and women and sadly I know that if I continue there will be more men than women on my list and that makes me sad. One of my goals will be to discover more female authors in my reading. Many of my favorite female authors are young adult novelists and honestly I think they’re amazing. 

In conclusion, please read a novel by Agatha Christie. I recommend Murder on the Orient Express, Mysterious Affair at Styles, or They Do It With Mirrors, although really, you can’t go wrong with any of her titles. Additionally, please watch Paddington, it is an amazing heart warming movie. 

With love,

Caro 

@nicholaspopkey​

[micaramel]

Artists: Christine Jornod, Elisa Larvego, Samuel Lecocq, Florent Meng, Mélanie Veuillet

Venue: Air de Paris

Exhibition Title: Littéralement et dans tous les sens

Curated by: Bruno Serralongue

Date: March 24 – May 19, 2018

Curated by: Bruno Serralongue

Click here to view slideshow

Samuel Lecocq, Fragility and Obsolescence, 2017, HD video, 10 minutes 10 seconds looped

Full gallery of images, press release, and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images and video courtesy of Air de Paris, Paris. Photos by Marc Domage. 

Press Release:

The exhibition Littéralement et dans tous les sens brings together five artist-photographers who studied at some point in their career at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD) where I teach Information/fiction since its creation in 2011. Far from being a retrospective and without attempting to show the diversity and wealth that characterizes the practice of photography at the school, the exhibition, which does not have a specific theme, is intentionally subjective. First shown at Centre de la Photographie Genève by Joerg Bader, it enables me to experiment and by holding another role, allows me to express a certain stance with regard to photography. However, the exhibition Littéralement et dans tous les sens is not a manifesto, although perhaps the title can be read as one. It is an excerpt from a letter by Arthur Rimbaud to his mother and to me, it seemed appropriate for a photography exhibition.

Photography has often been criticized for being too literal. Even today, a certain element of mistrust prevails with regard to the medium, even if it is no longer viewed in the same terms as it was in the 19th century, when it was criticized not for its inability to choose one element to focus on in a composition, but for describing everything literally, without hierarchy, and with the same precision. For this reason, it could never compete with painting (in other words, a photograph would never be an artistic image). Lots of photographers have literally proved that photography is not painting, in every sense possible. And this demonstration pushed them to define what exactly photography was—sometimes even placing it outside art. For example, in 1981 in the text of the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Ils se disent peintres, ils se disent photographes, Michel Nuridsany quoted a statement made by Christian Boltanski during a discussion about the aforementioned exhibition: ‘Photography is photo journalism, the rest is painting’. As recently as 2006, Jeff Wall admitted that he himself had led a struggle against a certain idea of photography, that of reportage, but that he had lost, that photography is always reportage, and that he felt ‘rather happy to have lost’. Undoubtedly these two artists were referring, each in their own way, to the same thing: that ‘the photographic image that results from the process of recording, is not essentially, a product of the imagination’.

It’s true. One of photography’s most important operations is certainly not imagination but selection. This occurs at all stages in the production of a photographic image. It begins with the choice of subject, the terrain into which the photographer plans to delve, and continues right up to the moment of the shot and beyond, to all stages of post-production. Every photographic project begins with a decision. Interestingly, the word terrain resonates strongly with the notion of movement. As everyone knows: in order to take photographs, one needs to move. Raising the question as to where. The destination is certainly important but on the condition that this is not the sole criteria of the artwork. I think that none of the five photographers participating in this exhibition was especially interested in depicting the reality of the Alps, Mexico, or a refugee camp in Calais. Of course, by choosing to go to a certain place, their photographs are the record of the specific data of each place. But beyond these specifics, each and every one of these photographers is on a quest to capture the present time, the actuality, and in so doing, they designate the direction of a future, not always a cheerful one for that matter, particularly for the Western world, where incarceration appears as the dominant image of our way of life and it looks as though this is set to last, or so these photographs seem to tell us.

Mélanie Veuillet in her series Tools of Disobedience photographed objects illegally made by inmates inside Swiss prisons: objects used for comfort, defence, attack or escapism. Samuel Lecocq on the other hand, visits the first and only deradicalization centre in France, where he attempts to understand how enclosure is intended to put offenders back on the right track. But where exactly is this track and which one is the right one? Does it lead through the desert? Is it a path that puts people’s lives at risk as they attempt to migrate to the first world, attracted by its wealth and abundance? This is what Florent Meng seems to suggest in the series realized on the border between Mexico and the US, in the town of Sasabe. Or is it a path that leads to a makeshift camp on the French coast opposite England? Does one need to hurl oneself against the walls of mountains and climb them at the risk of losing one’s life?

Through their studies, each of these five photographers has learned that the terrain is saturated with media-friendly images and that it is through such images that we read and understand the world. But more important than this, they have learned to combat such representations through a meticulous work on form. It is for this reason that these photographs and video share a certain sense of peace. It is from a boat floating peacefully on the river Loire on a sunny afternoon that a woman’s voice tells us about the deradicalization centre in Samuel Lecocq’s video Fragility and Obsolescence. When people are photographed, they seem relaxed, confident. By choosing to have volunteers pose for photographs alongside refugees in the series Chemin des Dunes, Elisa Larvego voluntarily challenges (our?) police-like tendencies to identify and categorize. The horizontal shots of the Arizona desert by Florent Meng and vertical shots of the Alps by Christelle Jornod are strikingly beautiful. Their clear and limpid composition reinforce the impression of insurmountable barriers.

We see the world through form. This idea has allowed me to think about fiction in the way that Philippe Dubois imagines it in a text on contemporary photography. For him, fiction is the best way of theoretically apprehending the status of the contemporary photographic image. In this way, photography is no longer the trace of ‘something “that was there” in the real world but something “that is here” in front of us, something we can accept (or reject), not as a trace of something that once was, but for what it is, or more precisely for what it shows itself to be: a “possible world”, neither more nor less, but one which exists in parallel with the real or actual world’. (3). Here, it’s about not forgetting the representation of the actual world. Or rather, it’s about not leaving the representation of the actual world to those who rely on ‘it was’. It’s about opening up, in every sense of the word, the scope of perspectives and thinking about what constitutes the world. This is something done by all five of these artist-photographers.

Bruno Serralongue

(1) Jean-François Chevrier, ‘Documents de culture, documents d’expérience’ in Communications. Des faits et des gestes, no.79, Paris: Seuil, 2006, p. 63. The quotations by Jeff Wall are taken from the same issue of Communications, p. 187. (2) At the time of writing this text, I was reading a book by the philosopher Christiane Vollaire: Pour une philosophie de terrain. Taking inspiration from certain philosophers who had abandoned the ivory tower of philosophy for sociology and a commitment to action on the ground (Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Simone Weil), she gives a brilliant and sensitive analysis on the motivations behind such a transition, of this descent towards the terrain, which she herself experienced. My insistence on the notion of ‘terrain’ owes much to her book. (3) Philippe Dubois, ‘De l’image-trace à l’image-fiction. Le mouvement des théories de la photographie de 1980 à nos jours’ in Etudes Photographiques, no. 34, 2016, p.60.

Link: “Littéralement et dans tous les sens” at Air de Paris

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[loriglessner]

Happy first day of Spring, my Art Bite Blog friends!!

Continuing from my last post on the topic of marks, as I sit down to write this post about the process of my recent acrylic and gouache paintings, (and pictured above) I realize I can’t write about them without first thinking about where and how the marks in these paintings originated. I also took into consideration the many conversations I’ve had with students and workshop participants regarding approaching galleries with a consistent ‘style’ or ‘voice’ and how an artist acquires such things. I look at my work from five years ago and it’s so drastically different from what I do today, yet when I look at the total evolution across the span of twenty years, I can see why the total body is related and it’s an interesting path. Giving lectures about my work has enabled me to chronologically trace back to where I am today, but I only go as far back as grad school and rarely go back that far anymore. I’ve recently started a huge studio clean-out and as a result I’ve come across work that I’ve long forgotten about. Seeing this work again is what prompted me to go back even further, to delve into some of the reasons why I do what I do today. I would like to explore that path a bit in this post and in a few future posts. Perhaps reading about my journey will help you to develop and/or trace your own.

I first considered art as a career in high school with the discovery of Hieronymus Bosch, Georgia O’Keefe and Wassily Kandinsky, not necessarily at the same time or in that order. My high school boyfriend’s father had a huge book of Bosch’s paintings and we would stare at it for hours. I loved the tremendous detail, the chaotic imagination and narrative. These paintings taught me to spend time, look further, to notice the small things not overtly apparent at first glance. I hope to encourage the viewer to do the same with my work by my adding camouflaged details one has to look to find. I was intrigued by O’Keefe’s voluptuous, sensual and simplified forms, use of color, subtle shading, smooth brushstroke and feminine subject matter. At that time, I had never seen any work similar to hers-mine was a more traditional exposure to art with pastoral landscape, tight still life and other popular art/craft of the 70’s, like scary clowns, bull riders and macrame owls…but I digress. I read everything I could about O’Keefe, poured over her work and even taught myself to successfully draw value, light and shadow by copying her drawings. I discovered Kandinsky around the beginning of undergrad and was literally blown away by the abstract expressionist ideas of communicating emotions through marks, patterns, gesture and color and that one could make a whole painting by simply being inspired by the emotions and melodies evoked by music. This approach to art making was totally foreign, yet it resonated with me almost immediately and I saw in my mind the art I wanted to make. Even though it isn’t obvious, I see the influence of O’Keefe’s wonderful forms and Kandinsky’s rhythmic marks in almost all of my work of the past 30 years. See the images below for some of my favorite paintings by these artists.

Although it was not my choice, I went to design school instead of art school…Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, now Philadelphia University and my major was textile design. Throughout my schooling and subsequent ten year career as a textile designer, I learned the fundamentals of design..composition, color, scale, repetition, etc. and acquired a detailed painting hand by countless hours of DOING. My first job out of school was as a jacquard designer for home furnishings. The company was unique in that I could take on a line of fabrics and design everything from start to finish-from the painted designs, to choosing the weaves and colors, to correcting errors in the weaving mill and on the computer. I learned an exponential amount about all aspects of design and because I had to spend hours correcting the shape of a flower on the computer if I painted outside the lines, I developed a very tight painting hand and eye for detail. The mill had been a former tie manufacturer and my bosses, the new owners, had kept within the traditional style of florals, damasks and allover patterns, small to large scale. Designing fabrics for a large scale area like a wall or sofa presents certain problems in that the design must ‘flow’ evenly without certain elements creating a distracting line. Looking out for these kinds of design no-no’s helped me develop an excellent eye for balance and placement as well as that continuous flowing line still so prevalent in my work today.

After nostalgically writing that last paragraph, I must confess that I hated that textile designer job, I found so much of it creatively stifling and perfection seeking. Thirty years later, I am grateful for certain aspects of working as a designer and I’m certain I wouldn’t be the artist I am today without that early training. See the second group of images below where I have included some of my hand painted designs from that job. Keep in mind that the colors in the paintings only represent different weaves and not necessarily the colors used in the final fabric. It’s fun to look at these designs and see how my textile design background influenced my early encaustic paintings (and pictured below) as well as a tiny flicker of my recent acrylic and gouache series. If you don’t yet notice that tiny flicker, I will fill in the blanks as to where the marks in that series come from in a near future post.

Please don’t be discouraged if you don’t have thirty years to devote to developing your voice, or if your first career choice wasn’t a creative endeavor as mine was, a lot can be achieved with determination, maturity and persistence. As I have mentioned in many previous posts, drawing a little bit everyday is the road to developing your own mark. One of my favorite quotes from my favorite book, Art & Fear tells it like it is…What you need to know about the next piece is contained in the last piece. The place to learn about your materials is the last use of your materials. The place to learn about your execution is in your execution. The best information about what you love is in your last contact with what you love. Put simply, your work is your guide. In time, as an artists gestures become more assured, the chosen tools become almost an extension of the artists own spirit. In time, exploration gives way to expression. If you’re determined and persisting in working everyday, even if it’s a 15 minute drawing, you will achieve your artistic goals…guaranteed!

I hope you have enjoyed this post and it helps you in some way. As always, I look forward to your comments, questions and suggestions-the comments section is located at the upper left sidebar of this post. Stay tuned for an exciting April-a two part series focusing on inspiring hikes for artists with contributions from some of my artist friends. Covering hikes from all over the world, remote and urban, these hikes range from other-worldly to tranquil to transcendental.

Enjoy the first day of spring, see you soon.

Working Title/Artist: Black Iris Department: Modern Art Culture/Period/Location: HB/TOA Date Code: Working Date: 1926 photographed by mma in 1983, transparency 2a scanned by film & media 6/8/04 (phc)

Working Title/Artist: Drawing XIII Department: Modern Art Culture/Period/Location: HB/TOA Date Code: Working Date: 1915 photography by mma 1997, transparency #3A scanned and retouched by film and media (jn) 12_15_04

Image Descriptions (From left to right, top to bottom)

Georgia O’Keefe, Black Iris, 1926

Georgia O’Keefe, Drawing XIII-I copied this drawing over and over, obsessed with learning to draw this way.

Georgia O’Keefe, Drawing X, charcoal on paper

Georgia O’Keefe, Blue and Green Music, 1919

Georgia O’Keefe, Music, Pink and Blue, 1918-I had a framed poster of this painting in my room through high school, college and my first apartment.

Georgia O’Keefe, Special Drawing No 9, charcoal on paper, 1915 -I remember reading in her biography that this drawing was done while she had a headache, I found it fascinating that she was able to capture such a thing.

Wassily Kandinsky, Yellow Red Blue, 1925

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913, one of my all time favorite paintings.

Wassily Kandinsky, Blue Circle, 1922

Hieronymus Bosch, Concert in the Egg

Hieronymus Bosch, detail, Garden of Earthly Delights

Hieronymus Bosch, detail, Garden of Earthly Delights

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition IX, 1936

Hieronymus Bosch, detail, Garden of Earthly Delights

Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights

Wassily Kandinsky, A Center, 1924

  Image Descriptions (From left to right, top to bottom)

1-7.  Lorraine Glessner, home furnishing textile designs for Jacquard Fabrics, Inc., gouache on Bristol board, circa 1991-94. 8. Lorraine Glessner, Sprawl, encaustic, mixed media on rust printed silk on wood, 12x12x1, 2006 9. Lorraine Glessner, Seed, encaustic, mixed media on rust printed silk on wood, 12x12x1, 2006 10. Lorraine Glessner, Misguided Angel Redux, encaustic, mixed media on rust printed silk on wood, 36x36x1.5, 2010 11. Lorraine Glessner, Flaupher, encaustic, mixed media on rust printed silk on wood, 12x12x1, 2006 12. Lorraine Glessner, Aggregate, encaustic, mixed media on rust printed silk on wood, 24x42x1, 2006 13. Lorraine Glessner, Crush, encaustic, mixed media on rust printed silk on wood, 24x2x1.5, 2010 14. Lorraine Glessner, Perfect Timing, encaustic, mixed media on rust printed silk on wood, 12x12x1, 2006

How does an artist acquire a consistent style or voice? In this post, I trace how and where from my personal mark evolved. Happy first day of Spring, my Art Bite Blog friends!! Continuing from my last post on the topic of marks, as I sit down to write this post about the process of…

[dargerhq]

Underneath, Around, & In Between: Notes On An Image Practice

It’s coming up on almost six months since the US presidential inauguration & I’ve been making a drawing a day every day for Donald since January 20th. I’ve been pretty good about sticking to this. Granted, sometimes I miss a day, but I have too much Protestant upbringing and Catholic schooling not to feel guilty if I forget, so I try to double or triple up when I miss them. I post them on Instagram, sometimes Facebook, and have been doing a really poor job of archiving them on my website. In any case, this has been a daily way of staying engaged, thinking through the strangeness of the current global political climate and getting a different kind of language out in the world.

But how do you keep up a daily practice without it getting stagnant?

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I once taught an Advanced Painting Studio at a large university and for a midterm assignment I asked 14 students to make 10 paintings in two weeks. Now to some that might not sound like very much (how about 10 paintings in three days?), but to these students this seemed virtually impossible. They were all juniors and seniors who saw themselves as “painters,” not artists, and had come to rely heavily on technique, but no vision. They each had an over-inflated sense of signature style and they were pretty sold on there being a right way to make a painting. I wanted to break all of that. They were horrified by the idea of making 10 paintings in two weeks because they’d been used to making 2 or 3 in a semester. Needless to say, they were even more up in arms when I made them sign a contract that said, à la Baldassari, “I will not make any more boring art.” In their eyes, nothing they’d ever made was boring. 

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All the Drawings for Donald use text and, so far, every one of them begins with the words “Dear Donald.” When I started the series, I used black Sumi ink on 9”x9” paper from a Fabriano notebook called quadratto. Squared. Occasionally, I added a bit of red ink, cake gel, glitter, or switched to the vermillion Sumi ink. A dash of cake gel or purple glitter felt like the perfect confectionary touch for an immensely confectionary presidency. 

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Not all, but many of the students in the Advanced Painting studio produced the best work of the semester for 10-painting project. Repetition and temporal constraints forced them to produce things in ways they never had. One student who had a lot of figurative chops painted a series of 10 self-portraits. They were still pretty boring at first, but once he loosened up and decided he didn’t have to glaze every piece and do an underpainting, he began to see both himself and the idea of a portrait in new ways. The last one he did was the best. He had a very hard time with that idea though because it took him almost no time and it was just a “quick, easy” piece (his words) that wasn’t as serious as the others. 

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When you practice something every day (or almost every day), you evolve. Be it yoga, meditation, portraiture, prayer, sobriety, martial arts, an instrument etc., a part of you morphs. Inevitably, a part of you develops as the practice deepens. This could be muscular, mnemonic, or the ability to see or hear something you hadn’t before. 

But repetition in practice is funny. For me, and perhaps for a lot of people, I think it’s two-sided. On the one hand, I crave patterns and structure. The limitations free me. On the other, the shear boredom of repeating the same things over and over keeps me wanting to reinvent the process. It’s a fine line. Repetition lets you deepen the process and allows for unforeseen discoveries, but how do you also deepen repetition?

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When I got tired of ink on Fabriano paper, I started drawing on dark room prints. 

The whole time I was making my Donald Drawings, I had been working very intensely in the darkroom. For two months, I used just two negatives, fragmenting, layering, and manipulating the printed image. I was less interested in making a “perfect print” and more so in making something that was about discovering all the possibilities in a negative; like pulling out all the hidden stories. 

Repetition again, but the lack of total control in tweaking and layering the image was very exciting. How long could you keep reinterpreting a single image?  How many new spaces could you extract?

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I know plenty of people who never want to reinvent themselves or their practice, but as a mentor and friend said to me recently, the people who grow the most are the people who diversify their work in life. 

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I had had a dream in which my daughter’s flute teacher was giving a multimedia presentation to an audience on Goethe’s book on color. It was extremely vivid and for awhile I had no idea what it was trying to tell me, other than reminding me that my daughter and her teacher talk a lot about color. 

But the dream seemed to be guiding me to do something with that book. Goethe wanted to see and know everything. His book on colors is no exception: he writes extensively on color in things like beer bubbles, or in the prismatic, oily surface of a just-poured cup of coffee. And then I thought, if Goethe is the pinnacle of joyous knowing and careful observation, our president is the strict antithesis. 

I started incorporating bits of Goethe into my text to Donald

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“For me, practice has a different meaning. It is the consistent willingness to open to life in all its pain and joy." -Judith Lasater. How could you create an image practice that aspires to this idea? What would it mean to open up the photographic image in this way? I don't mean to capture a moment with a camera, but to open up the image itself; something against the purity of the image. 

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Quadratto, squared. The square is where the Drawings for Donald started and recently, I’ve returned to it, but this time a smaller one. 

I like the medium format polaroid as a final product for a number of reasons. That little frame. How far can it be pushed? And aren’t we saturated in squares? While a Mamiya’s polaroid back produces an image bigger than the Hasselblad CM, the CM will give you something just about the size of your phone’s Instagram feed. That’s interesting; analogue Instagram. 

Also, the vacant space. That space between things that matters as much as the things themselves. 

In a sense these Polaroids are a combination of the blank paper drawings and the darkroom remixes, but flipped. They’re also finite, unlike the darkroom prints, which present a refreshing problem to repeat. 

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I think you can also practice things that we don’t always associate with traditional notions of consistency associated with practice. Like you could practice eclecticism. Or practice mobility and transience. Or you could practice shape-shifting. It’s interesting to think about cultivating a practice of these kinds. Different kinds of consistency might evolve and get us elsewhere. 

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Juno, Jupiter and the art of citizen science

With political and moral life here on earth being in utter turmoil, images of/from Jupiter beamed down to our little planet by the Juno space probe have recently kept me sane (as far as that’s possible). They brought with them glimpses of beauty and moments of wistfulness.

A year or so ago, I wrote a blog post about Juno, the space probe, and Jupiter, the planet, when Juno was approaching Jupiter. There you can find some more info on the mission. In this post I just wanted to marvel at some of the images which Juno managed to beam down to us. While doing this, I found something out about these pictures that I didn’t know! (And the scientists pouring over them found out that there is lots they don’t know about Jupiter!)

Marbled paper, wallpaper and famous paintings

First I saw this image of Jupiter’s cloud tops (on twitter). It reminded me of a special type of paper used in old books! In the case of Jupiter the marbling occurs naturally but I wonder whether there is some overlap in the physical and chemical processes involved. If you want to know more about the extremely interesting culture and science of marbling, read on here.

The subtitle for this marvellous marbling image says: “This enhanced color view of Jupiter’s cloud tops was processed by citizen scientist Bjorn Jonsson using data from the JunoCam instrument on NASA’s Juno spacecraft. The image highlights a massive counterclockwise rotating storm that appears as a white oval in the gas giant’s southern hemisphere.”(bold added) Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Bjorn Jonsson 

When initially searching for this image in order to put in this post, I also found another one (or rather, it seems, the same, but rendered differently). I came across it in a blog post that asked whether people associated it with Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’, or, indeed, cotton candy.

The subtitle to this image says: “The swirling clouds on Jupiter, shown in an image captured by the JunoCam instrument on the Juno spacecraft, and processed by citizen scientist Roman Tkachenko.” (bold added) Credit: Roman Tkachenko/NASA

From these sub-titles and from the blog post in which this last image was used, I learned that these images are produced by citizen scientists, or rather, as I’d call them citizen science-artists. The blog post explains: “The raw images that JunoCam sends back to Earth usually don’t look like much, but they contain information that can be extracted with imaging processing and color correcting. The resulting images can highlight particular features in the cloud tops, or re-create what the planet might look like to human eyes up close. Most of the work that has gone into processing the JunoCam images has been done by citizen scientists. The JunoCam team posts the raw image files online, and anyone can take them, process them and post the final result on the JunoCam website. Some users do extreme processing, creating amazing works of art, while others work on the images in such a way as to reveal new features and assist in the pursuit of knowledge about this planet.”

When searching for the first image, I also found yet another image called “Jupiter wallpaper”

The description below this image says (I have left out paragraphs): “When team members from NASA’s Juno mission invited the public to process JunoCam images, they did not anticipate that they would receive back such beautiful, creative expressions of art. The oranges and grayed-out regions of blue-green in this tiled and color-enhanced image resemble a color scheme much like Romantic era paintings, but more abstract. The lack of discreet objects to focus on allows the mind to seek familiar Earthly shapes, and the brightest spots seem to draw the eye. Eric Jorgensen created this Jovian artwork with a JunoCam image taken when the spacecraft was at an altitude of 11,100 miles (17,800 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloudtops on Dec. 11, 2016 at 9:22 a.m. PT (12:22 p.m. ET).” (bold added)

I hadn’t realised how much citizen-science art goes into the creation of these images! Popular images of galaxies beamed down by the Hubble space telescope are usually artistically rendered by NASA scientists, as far as I know. They have been studied for the way they get their colouring inspirations from Romantic paintings, for example. This type of analysis should also be carried out for these citizen-science-artists. One might even want to ask them about where they get their inspiration from!

Those interested in this topic can read Elizabeth Kessler’s book Picturing the Cosmos or Coloring the Universe by Travis Rector, Kimberly Arcand, and Megan Watzke.

A glittering geode and a song

After marvelling at these marbling images, I then saw in image of Jupiter’s south pole that was truly stunning and quite different. It reminded me of the geodes I collected with my father many years ago. These “are spherical rocks that contain hollow cavities lined with crystals. The name geode comes from the Greek word Geoides, which means ‘earthlike.'” For me, there is nothing earth-like about this one though (apart from its shape); but it’s certainly a jewel.

The subtitle for this image reads: “This image shows Jupiter’s south pole, as seen by NASA’s Juno spacecraft from an altitude of 32,000 miles (52,000 kilometers). The oval features are cyclones, up to 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) in diameter. Multiple images taken with the JunoCam instrument on three separate orbits were combined to show all areas in daylight, enhanced color, and stereographic projection.” Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles (I am not totally sure who Betsy Asher Hall and Gervasio Robles are, but a related image of the south pole was created by citizen scientist Gabriel Fiset.)

This image also reminded me of some verses of the song “Starry, starry night”, namely: “Starry, starry night; Flaming flowers that brightly blaze; Swirling clouds and violet haze”. Other people may have other associations, of course. A “blue marble, shimmering with swirling gold sand“, perhaps…

Is that Orion that I see before me?

The last image I came across before drafting this post was of Orion, my favourite constellation, but seen from a totally different angle, namely, through the ring of Jupiter – I could see Orion from another world!

The description explains: “As NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew through the narrow gap between Jupiter’s radiation belts and the planet during its first science flyby, Perijove 1, on August 27, 2016, the Stellar Reference Unit (SRU-1) star camera collected the first image of Jupiter’s ring taken from the inside looking out. The bright bands in the center of the image are the main ring of Jupiter’s ring system. While taking the ring image, the SRU was viewing the constellation Orion. The bright star above the main ring is Betelgeuse, and Orion’s belt can be seen in the lower right.” Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI

All this brought to mind (yet again) the oft-quoted passage from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788): “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” I just wish that more people would make that connection between the starry heavens above them, which we can now view in every-increasing detail, and the moral law within them, of which we are losing sight.

Science, art and citizens

It is interesting that these images the Juno gave us of Jupiter are so other-worldly, but at the same time we feel so at home in them. This is partly because we make these images in our image. We render the unfamiliar familiar by seeing the images of the starry heavens above us through the lenses of art and culture. These images are not just marvels of science and technology. They are also products of our imagination. This imagination, which feeds art and science alike, is shared by scientists and citizens and, of course, citizen scientists/artists. It should be shared as widely as possible among us citizens of the world.

Public participation in the Juno mission is actively encouraged. As Calla Cofield at Space.com points out: “The JunoCam project not only lets citizen scientists process Juno’s raw data and create amazing images, but also welcomes citizens to vote on which features JunoCam should photograph during each flyby.” And “The creators of the JunoCam outreach program wanted to ‘involve the public in every aspect of what an imaging team would ordinarily be doing,’ according to Candy Hansen, a Juno co-investigator and head of the JunoCam team.” Go to the JunoCam website for further information- participate, create, share and communicate!

Featured image: Wikimedia commons

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