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blueyesandleatherjacket · 6 years ago

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Ghost of you, 16/?

Volume: 1.

Number of parts: 16/?.

Pairings: Human!Nine x Rose; Human!Ten x Jack; Clara Oswald x Olivia Baxter (OC).

Synopsis: "He went straight to the restricted area where he had locked Colin and dismissed the guard standing there. He needed to talk with the scientist alone. It wouldn’t be nice."

A/N: I've started writing this fiction last year after I had a particularly weird dream (as usual) and after I wrote the prologue, I've put it aside to work on other stuff. I've gone back to it not so long ago and decided that it would be the fiction I would post next, after not posting anything for a while. I must have watched I am legend and Game of thrones way too much to come out with something like this but I hope you will like it. I am not a scientist, nor did I have a particular knowledge of sciences. I do my researches on the internet like everyone to make sure everything is as close to the reality as possible. I have a literature degree only. Writing is what I do and it makes me explore next fields, and learn new things.

“We're all capable of the most incredible change. We can evolve while still staying true to who we are. We can honour who we've been and choose who we want to be next.” - Doctor Who.

CHAPTER 16:

Tegan hadn’t given anyone any explanation. After he was told by Camden that the scientist that maybe was behind this entire nightmare was called Myrtle Appleton, his brain had frozen on the information and he had known where to go for the next information to get. He was furious and his quick steps along with his clenched fists were a good clue of this anger boiling in his veins. He went straight to the restricted area where he had locked Colin and dismissed the guard standing there. He needed to talk with the scientist alone. It wouldn’t be nice. Tegan was tired of being the good boy. He was the boss now. He was in charge. It hadn’t been easy but there he was. He stopped in front of the door and put his hands on his hips. His eye and jaw were still hurting from the fists they had met earlier but it was war wounds. Colin was outrageously relaxed for someone who had been sacked and locked away. Tegan was resisting the envy of throwing him out of the lab and letting him see how he would survive out there. It was a chance that he hadn’t done it yet since Colin was gonna be really useful if he accepted to speak. Tegan wouldn’t get inside his prison. It would be playing Colin’s game. He would just do what he had to do by staying outside. One black eye was enough for him. He observed Colin. The scientist was lain on the desk of the room and watching the ceiling. He had a smirk on his face. He didn’t seem bothered at all by the whole situation. He was annoyed to have been caught but he was living it quite well. And this was infuriating Tegan. How could this mad scientist be so happy with himself when he almost killed a man? Colin didn’t move or made anything that could let Tegan know that he had seen him. He was voluntarily ignoring him. He maybe thought that it would force the neurologist to get mad and make a mistake, but Tegan didn’t plan on losing this battle. He remained silent for a long moment. Such a long moment that Colin finally believed that he was gone without a word. Only to face him when he decided to move. He smirked and put his hands in his pockets. He was gonna play it cool. He wasn’t gonna let Tegan see how furious he was for this situation. If the man was there, it was for a good reason. He would either push him out – Colin doubted the man would have the courage to do such a thing though – or he needed something particular and that option was far more interesting for the fired scientist. “Well, you’re the last person I was expecting to come here to visit me.” Tegan didn’t reply. Not yet. He didn’t want to play that game. He was gonna let himself fall into one of Colin’s trap. This time, he was gonna be the clever manipulative one. He was gonna try at least. He couldn’t remember a time where he had manipulated someone. He was too nice for this. But times changed and so did he. “No one is allowed to come and visit you.” “Except for the gargoyles keeping me here.” “Just be glad they’re bringing you food.” “You’re still a disappointing poofta, Tegan. Unable to even throw me out when the envy is burning in you. Too much of a good heart you. It will lose you one day.” “Don’t tempt me. This crossed my mind more than once.” “You think but you don’t do anything.” “Except I’ve fired you.” “Only after I punched you twice.” “Your aggressivity is just a way to get revenge for what your older sister made you go through.” Touché. Tegan knew he had won a point at the face Colin pulled. Even if he was trying to keep a straight face, there had been a subtle change in his expression that betrayed him. His sister was his weak point. Two siblings, two brilliant but rotten scientists. “Don’t you dare looking into my personal files.” “Why not? I’m your boss now.” “Boss of nothing! You’ve fired me!” “As long as you’re here, you’re still under my responsibility. That’s why I have access to your personal files.” “But you don’t have Missy’s.” “Myrtle Appleton, distinguished specialist of the Xeroderma pigmentosum. Author of three impressive books about the disease. Dubious methods but the results are there.” “Found this on her Wikipedia page?” “They don’t mention that she’s the one who started the whole noctiagus infection.” The silence that followed this information confirmed Tegan’s words. Myrtle Appleton was the one who let the virus out of her laboratory. Was it intentional or not, it was a question that didn’t matter anymore at this point. If she was caught, she would have huge troubles. “It was an accident,” growled Colin. He wasn’t gonna let this man without family badmouthing on the only member of his. Myrtle and him used to be very close. Almost like twins. They shared the same passion for sciences, for experiences, for the dubious methods. They were both geniuses of course and they were rivals on the scientific field. Myrtle was doing better than him at the moment but he intended on beating her on her own field.

– Flashback –

Colin ran to the flat he was sharing with Myrtle in town. First, there was that alarming article in the newspaper was alarming. He was the first one to have been called after that and he had had to ask for a free afternoon to Maxence so he could fix this problem. A problem that hadn’t been fixed. Myrtle couldn’t have her job back because she had been caught paying men and women that desperately needed money to run her experiences on them. She hadn’t told them that the Xeroderma would be inoculated to them for her to try to find a cure to this disease that once killed her precious child. This disease was still haunting her twenty years later and she was constantly looking for a way to cure it, as a way to save the daughter she had loved so much, a daughter who left a hole that could never be filled in her heart. Only Colin knew that story. Most people thought that she was doing it because it was her vocation. Most scientists didn’t have a particular story with the field they were working on. They just were doing this because their natural curiosity and will to change things orientated them this way. Myrtle was this way before all this story and she couldn’t talk to anyone about this because no one would understand and she preferred dealing with this on her own anyway. This was why she was being so secret on her researches and the way she was getting her results. No one needed to know why it was so important to her to find a cure to this disease. No one needed to know why she so desperately wanted to save someone who was already dead. No one needed to know that instead of a cure, she had created something far more dangerous. “What’s the matter, Missy?” Colin always hated being bothered during a day of work, especially since he was a rival to Maxence Spitz, one of the greatest minds of this century, but he could never resist the call of troubles. So when Missy had called to tell him to come immediately, when she had told him that it was urgent and that he better get his ass back home quickly, he had answered immediately. Her words and her tone had been enough for him to run to the flat where she had been hiding since she was fired. She hadn’t stopped her experiences. Far from it. And one of them must have gone wrong. “Don’t tell me you’ve told me to rush here for nothing, Missy!” “Not so loud, brother.” She finally showed up to face him and he sighed when he saw that she was wearing her favourite purple outfit with that thing she was daring calling a hat. She also had her white smock on, which she quickly got rid off and threw on the couch. “You were gonna be late for the eclipse.” “I hope you didn’t make me run all the way to here just for this stupid eclipse Spitz has forecast.” “Actually, I was thinking you could help me with a little something.” She gestured to him the little something with her thumb and forefinger slightly spread. Colin was feeling the anger boil in him. Missy was always taking things so lightly and making fun of them when he was being more serious. One of the clearest differences between them. He leaned against the wall and folded his arms on his chest. “What have you done again?” “Time for a hide and seek game.” “I don’t want to play anything.” Missy groaned. Her brother could be so annoying sometimes but they didn’t have much time to waste. They had to leave this flat and play that hide and seek game for the sake of the world. “Okay, fine!” she sighed. “One of them escaped. He’s got the symptoms. We gotta find him.” This admission from his sister made him fly off the handle. He had always known it would happen and she had sworn it would never happen. They teamed up and while everyone was looking up to the sky, they were looking for a man with particular symptoms. Someone they couldn’t find. And that was gonna have serious consequences on the world…

– Fin –

Colin was raging now. He couldn’t believe that someone found the truth. Of course, it shouldn’t have gone this far. Him and Missy would have serious troubles if they were caught. They had known the truth of this pandemic since the beginning and they had kept it hidden. Missy was behind this whole mess and she was as unfindable as the patient zero. The situation had made communication really hard but her and Colin always found a way to get in touch with each other. He wasn’t someone who was worrying easily but Missy was his only family and he really hoped that nothing bad had happened to her. He was the only allowed to hurt her and with the situation they were in right now, he definitely was gonna make her pay for it if he was finding her before anyone else. She better be alive! “Where is she?” “As if I was gonna tell you.” Tegan had foreseen this reaction from Colin. He didn’t insist and left the corridor. Colin raised an eyebrow. He doubted that Tegan would abandon so easily. He would come back for his answers. What did he expect? That finding the patient zero would help them find a cure? Colin knew everything about this patient and he had never been able to find anything. Why would the stupid neurologist find anything? He shrugged and lay back down. The sound of the meds hatch – the food hatch in his case – followed by the sound of broken glass and the loud closing of the hatch made him move quickly. His heart stopped when he saw a broken phial on the floor. The pieces of glass were drowning in a crimson fluid that could only be blood. Tegan was standing on the other side of the door in a hazmat suit. It confirmed Colin’s fear: this blood hadn’t arrived here by accident and the ventilation was off. Tegan had decided to take drastic steps. “Are you out of your mind?!” roared Colin. “I’m perfectly fine, thanks. You’re clever enough to know what this means.” “We don’t know how the virus infects people.” “Maybe. But breathing in infected fluids always proved itself to be efficient to spread a virus.” Colin furiously hit the security window of the door. It didn’t even tremble. Tegan didn’t even blink. The man had grown a pair and Colin was paying for everything he had made him go through. He had underestimated him and now he was a prisoner of a man who could kill him in a snap of his fingers. The monster was never the one we thought. “You know what you have to do if you want to survive this.” “I don’t know where she is!” “Liar!” “I swear I don’t know! Haven’t had any news in years. You can check on my computer! There’s everything about her researches in a folder!” “Access codes?” “The Master, 17453219.” Tegan noted it all and put the little notepad and pen back in his pocket. He took a few steps away and suddenly turned around. “By the way, it isn’t infected blood. Just some food colouring. Goodnight.” The muffled roar of rage he heard after this admission was enough to bring a smile on his bruised face. He wasn’t proud to have done this. It really wasn’t like him to do such a thing. If it hadn’t been Colin, he would have felt worse. But in time of war, you needed to be cleverer than the enemy and Colin obviously was the enemy in this situation.

Myrtle Appleton was no woman to die so easily. She was still outside despite the chaos she had created. Colin had let her down in her researches for her missing patient. When he had seen the mess she had created, he had told her that he would cover her in the precious lab he was working on and find a cure but he had never managed to do such a thing. If she herself hadn’t been able to find a cure, why would he? Anyway, this cure was hers to find. It was her researches, her problem. Even if the whole world was currently working on the Xeroderma, she wouldn’t let them get all the glory. Especially not this Doctor Colin was complaining about. What was his name already? His worst rival but also his boss… she couldn’t remember. Her cerebral activity had slowed down a little bit. That’s was her fault. Now that the world was such a mess, she could pursue her researches and not be worried about the consequences of the way she was working. She could pick a subject out there and run her tests. After all, that’s what they were all doing in their precious labs. She hadn’t seen many of them outside though but she had heard rumours about vans and soldiers wandering in the streets. She was staying hidden. She didn’t want them to find her. If they knew, if Colin had spoken… No, he wouldn’t betray her like that. Even if their intelligence made them real enemies, a certain honour code was present in their genes. As well as madness. It was a trait their mother had given to them. A mother who died after giving birth to Colin. They were raised by their father, a poor guy totally overwhelmed by the evil genius of his kids. They were teenagers when he ran away and left them to handle things on their own. Their passion for unconventional experiences was already there. Sciences weren’t the only fields where they had become experts. They were redoubtable separately but together they could be the worst criminals this country ever saw. They had never been caught thankfully. It was just small things. At least, for her, it was. Colin had done terrible things with her help and now she was feeling guilty for this. Maybe that was why she had done what she did. She was alone to survive out there and it wasn’t easy. Especially when you were dragging an emotional burden like hers. Watching all those zombies wandering around the town and dying one after another was reminding her of the death of her daughter twenty years ago. This death had made her who she was but it was also what made her regret all she did. Now it was time for redemption, time to pay for all of these shits she had done. She had infected herself with the original strain of this virus she had created. All she wanted at that moment was to disappear, to die, to meet with her daughter again. However, the virus had refused to work on her. She was clearly infected. Her blood was carrying the Xeroderma molecules and the cells of the foreign body were multiplying themselves in her. For some reasons though, she wasn’t developing any symptom. With the time passing by, she had noticed that one of her eyes had gone black and that her cerebral activity was slowing down. She was affected, just not in the way she had thought. It made her a living specimen willing to be a part of the researches as an object of study. Once again, it was an act of redemption. She had created this mess, she could be a part of the solution. She would assume all the consequences that would follow. She had looked for the still opened laboratories all around the country and she hadn’t been surprised to find out that the CRCD was the only one still in activity. The biggest lab of the country obviously had been the one chosen for the hard work of finding a cure. No wonder why Colin wanted to stay hidden here. He wanted all the glory for him and staying in this place was a first step. She hadn’t contacted him in months. He would be surprised to have her showing up to the CRCD. He would say that she was mad for sacrificing herself like this too but she wasn’t like him. She had a consciousness and it was bothering her more and more with the days passing by. He probably would never feel the weight of remorse and regrets but she did. In the end, she was the most human of them both. She always had been somehow. The dark silhouette of the huge laboratory showed up in the light of the sunset. It looked like a gigantic prison with all these walls and railings and doors with small hubs. There used to be guards in those hubs but the current times had forced them to run to a hiding place like everyone. The CRCD wasn’t vulnerable though. All the doors were firmly closed and if you weren’t a part of the lab, you couldn’t get the authorisation of getting in. She still didn’t know how she would get in but she would find a way. She walked through the deserted parking where the carcasses of hundreds of abandoned cars were waiting for owners that probably would never drive them ever again. She reached a post of control and used the intercom she found there to try to contact someone from the inside. She was quite anxious, but it wasn’t gonna stop her from doing the right thing for once. She got no answer from anyone even after long minutes of waiting. She tried again to be given the same results. She should have expected it though. They would all be on alert and their intercom had a camera. If they saw her black eye, they would think she was a sick person who found her way here. They certainly wouldn’t open to someone like her unless she gave them a reason to. They would come and see who she was and ask what she was doing here. The door was opened. A large enough opening to let a group of five armed guards aiming their guns at her appear. She raised her hands and sighed dramatically. “Shoot me in the heart if you really want me dead.” “Name and reason to be here.” “Oh, wow. They don’t teach you politeness in here.” She pointed her thumb on the CRCD. She was joking around to hide the fact that she was tensed. She wasn’t afraid of death. She was actually waiting for it. She would prefer avoiding such a violent death though. She wanted a clean one. She couldn’t be a hero but she could do a good thing before dying. “Name and reason to be here.” “Doctor Myrtle Appleton, Xeroderma Pigmentosum specialist. I wanna see your boss.” “Why?” “I doubt he or she is telling you everything about the current situation but I guess that if you tell him or her that I can be an excellent asset for their researches, he or she will be highly interested.” “You are infected.” “I know. I did it to myself.” “Go away. We’re not accepting the nightwalkers around here.” “I’m not an ordinary… Is that how you’re calling the sick people? Nightwalkers?” “Ma’am, we’re gonna have to shoot you if you don’t leave now.” “Tell your boss I’m Myrtle Appleton and that I’m the person who started this whole mess. I’m pretty sure he’s gonna be interested. Or she. Whatever gender they are.” The guards looked at each other briefly. They were taking her seriously. Perfect. She had managed to draw their attention on her. One of them stepped away to contact the lab and ask what they should do in the current situation. Her future and the future of the whole world were between the hands of this man in black.

Maxence had come out of his worrying condition but Zachary still wasn’t reassured. He was keeping his eyes on Maxence’s brain activity as recorded by the sensors in his blood. They were better than a couple hours ago but they weren’t good enough for his liking. He didn’t know much about neurology but he knew that what he was seeing wasn’t good. He was entering the data in their working space. Except for Liv who had come earlier because he was struggling to breathe, no one had seen it all yet. His condition was getting worse and worse. He already had a heart attack – provoked by a mistake but still – and his breathing wasn’t the best. Liv had added her own observations and they weren’t to reassure anyone. He was aware of the risks for him if he kept fighting but he was ignoring them. He was working on the cure as if nothing was happening to him. Right now, he was busy taking a test he had himself created from stuff Rose had told him. Pictures of people from his surroundings were scattered on the interactive wall and he was adding names to the faces he could see. A cerebral test he was forcing himself to do so he wouldn’t lose his skills. The disease was already reducing him to nothing and he hated it. He was refusing his condition and living as normally as he could. He was even forcing himself to eat when he wasn’t hungry at all. Beside his bed, there was a bowl full of Shreddies with a mix of fruits. Easy thing to nibble whenever he felt like it. He grabbed the bowl and did another test for his brain. He liked the fruity and fresh taste on his tongue. In the other cage, Liv was doing the last tests on Allegro. The first two tests she had made were negative. It meant that Allegro’s blood was sane again, that the little cells of the virus hadn’t survived. His body had been fighting the noctiagus and had rejected it. His blood was gonna be precious for the researches if the third test was negative. So the captain of the guards was rather anxious at this moment. “How can you be so fast in bringing me the results of my tests when it takes two days for a quarantine?” “A quarantine implies that several persons are under the tent. It takes more time to exclude each risk.” “It also gives more time to the virus to infect everyone.” “We’re always thinking that you’re all infected when you come back from town. We shouldn’t probably. We’ve been lucky so far.” “We shouldn’t push that luck too far.” “I don’t think we need to worry about this. You and Kyle might be the key we needed for that cure.” “Then, being locked here would have been useful.” “It saved you already. So it’s been quite useful yeah.” “I don’t consider myself as saved.” He pointed to the large bruise on his head that was a constant reminder that he had reacted to the virus at some point. It was frightening to think about it and this was why he was always pushing the thought away when it was coming back to him. He was holding on to the hope that he might be out of here soon. That was more than enough at the moment. He would have to find another motivation to go back to work when he would be allowed to. “Quite a day.” “Awful day for everyone.” The face Olivia was making was telling more to him than any word. His name hasn’t been mentioned but they both were thinking about the same man: Maxence Spitz who was locked in the cage just next to his. The black wall and the fact that the cages were soundproofed were keeping Allegro from knowing more than what he was told. “He was better last time I’ve seen Rose.” “His mind is fighting still. But his body is giving up on him.” “How long do you think he’s gonna hold on?” “Not much, I’m afraid.” Liv didn’t know how right she was. Maxence was trying to identify the person on the picture that was on the wall but the answer was lost in the mess of his mind. The answer was right there but he couldn’t access it and it was frustrating him. He rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. The headache was there already, he couldn’t avoid it anymore. He pressed a random answer on the screen but the computer refused to accept it although he was insisting on the ‘done’ button. What he thought was the ‘done’ button. It wasn’t very clear. His glasses were giving him a better sight but the noctiagus was destroying it. A sudden peak of pain hit his head and the bowl he was holding crashed to the ground. He pressed his hands on his head. The pain was unbearable. He stepped toward the bed and could only tangle his feet. His body wasn’t obeying him anymore. Neither did his mind. And the cold hard ground was the last thing he saw before the darkness won over him…

To be continued...

×××

In the next chapter:

The thought of Maxence dying forced Jack to stop speaking for a moment. He didn’t turn off the recording. He just needed a moment to breathe deeply and pull himself back together. He looked down, moved away, took deep breaths. Maxence being infected was a hard blow on him but there still was that hope to save him. Maxence fighting the virus had been a good thing at first but now… he was dying and Jack couldn’t handle that. He was putting his brace face on when he had to face everyone but deep down… deep down, he wished for this nightmare to be over. With all the geniuses gathered in this place, how could this cure still be unreachable?

×××

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#doctor who #ninth doctor #rose tyler #tenth doctor #jack harkness #doctor x rose #ficandchips #dwfic #dwau #ghost of you

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elizabethrobertajones · 7 years ago

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Hello! Sorry for this stupid question, but here it is... how do you notice subtext?? Like, is it something that is obvious to you or do you know what/where to look for?? Am I dumb for not seeing it by myself, or is it actually okay and you need a skill for it, that's what I would like to know... *sigh*.. but also it's not like I'll accept any explanation that someone gives, I'll take it only if I find it reasonable, but lmao do I even have a right when I can't come up with anything by myself??

Oh gosh, that’s not an easy answer… Good thing I just had a coffee and my brain is nearly back online!

Essentially, it’s just about awareness and willingness to engage with the text on the level of being aware that it’s a text, rather than losing yourself to it. In a very good movie you forget where you are and you’re 100% in there and your thoughts are just absorbing what is in front of you. In a bad movie you’re gossiping and joking about the characters, even in your mind if you are polite in the cinema, and identifying shit like “oh wow what a surprise his sketchy brother is betraying him” or whatever. Aka you are viewing it as a bad movie rather than disappearing into the good one.

And at that point you are an objective level removed, and your awareness of tropes and storytelling and general themes of the genre means you’re now engaging with the story and its subtext on a higher level than pure indulgent viewership. (Which is a blessed state and extremely important for creators to cause that to happen in us, but if we want to be critical of a text we then need to lovingly make this step back to critique and explore and analyse and understand WHY we liked the thing we liked. Or, of course, hated the thing we hated.)

This is the answer the internet gives on What Are Subtext?

The important thing is that the subtext is an actual, solid, understandable part of the story, but it’s not one that the text will actually announce with words… Unless it’s being extremely post-modern.

(You should watch Jane the Virgin, it’s amazing)

In that example, it’s extremely obvious in context that the situation sucks, and our narrator is telling us, as a voice outside the scene, how it feels for the characters even though it’s blatant on screen, it’s humorous for us to be told this as part of the overall conceit of the show, which is extremely postmodern and constantly types out the details of the story and how the characters feel, things they don’t know, etc, on screen for us to make sure we’re all on board and understand what’s going on. Using the narration like this is making what is subtext in the acted scenes, for example jealous eyebrows and the sort of other micro-expressions we over-analyse, into stated fact about the feelings. The serious nuance comes in other, much more intelligent ways in the story.

Another direct and frequent way we interact with subtext aside from it being just literally anything happening on screen that is not directly commented on but may be evident from the work of acting, camera, and setting-related design and other choices, is dramatic irony, which is a very good use of subtext which draws us in and makes us extremely aware of what we know that the other characters don’t, and plays on that for our attention and investment in the story, but of course MUST go unstated at least to some characters, meaning that any engagement we have with the conceit around said character(s) means we’re seeing the subtext they miss. Growing up reading Lemony Snicket was a masterclass in storytelling and general life so I’ll let him explain:

“Simply put, dramatic irony is when a person makes a harmless remark, and someone else who hears it knows something that makes the remark have a different, and usually unpleasant, meaning. For instance, if you were in a restaurant and said out loud, “I can’t wait to eat the veal marsala I ordered,” and there were people around who knew that the veal marsala was poisoned and that you would die as soon as you took a bite, your situation would be one of dramatic irony.”

When we’re reading a text to identify subtext, we need to have awareness of some pretty basic foundations, such as the major story tropes and styles, and character and setting and a lot of other things… Fortunately as long as you read books, watch films and TV series and otherwise consume tons of media, you will have at least unconsciously absorbed a LOT of the toolbox needed for this. You just need to know enough to know how to expect what happens next, OR to know when a story has done something radical which is NOT what you would have expected, and breaks a mould you thought it was set in.

For example, the cold open of 2x03 features a vampire, a panicked, conventionally attractive woman in a white top running through woods, being hunted by Gordon, with the vampire as the typical tropey victim, and Gordon facelessly featured as a seeming hook-handed killer. It LOOKS like it’s going to play into an extremely typical slasher story, but once Sam and Dean realise the victim was a vampire, it turns the entire set up on its head and is immensely unsettling to the foundation of the show (which is how Dean handles the episode). I use that example a lot but it’s one of the most blatantly tropey cold opens on the show which gives away nothing to suggest it will be subverted, because it’s so early in the show their mould is extremely simple, and you could almost not trust that they wouldn’t do another extremely on the nose urban legend, before they have really established themselves beyond the season 1 style.

That whole set up relies on giving us invisible cues we read which are the subtext of the scene, and then using the fact that this set up plays us really hard to believe one thing and the other, in order to make it so complex and confusing and uncertain even for us, as we relied on the cold open to tell us what was what and who was good and who was bad, which if we followed one emotional POV of the episode, could last as long as Dean’s uncertainty that the vampires weren’t bad.

Storytelling is built enormously on this foundation of subtext and stuff, and one of the things that you can tell is bad about Buckleming episodes is that they really don’t put in much subtext: things are fairly straightforward, subterfuge is broadcast, and there’s rarely deeper meanings or connections between events in their stories. It comes across shallow and weird, especially with side characters with bizarre and unexplored motivations, or surface level motivations which are not explored and we can only take it on face value what they actually care about. One of the most hilarious Buckleming scenes to me is the one where Crowley “forces” Lucifer to tell the court of demons that Crowley is the best and he is in charge, while with his back turned to Crowley, Lucifer winks and implies with his tone of voice that he is/will be in charge and is the real king they should be bowing to. This is their idea of dramatic irony, subtlety and subtext in character interactions and it is utterly, truly dreadful to behold, in the sort of way I want to put it in a museum as an example to future children to learn what not to do. You can press a button and Lucifer’s eyes light up in the exhibit!

In any case you’re probably really mostly asking about Destiel and bi Dean subtext etc, because this is what majorly concerns the meta-interested peeps. But to me it is really really essential to know and care about the entire house of cards. Billie’s words about the structure and function and behaviour of the universe in 13x05 are a wonderful description of how writing works, and as a bonus she doesn’t say “this is a writing metaphor” and wink directly into the camera, as Buckleming would have written it, but Yockey leaves this idea in the writing itself for us to interpret and understand. There’s a LOT of commentary in this show about writing but this one in particular really resonates with me when it comes to talking about interpretation, because we really have to understand and handle the entire story in order to really line up any of the pieces in a way that makes sense.

Right now I have that lil lesson in visual subtext floating around, about Ketch and Dean in 13x18 and Dean n Cas in 13x19. I think it’s a great example because Ketch and Dean have a real history, and that’s super important to remember when on the surface it looks like just a joke. The history goes back as far as 2x03, when I’ve written before about seduction and the trap Dean falls into with men filling a space in his life. The tl;dr of this linked meta is that Gordon, the Siren and then Crowley as a main arc over season 9-10 seduced Dean in a very similar pattern. 9x11 is the best example of a Dean seduction episode, but through season 10, Crowley is so successful that he has the dubious honour of having actually managed to bed Dean in the process, while the others failed, though the Siren at least got a proxy-kiss.

Ketch comes on to Dean in 12x14 and there was even a shot or promo image (I can’t remember which this is now) where they had this bottle in the middle of the table between them.

Bottles are suggestive imagery in any case, and we have Cas flirting outrageously (for Cas) with Dean in 9x09 including this action of stroking his bottle in front of Dean:

Ketch’s approach with Dean was a lot like Crowley’s, emphasising their similiarity and trying to get his little adventure with Dean to tap into all the dark parts Dean denies. In the end Ketch went overboard beating up the vampire girl, Dean went into protective mode, and didn’t unleash an inner killer, like Gordon and Crowley in particular had wanted him to, and so this Manly Bonding Over Violence failed to occur, they went their separate ways, and Ketch shacked up with Mary instead because this is a fucked up story :D

Once this incestuous connection to Ketch occurred, he for once is off-limits to Dean now, so he’s having this oddly romantic bonding episode with Dean in a sense - the kind that without this context would be huge alarm bells because it combines the ridiculous homoeroticism of Dean x Cole (thank the fucking lord that stopped short) and the plausible good chemistry of Dean x Crowley in the sense of Jensen and DHJ being a fucking delight when they’re together. This would be EXTREEEEEEEEMELY shippable in other circumstances, but instead Dean knows Ketch slept with Mary, they mother and son killed him and destroyed that gross connection, and then he floated back up like a turd, and so they mostly just talk about when and how they get to kill him again, and not in the “this is a blatant flirtation” way Crowley pointed out it was basically a come on from Dean to threaten to kill him in the closing lines of 9x10 and the opening lines of 9x11 featured Dean threatening to kill Crowley.

So Dean chilling 5ft away from Ketch in a hot tub because he’s not gay in the woods, and telling him flat out he’s not his type, is legit and not connected to subtext telling us that Dean isn’t bi, it’s that Dean in a zillion years is not going to sleep with Ketch, that if he was younger and dumber he would have, but he knows what’s up and now Ketch slept with Mary, this is fucked up in a way that we’re now verging into bizarre John subtext instead. The phallic symbol of a gun - used a lot by Dean from between his legs in humourous or not so humorous scenes and teased as penis subtext a lot (especially in #THINMAN with the “say hello to my little pistola” moment where Dean directly compares dick and gun in coded talk while having it out with Harry) - is therefore presented as Dean with it loose and not pointed at Ketch. Surface level, he’s not gonna shoot Ketch right now. Subtext… He’s… not gonna… shoot……. ketch right now…

And then you go to the kitchen scene with Dean n Cas, the subtext of beer as dicks is also deeply established as well as alcohol as sexual bonding between men, right back to Gordon and the Siren and Crowley, in a bad way, but also positive; Dean bonds with people who share a drink with him and his primary way of picking up women is in bars. In the open of 1x19 he and Sam have full beers on their table, and Dean goes over and buys more beers to talk to the women he wants to pick up, then goes to Sam and puts those beers down - in the end Sam has 4 full, untouched beers on the table in front of him when Dean runs off to go seal the deal at the end of the scene. I find that so utterly hilarious.

But yeah. Between Dean n Cas it has a much deeper level of symbolism about their connection, and the major moments are pretty numerous, but I love in 10x18 at the Last Supper, the Kingdom Beer bottle superimposed over the whole of Cas for a moment in the fade between scenes, before Dean picks it up and drinks from it. There’s also moments like 6x03 when Dean is praying to Cas where he’s holding a bottle directly between his legs, as Cas arrives in the room. Details like this always make me laugh. You need a dirty mind for this sort of subtext :P The show itself has a dirty mind… Season 7 is full of Dick jokes, but they’re only the most overt that the show makes. 9x17 is RIDICULOUS because Misha has the foulest mind and spent roughly 50% of the time he was directing doing close ups of Dean’s face as he drinks seductively from a bottle, or with him standing with a pool cue between his legs, running his hand up and down it. I… Am not going to comment further. It was, however, the episode where Crowley thought he had sealed the deal with Dean.

In any case the subtext of the beer in 13x19 is more likely to link directly to 12x10 and “this will do nothing for me but I appreciate the gesture” and the more wholesome theme of Dean trying to be nurturing and inviting Cas into the home and family - 12x10 was basically addressing and fixing an enormous problem of miscommunication about this. In the end despite the gesture - of both not killing Cas just to spite Ishim, or giving Cas a beer when it won’t make him drunk, Cas ended up still leaving on the mission that ended up with him stealing the Colt and then going off with Jack and Kelly. And this season the theme remains of miscommuncation, this time with so much dramatic irony that WE know that the characters don’t that their cross purposes can be seen from space… Hopefully for the sake of addressing it.

But I have a dirty mind and this is an established part of Destiel subtext from other scenes where the beer was more directly in focus, such as 9x09, meaning no harm in highlighting the upwards pointing phallic symbols in the room and grabbing an awkward shot of Dean holding the beer pointed Caswards from his lower torso… :P

I think in the end spotting innuendo is important to know when it is and isn’t intended by signifiers in the story and characters that it is just random. There’s almost certainly accidental moments where characters with no chemistry or emotional subplot have done things which might look suggestive but it’s up to us to use logic and reason to guess they’re not really telling us they have a boner for each other. Since Dean n Cas have romantic subtext and a strong history of innuendo and sexual subtext as well, it’s fair game to at least laugh about unfortunate implications, wonder about the Big O Slush Machine that Cas spilled over the phone to Dean in 9x06, or look stonefaced into the camera and say “that’s a dick.”

#Asks #meta meta #dean is bi #destiel #my stuff #long post for ts

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sleemo · 7 years ago

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Daisy Ridley: How to survive Star Wars

— The Telegraph | Dec 8, 2017

Almost two years ago to the day, Daisy Ridley was propelled into the stratosphere via the Millennium Falcon. One minute she was a little-known actress from London who had had a bit part in Casualty and the dubious honour of being cut from an Inbetweeners movie, the next action figures were being created in her likeness.

As Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Ridley wowed audiences with her punchy portrayal of a scavenger who discovers that she in fact has mighty powers – the force is strong with her, if you will.

The film ended with her seeking out Luke Skywalker and presenting him with his father’s lightsaber. Are the two related? Is Rey Darth Vader’s granddaughter? So many questions, so little chance of anyone being able to answer them before Christmas 2019, when the last of the current crop of Star Wars movies is due to be released.

So we come to The Last Jedi, episode eight of the franchise and the reason that we find ourselves in a galaxy far, far away – or at the very least, a hotel room in Los Angeles. When we meet, Ridley can’t tell me anything about it – partly because then, she’d probably have to kill me, partly because she hasn’t actually seen it herself.

It has been directed by Rian Johnson, who worked on Breaking Bad and, Ridley says, ‘is far more secretive than JJ Abrams, who directed episode seven. But what I can tell you is that [the film] picks up right where we left off, and what Rian and I were discussing is that it’s not always a good idea to meet your heroes, because occasionally it doesn’t work out. And it may do. I’m not saying that it’s all awful between Luke and Rey. But Luke is not expecting Rey, and his reception is perhaps not what she thought it would be. She looks at him like a myth, but they actually have to communicate – and it’s not this mystical thing that’s away from her and up in the clouds, it’s this thing that is happening right here. There’s a threat, obviously, but also there’s room for both of them to grow. So now she actually gets a chance to ask herself questions like, “Why is it that I’m here, what is it that I’m doing, and where am I going to end up?’”

These are questions that most of us ask ourselves at some point in our lives. For Ridley, who is just 25, they came up a little sooner than usual due to the avalanche of exposure that comes with being in a film franchise so huge that it has spawned its own religion (people are now allowed to choose ‘Jedi’ when asked their faith on the census). She had therapy for six months last year, once filming had wrapped on The Last Jedi.

‘I have always suffered with anxiety since I was a teenager, I should have done it way before, but I suddenly realised how good it is to talk about this stuff. Going through the whole thing with the same group of people is wonderful, but also occasionally it’s really good to step away [from the cast and crew of Star Wars] and actually really process what went on, and how I felt in it all.’

Ridley made the decision to leave Instagram last year, after posting a picture of herself at the 2016 Teen Choice Awards, accompanied by a caption in tribute to people lost to gun violence. She was targeted by trolls; a shame, given that she had previously shared honest posts about her battle with endometriosis (which has had since she was 15) and the acne she suffers as a result.

‘[After the Teen Choice Awards post] suddenly people were not very nice. I had put on weight after finishing filming, and I thought, why do I have to be slender to have the views I have? For three days I was shell-shocked. It was the most rude awakening to what the internet could be. So I came off, because I just thought my soul was more important. As I’m in more films and everything gets more public, I savour the private stuff more.’

She tells me that she also read a report linking teenage anxiety with Instagram. ‘I suddenly thought, what world are we living in, where we are affected by things that are edited online? I’m pretty solid in myself, but my confidence was ruined. It was really unhealthy. I’ve felt so much happier since I came off [social media].’

Ridley worries about the need for online validation. ‘Everything is for someone else now. How we look on our holiday has become for someone else. It’s really nice to have stuff that’s just for you, that you can do and go home and say, “Hey Mum, this, this and this happened, I still have pictures to show you, but I can also tell you the story and it will be a wonderful, personal thing I’m sharing with you.”’

She describes 2016 as a ‘total head-f—’. Why? ‘The film coming out and seeing people’s reactions and freaking out a bit and hearing people talking about whether you did a good job in it.’ But she got great reviews, I say. ‘But I didn’t see that, so it’s also sort of reconciling what other people are seeing and you’re not, and then realising that it’s OK not to see that.’

Ridley says that her sudden fame was hard for others, too. ‘I know it was really difficult for my mum. I mean, it’s difficult for someone’s youngest child to suddenly be this thing that people are claiming parts of. Sometimes I’ve felt like I was limiting myself in [talking about] the good or bad things, because I never wanted to seem ungrateful – what I am getting to do is extraordinary. But it’s also not easy all the time.’

Daisy Ridley was born in London in April 1992, the youngest of three daughters. Her mother works in communications for a bank, while her father is a photographer; Daisy attended the Tring Park School for Performing Arts in Hertfordshire, where she specialised in musical theatre, but she has said that she never had a burning desire to act.

She credits a drama teacher with being the first person who made her think she could do it as a profession; after leaving school, she started a degree in classical civilisation at Birkbeck, University of London but dropped out to pursue acting.

There were small TV roles in Silent Witness, Toast of London and Mr Selfridge, but when Ridley heard that JJ Abrams was seeing unknowns for the next episode of Star Wars, she lobbied her agent to get her an audition – the films have a rich history of turning nobodies into somebodies (not least Harrison Ford), and Abrams was keen to stick with that tradition.

Five meetings with Abrams later, she landed the role of the girl from nowhere thrust into the centre of the Star Wars universe. Ridley says that in Rey, there is a lot she can relate to. She remembers meeting the late Carrie Fisher for the first time at a dinner before shooting started on The Force Awakens.

‘All the men were on one side of the table, and she said to me, “Come and join the oestro-fest!” And she was wonderful. The Leia thing… I mean, yes I did look up to [that]. But, to me, it was much more that Carrie didn’t shrink from everything that she was and everything that this is too. She owned it. She knew what Star Wars was in her life, and what it had done for her. She was just incredible.’

Fisher advised Ridley to ‘fight against being the slave girl’, in reference to the gold bikini Leia famously wore in Return of the Jedi. ‘But what is amazing is that I didn’t have to fight against anything. I thought it was a super-cool role because Rey wasn’t making choices because she was a girl, she was just making choices because that’s what people have to do.’

When we meet, Ridley is wearing a Roland Mouret dress with Jimmy Choo heels. ‘I’m so scruffy usually,’ she says. ‘My goal in life is to be really elegant and smart. My sister says, “Dais! Stop buying men’s jumpers then!” But I love a man’s jumper.’

How much has life changed since Star Wars? ‘Well that’s the thing. I don’t know if it has.’ She is aware how ridiculous this sounds; what she means is that she tries not to let success go to her head. ‘Career-wise it’s changed everything. There’s no way I would have recorded with Barbra Streisand [on her album Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway] had I not met her through JJ.’

She has recently been in cinemas as Mary Debenham in Murder on the Orient Express, ‘and there’s no way I would have been able to do that because Ken [Sir Kenneth Branagh, who directed the film] may not have seen me. So that stuff is different. But life stuff is… I don’t know. I hope I’m smarter than I was and make better decisions, but I think it’s pretty similar.’

She catches the cynical look on my face.

‘Obviously I am living a different [life] to the one I was before, but I still live in the same place [London], my family are still my favourite people, my friends are the same, I still go on the Tube.’ Does she get recognised? ‘Not really. Everyone has their own stuff going on, they’re going to work, they’re living their lives.’

Ridley adds that she’s not sure what it is that everyone assumes she should be doing – perhaps living in a gold palace, I suggest?

‘Yeah. I don’t think people necessarily actually think that, it’s just a thing that once you get into conversation with someone, they realise that you still have to buy friggin’ tampons. My friend texted me the other day to say that her sister had seen me getting my eyebrows threaded in Superdrug for £3.50. And you know how they do it in the middle of the shop. She was like “Dais! Go somewhere else!” But I won’t because Superdrug is the best place.’

Today Ridley’s modus operandi is to look after herself and try to stay as calm as possible. ‘Reading a book or running a bath – that to me is self-care, because you get a moment to be tranquil and listen to your own music.’

She recently finished playing the title role of Ophelia in a new film that tells the story of Hamlet through the eyes of the tragic heroine, also starring Naomi Watts and Clive Owen, due for release next year. She says, ‘I worked pretty much every day for eight weeks. What I needed to do was go home and sleep. And that is self-care too, deciding what I need right now.’

In her spare time, Ridley does Pilates and then she likes to ‘sit on the sofa. I don’t drink very much, but last week I was back for three days so I went to the pub with a smattering of my friends and my parents and sisters and we had a little drink and made merry. Also, I love washing. People take the piss out of me – on a day off I’m like “leave me alone with my detergent”. Nothing is sweeter to me than being in my flat and hearing the washing machine go.’ She laughs.

After Ophelia, there’s Chaos Walking, an adaptation of the young adult novel by Patrick Ness. She has just been signed by Netflix to star in a superhero comedy alongside Josh Gad, and of course there is the ninth (and final, for now) instalment of Star Wars.

What then? ‘Well, I just want to keep working with people who give me as much joy as the people I’ve got to work with so far. Just that. That is what I want.’ She pauses, smiles. ‘And also to be able to continue to have a voice. To be able to take a month off if nothing right comes along. That would be wonderful.’

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is released on 14 December.

— The Telegraph

#i forgot to post this #q #uploads #interview #daisy ridley #rey #star wars #the last jedi #the force awakens #tfa #tlj #cast #rian johnson #carrie fisher #jj abrams #*#long post

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moredickpics-blog · 5 years ago

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The Dick Pic Generation And Why We’re Still Stupid About Nudity

Millennials are what I call “The Dick Pic Generation”.

We’re the Dick Pic Generation because we have the technology. If the Baby Boomers had the technology, they definitely would have tried.

Instead, Boomers vacuumed up the wealth and polluted the Earth so now the dubious honour of polluting the world with terabytes of our junk has fallen to us Millennials.

But make no mistake, it’s not because of our horned up culture that makes us do it, it’s nature. Older generations, if given the opportunity would have done the exact same thing.

My question is, seeing as how there is this compulsion for humans to be gross, should there really be such an outrage we share pictures of our naked bodies?

To be clear, I don’t mean sending out other people’s nudes, or sending/receiving them uninvited. I mean that people lose their jobs and get tarnished for doing something that yes, is primarily a private matter, but also a deeply human experience: being gross with other people and using what technology we have available to enable that.

There’s plenty of stories of people getting canned for what they put out on social media, and we all more or less understand when you mock a war widow or post a photo of you urinating on a plate of nachos that it’s not something your employer wants reflected on them.

But the same goes for a teacher drinking alcohol, or having sexy bikini pics, or an ex-boyfriend posting their nudes online. And that’s fucking bullshit.

“Teacher fired for bikini pics” came back with over 9 million results on Google. Progress against revenge porn is slow, but ongoing, thankfully. But the attitude is still largely, “well, you took the pictures in the first place, that makes you the idiot.”

Nudity has power because of its scarcity, and because there’s a deep shame forced on all of us to think of it as both precious and perverted. While there are terabytes of naked people floating around the world, and porn is a multi-billion dollar industry, and strip clubs bring in $7 billion in the US alone, there persists this bloody hypocrisy about the naked body or near-naked body.

Let’s understand why this isn’t working.

Sexuality often takes the brunt of cultural hypocrisy. I’m certainly guilty of it. I cringe anytime someone points out “what, we’re all naked under our clothes, we’re all sexual beings. It’s natural.”

Being a bit of a prude, I get it’s a true statement but still operate with the bias that it’s gross to point out. “Come on, it’s natural, it’s natural.”

Yuck. Stop that… Unless they’re hot.

But being open about it is punishable by ostracism not because it’s gross in the same way braiding armpit hair is (come on, it’s natural) but because there’s some deeply fucked up psychology that punishes sexuality. Especially as a woman, you’ll be called a whore in places if you express sexual agency and experience worse if men even suspect it.

It doesn’t change anything though. Our DNA is older than our belief systems. People are sexual, and people are gross. What we should try not to be however, is a hypocrite about it.

As a couple examples, they did a study that found sexting occurs mostly on weekdays between 10am and Noon. On Tuesday specifically.

A study by Drexel University found a majority of teens engaged in sexting without knowing it technically counts as child pornography.

In 2012 the Pentagon had to tell its employees to stop looking at pornography at work. The Pentagon, the monolithic symbol of American military might, had to ask its employees to stop using work computers for porn.

I know exactly what you’re thinking right now, “But Mark, why the penis which is objectively ugly?” Here’s my rule: All genitals are ugly until we want to put our mouths on them. We can’t escape that. We’re not Gods.

If you’re in an increasingly erotic chat with someone and it eventually gets to nude shots of their bum, tits, vaj or cock, it creates excitement and anticipation. It makes you cry out “O Joyous Occasion!” as you rub yourself through your sweatpants (be honest). You get into talking about what you’re into and it’s hot and titillating. That’s hormones and nature, not culture. Ask Weiner. But don’t text him.

But those interactions are about two people who are into it. What about one party who’s unwitting and unwilling about the whole thing?

A survey found 53% of Millennial women have received a dick pic. 24% of the men in that same survey admitted to sending a dick pic without being asked. The survey doesn’t head on address the question “but was it heavily implied it was okay or just totally out of the blue?”

This was my reaction, because dick pics can be contextual in the same way any nudes are. They can be tastefully and appropriately submitted into conversation, or like a ham-fisted joke can be just bad writing and timing.

Well, of the 53% of women who received a dick pic, three out of four say they received it unsolicited and unwanted.

Apparently God’s gift to man is man’s shockingly poor gift choice to women.

In another article on AlterNet, they surveyed seven types of reasons men sent dick pics. These reasons included an exhibition kink or thrill they experienced, or a swelling of pride, thinking it’s what women want to see, thinking it was a cheeky sexual invitation, or doing it for dominance and control, or for positive feedback, or simply because they can because hey it’s magical Internet and we’re anonymous.

Most of these reasons are just sad. Doing it for domination and to stress someone out is just a dick move. Doing it because you’ve been ignored by countless women and just want to get some kind of reaction is, well, sad. It’s sad that guys feel driven to this, and that their loneliness and alienation makes them bitter and resentful. I’m pretty sure this fuels a lot of the misogyny we see today in these Men’s Rights Groups.

Quick aside: In that earlier article linked to about revenge porn, a woman ended her relationship with her possessive boyfriend and he angrily accused her of sleeping with at least three male friends based on looking at her Facebook pictures. He threatened to sell her nudes online unless she was honest about how many guys she slept with.

Ooof.

On the more forgiving side of things, philosopher Alain de Botton says we guys share dick pics to share something vulnerable about ourselves as the genitals can be a source of disgust and shame. By sharing our bodies we are both vulnerable and connected, and because sex is a major fact of life there is something theoretically tantalizing about genital shots.

To artist Whitney Bell, who turned unsolicited dick pics into an art exhibit, sending dick pics is also an expression of power. She creatively robbed the power of those unwanted pictures by turning them into art (more “Piss Christ” art than the Sistine Chapel kind).

Bell believes it’s a way for men to terrorize women, like “screaming at a woman from a car. You’re just doing this because you can, and because the world has taught you that that’s OK.”

This Everyday Feminism article calls unwanted dick pics “sexual assault”.

Then again…

Watch out! Patriarchy!

I frankly think this gives men too much credit. Men tend to be visually inclined, they respond to filth and think others, particularly women, do too. Have you ever looked at personal ads on Craigslist? It’s better than charades at parties. What you’ll find though is both earnest ads looking for monogamous love and depraved ads looking for sex, and both are accompanied by cock shots.

Because, for as many men that are terrible there are just as many that are kinda clueless. Never attribute to malice what you could attribute to lazy, horny, socially inept, one-handed texting.

Men are not smart enough to be cruel enough—most guys anyway. Maybe some men think that perhaps out of a hundred sent dick pics the one person that actually bites and wants to meet up to get some of that sweet dick is worth the ninety-nine who feel violated looking at impromptu genitals?

But what do I know? I’m one in a hundred.

Of course this doesn’t mean there aren’t assholes out there who know it can be distressing for a girl to receive a dick pic and do it anyway. They exist. The Internet exaggerates that capacity, empowering men to be more flagrant and direct with harassment at the same time being anonymous. And there certainly is a power dynamic when one sex has their genitals normalized enough they can send it willy-nilly and the other sex is so thoroughly demotivated they could never send pics of their vulvas or whatever they’re called. Vaginas.

So let’s make a distinction: There’s a dick pic, and there’s an unsolicited and unwanted dick pic. I have never received an unsolicited dick pic and thought “Ooh! Future husband!”

But never say never. I’m open to it, is what I’m saying.

Thousands of people have lost their jobs because their nude photos wound up on the Internet, and there’s an oppressive and stupid shame that perpetuate this arrangement. Here’s one such list article that basically repeats itself on items 2, 3, 4, and 5:

It Can Ruin Your Career

The Photos Can End Up On The Internet

Or They Can Up In The Wrong Hands

They Can Live On Forever

What articles like this say is that your naked body has negative power over you. But nude photos have only as much power as we give them, and they have been drastically inflated.

We kneecap people’s potentials for what they can do with their lives because there’s evidence they’re naked under their clothes. Nude bodies should not be leverage against their owners.

At least when we ostracize someone for pooping in public there’s actually a good many reasons to. But calling a girl a slut, or believing her unlovable because she has nude photos on Tumblr?

We got here because our sex education was terrible. We weren’t taught human nature properly as a kind of capacity for different beliefs and actions, sometimes at odds with each other. We weren’t taught about biology, upbringing, cultural imprinting and institutional enforcement.

But without that we are far likelier to be worse hypocrites. It’s how we’ve become hypocrites about something that, come on, is natural.

We’re at war with our nature and we’re worse for it. Society is deeply unhappy. Relationships end badly and frequently, antidepressants are prescribed in ever-more numbers.

Lastly I have to ask, what is going to change first though, human nature or our attitude towards our nature?

What do we have power over? Humans are always going to be perverted apes on some level, but we don’t have to be hypocrites.

We have power over our education systems if we choose it, and that’s how we can be less hypocrites about such fundamentally human experiences.

Obviously it’s our attitudes that need to change, as it slowly has been.

In many parts of the world, women can show ankles. Praise God. Women can vote, hold public office, and even marry who they choose. That’s because our attitudes changed.

Cultural change is slow and nebulous, but it’s an aggregate of a thousand interactions and decisions by individuals trending toward sometimes vaguely outlined normatives. We can outline those normatives because we can control our attitudes.

Repeat that five times and send nudes.

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metalbuzz-net · 6 years ago

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The Devil’s Blood: A Quick Chat with Guitarist Selim Lemouchi

While Selim Lemouchi, the guitarist for satanic rockers The Devil’s Blood, who goes by just SL, opted not to answer a handful of questions pertaining to songs on ‘The Thousandfold Epicentre’, and another couple were abruptly answered with “No,” I did briefly engage him on subjects such as his writing process, F’s voice, Satan, the lack of protesting bible thumpers and Guns N’ Roses as rock n’ roll inspiration. Plus, I got a long ass list of music that he’s into. Sweet!

Ken Kopija: Hello SL. It’s Ken over at METALBUZZ in Chicago. We are the Internet’s number one source for real metal news, reviews, interviews and more. First off, I am a huge fan & supporter of The Devil’s Blood, which has graced the digital pages of METALBUZZ off and on now for several years. SL: Thanks for your time and energy so far.

How are you doing today? Today is a good day, the weather is quite downcast and grey which makes for a good walk in the forest.

I spoke with you about a year and a half ago, right around the US release of ‘The Time Of No Time Evermore’. That is the album that introduced me to and got me hooked on The Devil’s Blood. How do you feel the band has progressed musically from ‘The Time Of No Time Evermore’ to ‘The Thousandfold Epicentre’? I feel that, as a band, we have become better at performing and better at recording, perhaps that might not seem like much, but that is the kind of progress that allows a band to stay evolving. When it comes to the creation process of the material, nothing has changed.

‘The Thousandfold Epicentre’ was released on 11-11-11 in Europe. Is there any signifigance to it being released on that date? 11 is our most significant numerological correspondence and we always try to gather as many of them around as possible, in the artwork, in the music, in the lyrics, in the number of minutes and seconds, volume differences etcetera, etcetera. It signifies Chaos, renewal, freedom and at the same time, it signifies the structure of Satan and Death to us.

And the album dropped in the US via Metal Blade on January 17th. Do you have any special rituals that you followed on release day? To be honest, no, I have let this record “go” already. The release date in Europe was for me the ultimate moment and our Ritual at Groningen’s Vera Club was our perfect way of celebrating our Child’s birth into this “world of gravity gone mad.” For the glory of our first official American release, we shall wait with rituals and rites until we are on American soil again.

As I understand it, in addition to being one of the bands guitarists, you are also the primary songwriter. How much of the songwriting were you involved with on ‘The Thousandfold Epicentre?’ All of it. With the exception of the lyrics of “Fire Burning” and the last guitar part of “Everlasting Saturnalia,” which were done respectively by Tommie Eriksson (Saturnalia Temple) and Rob Oorthuis (NOX/Centurian).

That being said, other than topics like Satan and the occult, what other subjects or entities were your inspiration for the new record? All of it can be caught within the three principalities of Adversity; The Death, The Chaos and The Satan. There is nothing more to me.

Which comes first, the music or your words? Usually at the same moment, sometimes months apart, in which case music usually pre-dates the words. I guess this has to do with the fact that my instinctual understanding of music is still stronger than my understanding of language.

Can you elaborate a little on the whole writing process? There is not much to say, you have an idea, you pick up a guitar and a pen, you don’t stop till you are done.

Your sister, ‘F’, the bands lead singer, sounds a little more produced this time around. Was a different approach taken with the recording of her voice? Funny you should say that as she was most certainly less produced. We simply let her sing the song and apart from that nothing, except some choir parts, were doubled or added. This is as close to absolute purity as we could come this time around.

In my opinion, it sounds like The Devil’s Blood have re-invented themselves on ‘The Thousandfold Epicentre’, while at the same time maintaining that definitive sound that is unique to the band. Would you agree with that statement? We simply have done what we could, no more and certainly no less. We ourselves were quite surprised and of course immensely proud with what manifested itself, but to claim any kind of control of what the outcome came to be would be grossly overstating the importance of the musician in the creative process.

As far as I know, The Devil’s Blood have never done a concept video. Is that true? Yes it is.

Are there any plans to do a video(s) for ‘The Thousandfold Epicentre’? We would love to do that of course, it is mostly a financial thing. These things costs money and we have none.

Along with several European dates in the spring, I see that the band is scheduled to play ‘Maryland Deathfest X’ May 24th – 27th. Please tell me that those are not your only US dates this year? They are not.

Is a US tour planned? We will be doing a full North American tour which will be officially announced very soon.

The Devil’s Blood has played with the likes of Watain, Pentagram, Root, Venom and Tryptikon. Are there any bands that you’ve never toured with that you would really like too? Not any that jump to mind immediately.

I have never been to one of your live shows, or “rituals” as they are referred to, but I’ve watched videos online of the band performing live. There seems to be a lot of sweat and blood. Can you describe your live show to someone who has never witnessed it before? Explanation is empty, it is better to withhold all information and allow each individual the chance to experience freely and without priorly enforced parameters of expectation.

I know that there are a lot of bible thumpers out there who would probably jump at the chance to protest one of your shows. Do you every get those types hanging around your gigs? To be honest it has not happened yet, which is a shame of course.

The Devil’s Blood is based out of the Netherlands. What is the metal scene like there these days? I don’t really know, apart from a handful of bands and people I am personally in contact with. I am terribly uninformed about these things. I no longer read magazines and I rarely go to concerts and have no real desire to be on top of things any more.

The Metal Blade website has the following listed for band members: SL/TDB/A-O and F/TDB/MOS. Can you please tell me a little about what this means and who all of the members of the band are? No and no.

Well alrighty then. Have you ever put on headphones and listened to any of your music on vinyl? Of course.

Who or what inspired you to start playing music? If I had to name one person who has that dubious honour it would have to be Slash and Axl Rose of Guns ‘n Roses. That band really showed me the power of rock n’ roll and its insidious flair for rebellion and independence. And Slash’s personal style of playing and his careful ear for sounds and harmony combined with Axl’s uncanny talent for writing anthems is something that has definitely found its way into my music at various levels.

What is your favorite guitar to play? At the moment, it is a Haar Stratocaster, a custom built machine that seems to fill my needs wonderfully. But it does change from time to time.

Assuming you have one, if I got a hold of your iPod, what would I find on there? Danzig, Morbid Angel, Pentagram, The Doors, Merciless, Death, Judas Priest, Jimi Hendrix, Iron Maiden, Entombed, Slayer, Aphrodite’s Child, Slayer, Autopsy, Nick Cave, The Who, Root, Dr Feelgood, Nazareth, Aerosmith, MC5, Iggy and The Stooges, Mercyful Fate, Uriah Heep, The Byrds, The Rolling Stones, Bathory, Type O Negative, Charles Manson, The Beatles, Blue Öyster Cult, Coil, Joy Division, Ministry, Sepultura, Tiamat, Roky Erickson, GG Allin, Carnivore, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Jefferson Airplane, Blood Axis, Hawkwind, Motorhead, Cro-Mags, Mayhem, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Burzum, Kiss, Alice Cooper, Velvet Underground, In Slaughter Natives, Samael, The Pretty Things, The Golden Earring, ZZ Top, Master’s Hammer, Shadows, Thin Lizzy, T. Rex, Guns ‘n Roses, Bobby Beausoleil, King Crimson, Bolt Thrower, Dissection, Wishbone Ash and many, many more.

We have time for one more question, and it’s from a fan… Fred from St. Germain wants to know… “I grew up listening to a lot of Mercyful Fate and King Diamond. Would you consider them/him an influence on your music and are you a fan?” I consider Mercyful Fate to be one of the most important heavy metal bands that ever existed, apart from that I am not sure how much they actually inspired me, it is hard to say how these things work.

Once again, SL, thanks for taking time out of your busy day to chat with METALBUZZ. It has been my pleasure talking to you and I look forward to seeing The Devil’s Blood in Chicago soon. Thanks for you attention.

(с) Ken Kopija

#the devil's blood #metal #black metal

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mrmedia · 8 years ago

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1306 Gary Chaloner, comic book artist, "Will Eisner's John Law"

Today's Guest: Gary Chaloner, comic book artist, Will Eisner's John Law

(EDITOR'S NOTE: The following interview with comic book artist Gary Chaloner was recorded on August 25, 2006 to supplement my authorized biography of the late Will Eisner, Will Eisner: A Spirited Life. I recently rediscovered the audio file and decided to add it to the Mr. Media podcast archive. -- Bob Andelman)

"Will Eisner's John Law" by Gary Chaloner

Gary Chaloner is an award-winning artist and writer who is currently creating and publishing the new adventures of Will Eisner’s John Law. I interviewed Chaloner via email the first time around, for my biography of Will Eisner, A Spirited Life. But that was when John Law had yet to be published. Now that it’s out and building an audience for one of Eisner’s lesser known characters, I thought it would be fun to talk to him again. He suggested we do it via Skype, the free Internet phone service; being a new technology junkie, I had to say yes. So Gary has the dubious honor of being the first person interviewed in this series via podcast. The audio quality isn't perfect; the hum/buzz you'll hear in the background is from my computer. Sorry about that, audiophiles. This interview combines the stories behind Chaloner's Eisner-related work as well as a sneak peek (below) at his upcoming work. Eisner fans will also be excited to learn how many more characters from Eisner's early work are returning to action in Chaloner's John Law series. First, let me tell you a little more about Chaloner: He’s an Australian-born creator who began his career as a publisher of his own work and the work of other Australian creators through his own imprint Cyclone Comics. Cyclone published a range of popular comic books in the 1980s and 1990s with titles as diverse as The Jackaroo, The Southern Squadron, Dark Nebula, GI Joe Australia, Flash Damingo and CCQ (Cyclone Comics Quarterly). Gary's overseas work includes US editions of The Jackaroo and The Southern Squadron; a very odd issue of The Badger with Mike Baron; the award-winning Planet of the Apes: Urchak's Folly; The Olympians, a two-issue prestige series for Marvel/Epic Comics; editorial and creative duties on Dark Horse Down Under for Dark Horse Comics — this series featured the first US appearance of Gary's creation "Morton Stone, Undertaker." His current creator-owned projects include the black comedy of Morton Stone: Undertaker; Red Kelso, a pulp-inspired adventure series; and new adventures of The Jackaroo. Chaloner worked closely with Will Eisner in the development and relaunch of Will Eisner's John Law both online and in print through IDW Publishing.

Gary Chaloner

The online series recently left ModernTales.com and set up home at http://johnlaw.us.com. You can browse through the archives for free there and read more about Law and his new adventures. As a bonus, Chaloner is uploading original golden age stories featuring Lady Luck and Mr. Mystic. These stories first ran as backups in The Spirit Section and will be remastered and colored for online viewing. Hopefully, these classic stories will be collected for print at a later stage. In the 2005 Ledger Awards (Australian Comic Industry Awards), Will Eisner's John Law received several awards including "International Title of the Year" and "Single Issue or Story of the Year." Chaloner was also awarded the "Ledger of Honour" (a Hall of Fame award) and received industry awards for "Achievement of the Year," "Cover Artist of the Year" and "Inker of the Year." Chaloner also redesign and modernized the official Will Eisner web site.

Gary Chaloner Website • Facebook • Twitter • Wikipedia • Goodreads

BOB ANDELMAN: Gary, let’s jump in here. Tell us a little bit about John Law and how and when Will Eisner created it. GARY CHALONER: Well, hello to everyone. Hi, Bob. John Law was devised and created by Will back in the mid to late ‘40s. The Spirit was going very well, and Will wanted to expand his range of publications on the newsstand. He developed several titles, one of them being the John Law character, but the first one that he released I think was Baseball Comics, and it didn’t go as well as he would have liked, so the other ideas that he had were put on the shelf for a while. Will, being the frugal person that he was, utilized (inaudible) more artwork and converted it into Spirit stories. So all those stories didn’t see print as Spirit stories until about 1950. So the John Law material was a fully formed concept that he had been thinking about quite a while, for several years, and so that whole idea was a bit stillborn, so when the opportunity came along when I talked to Will and Denis Kitchen about developing the series wasn’t just a dead concept, it was a fully developed, ready-to-go set of characters in the universe that Will had already worked on and established, so that was irresistible.

GARY CHALONER podcast excerpt: "If you learn a bit about The Spirit, you also learn about these aborted characters that Will tried to publish back in the ‘40s. The name 'John Law' keeps on popping up as this parallel Spirit character, so it was only through reading about Will’s past and the different things that he tried in the ‘40s that this recurring name 'John Law' and the characters surround him, like Nubbin, The Shoeshine Boy, and Melba, Girl Detective, and a few other characters, had always stuck in the back of my mind as something that, why doesn’t someone do something with these things."

ANDELMAN: Was John Law ever published in the ‘50s or not? CHALONER: No, it was not. All of the work was adapted and absorbed into the Spirit universe. John Law in his own environment wasn’t published until the ‘80s in the Eclipse Comics edition. ANDELMAN: That was Dean Mullaney and Cat Yronwode. CHALONER: That’s correct. Yes. What I did there was, they stripped back a lot of the paste overs and art changes that Will had made to the original art to reveal the original John Law art underneath.

Will Eisner's "The Spirit" as interopreted by Gary Chaloner

ANDELMAN: How did you first hear of John Law? CHALONER: Well, being an Eisner reader for many years and bumping into a lot of the publications that Kitchen Sink first released and that other publications had written about Will Eisner, if you learn a bit about The Spirit, you also learn about these aborted characters that Will tried to publish back in the ‘40s. The name “John Law” keeps on popping up as this parallel Spirit character, so it was only through reading about Will’s past and the different things that he tried in the ‘40s that this recurring name “John Law” and the characters surround him, like Nubbin, The Shoeshine Boy, and Melba, Girl Detective, and a few other characters, had always stuck in the back of my mind as something that, why doesn’t someone do something with these things. A future John Law cover featuring Law and Melba, in a situation inspired by an earlier Eisner piece. ANDELMAN: Whose idea was it that you do this? Was it yours, or was it Denis’? Was it Will? CHALONER: It was pretty much my idea. I approached Denis about it. This is after The Spirit: The New Adventures was cancelled, and I had to produce a story for that, and this was also at a time when Kitchen Sink Press had gone belly up. Denis was going through a few hard times himself, and I had gotten in touch with him, and the relationship developed from there. Well, if The New Adventures had gone beyond issue No. 8, I had to do something else, and the John Law character was always at the back of my mind for me to develop. ANDELMAN: When you did work for The Spirit: The New Adventures, you completed a story that didn’t see print. CHALONER: That’s right. That was going to be in issue nine, and the series ended with issue No. 8. ANDELMAN: And, of course, one of the great ironies here is that, and you have kind of hinted at it, is that Will had done John Law in the late ‘40s or early ‘50s, I guess late ‘40s, and when that did not take off, he adapted the John Law story into The Spirit, because he never wasted anything, and then you, following that same thing many years later, you did a Spirit story, and you adapted it to John Law. CHALONER: I thought it was perfect. The planets were in alignment, really. ANDELMAN: How hard did you have to convince Will to let this happen? CHALONER: Not hard at all, really, not from the creative side. Interestingly, as a John Law project, it wasn’t always intended to initially be presented on the web, and that side of the project interested Will a lot. He was used to emailing and things like that, but he wasn’t really the full expert on web comics and how to deliver something on the Net, so it was all new technology to him. There was a steep learning curve for him as far as being part and parcel of the present Law stories. Another future John Law cover, this time featuring another Eisner creation, Lady Luck. Luck and Mystic feature in the new Law adventures. ANDELMAN: Will was not savvy as far as the Internet went. How did you explain to him the business model behind this? CHALONER: I did the best I could based on the business models that were around at the time, and at the time, Modern Tales was just starting and had been around for several months. It had the business model of the subscription base, where people paid “X” amount of dollars a month or a year to get access to the comics behind the subscriber wall. That kind of logic Will could understand quite easily, the whole idea of magazines having subscriber lists and things like that. It was quite easy for him to understand the logic behind the business of the Internet. The actual technical side of how to, of scanning artwork, color, you had to upload it to the site, that kind of stuff was initially probably a bit of a struggle for him, but he wasn’t a stupid man, so he caught on real quick. ANDELMAN: That’s interesting you mention that. So you are drawing by hand on paper as opposed to using, you are not drawing right into the computer? CHALONER: No. I color or graytone on the computer, but everything else is traditionally done. ANDELMAN: How interesting. I have wondered about that when I have seen the work. CHALONER: Yes, yes. ANDELMAN: Did Will give you any particular input as you were getting started on what he liked, what he didn’t like? CHALONER: Oh, yes, he did, actually. He was very hands-off as far as allowing me to do what I wanted, how I wanted it, but my ideas very much fitted with what he wanted, anyway, so we were running parallel with our thinking. There were several times where he did suggest storytelling changes as far as the structure of the story, panel layouts, visual storytelling, things like that, but the overall direction of the strip, the way the setting for the series, what the characters were all about, he basically left that up to me. I was always using his guidelines from the original 1940s stories.

ANDELMAN: I remember Alan Moore telling me that when he did the story that he did for The Spirit: The New Adventures, that Will told Alan not to make The Spirit a drug addict, among other things. And Alan, of course, was like, “What, me? I wouldn’t do that!” What rules did he lay down for John Law with you? CHALONER: The one that stands out above all else was that he said Law is human. That’s about the only thing that he said that was really the spirit of Law, excuse the pun. He didn’t want the stories to go off into any kind of ridiculous directions, and he just said, “Keep the stories human.” ANDELMAN: For someone who hasn’t seen John Law, first of all, how would you describe the difference between John Law and the Spirit? CHALONER: Well, I would say that the John Law character as a man is a lot more serious than Denny Colt in the Spirit character, so the stories tend to reflect that. There is still humor in there with characters like Nubbin The Shoeshine Boy and several of the other supporting cast members, but the character of John Law himself is a little more serious and less flippant than Denny Colt in The Spirit. This isn’t something that I necessarily planned, actually, because most of my other work I consider to have a certain amount of likeness about it and a sense of humor about it. It’s just when the stories have been produced with the John Law that the stories are draped with a sense of drama instead of humor, or that’s the way I see it, anyway. ANDELMAN: Both characters have sidekicks, however.

"The Phantom Down Under" by Gary Chaloner

CHALONER: Yes. A favorite of Will’s. ANDELMAN: Yes. Now, I gather that Nubbin is less controversial than Ebony? CHALONER: Well, Nubbin’s a drug addict and male prostitute. No, he’s not. He’s not! He walks the street at night. Nubbin’s your dyed-in-the-wool sidekick, comedy relief, a very resourceful street kid and orphan who attaches himself to John Law and also being a boy hanging around a large metropolitan police station, there’s plenty of shoes to shine for his business. So he’s very smart and resourceful as well. ANDELMAN: And how does John Law do with the ladies? CHALONER: Well, he’s had a rough history with the ladies, which is all reflected in stories that are being told, so he has had several loves of his life, and he is still trying to find “miss right,” which I actually do have planned out. A great love of his life is coming into his life very shortly, actually. So he has had a rough past, but he is going to have a fairly sweet future. ANDELMAN: The series began on Modern Tales online, but it has kind of evolved since then, has it not? CHALONER: Yes, it has. Yeah. The core of the delivery system for the stories will always be the web, and a new part of that is going to be that I am redesigning the John Law website together with the new Will Eisner.com website, as well, so it will be a functioning part of the new Will Eisner site. These stories online will always be the basis of any stories I develop in the future. ANDELMAN: The John Law stories have also appeared in print since then, too. CHALONER: Yes, that’s right. Yes. There has been a nice beautiful edition by IDW in December 2004, and it was received very well by critics and fans, and there is a new series that is in development now. The first issue has been released. The rest of the series will be coming along shortly. ANDELMAN: So it will be a regularly scheduled series in print? CHALONER: These will be a limited series, so they will be like self-contained stories. ANDELMAN: Will these be collections from the online, or will these be specially done for print? CHALONER: Originally, I had planned the materials to be in print exclusive, but with my scheduling at the moment with the Will Eisner site and the workload, I decided to run the material online, and then once that is done, collected in print. ANDELMAN: I have to ask, because this is something I am always curious about, is the John Law character and the online and the print editions, is it profitable for you to work on?

"Betty Paginated" by Gary Chaloner

CHALONER: The online material -- there has always been a huge question on that stuff: how do you make money from the Internet? This is part and parcel of my challenge in developing the Law project online in the way so it will generate a solid income for myself and for the Will Eisner estate. I haven’t found the answers to it yet, but this next phase of the development of the strip will hopefully provide some answers as far as new merchandising, advertising support, and things like that that will help raise more money via the internet. ANDELMAN: Have you officially licensed the character from the estate, or do you pay them a royalty, or…. CHALONER: I am basically work-for-hire for all intents and purposes. Any monies that are generated, a percentage goes to the estate, and the rest comes to me. I work very closely with different facets of the license for the project with Denis and with Carl Gropper, who is now running the estate. So if there is any facet of the business side of the Law project, it always goes past him first so that I don’t get myself into trouble. We don’t want that. ANDELMAN: No, we would not want that. Now, you mentioned in the conversation that you are involved with the WillEisner.com site. Tell us a little bit about that. When did you get involved, and what will you be doing there, what are you doing there? CHALONER: Well, it’s a total overhaul of the site. The web site had been lying dormant for quite a while, and it was, from what I can assume, the first part of a larger project from the people that had first established the site for Will. Will, of course, is one of the hugest names in comics. Therefore, my approach to his site was something that reflects his stature and also the amount and body of work that he produced over the years. Now, the Will Eisner Studio as a business entity also has work surrounding or evolving Will Eisner projects going off into the future, so the site will also reflect future projects like the new Spirit title coming from DC, trade paperbacks and book collections of Will’s work coming out from other publishers. So not only will the site reflect Will’s past legacy of work but also the things that are happening in the future, like John Law, a set of instructional books that Will produced or will have published since his death, and future editions of his old material. So it is a totally expanded site. It will feature forums, it will feature a very expanded library area, it will feature the John Law area, as well, so it will be a highly expanded and a lot more interactive site to reflect Will’s legacy. ANDELMAN: Gary, before we kind of wrap up, what else are you working on these days?

"Unmasked" by Gary Chaloner

CHALONER: Well, on the short term, I am just really concentrating on the John Law project and getting the Will Eisner site finished. They are my two major things at the moment, and just last weekend, I sat down and reviewed my notes for John Law, and I think that will keep me busy for the next five or ten years if things go well for the project. I do have a couple of individual projects, personal projects on the side, but they really do have to take a back seat to the John Law project at the moment. There is a Jackaroo series which might be recollected for the American market. I am waiting just to get some contracts in line for that. The Undertaker character might be seeing some sort of life online over the next months, as well, but that will only happen if my scheduling works out with the Law project. ANDELMAN: Gary, I am just curious. How different or in what ways is the Australian comics market different from the American market? CHALONER: Well, it has no backbone structure of a direct market distribution system, for a start, so a lot of the publishers down here, they have to decide whether they are going to self-publish and self-distribute through the internet, whether they hook into the overseas distribution system, like Diamond, or whether they think up some other magazine marketing distribution method for their title, so it has always been a bit of a hard thing down here. I have also noticed over the last 20, 30 years of Australian comics that the creative voice is quite a strong one, and the voice is one of, what’s the word I am looking for? There isn’t a superhero voice down here, there isn’t a crime voice. There are so many different subjects and variety of material being produced down here that you could pick 20 different comics and not two of them be the same. It’s total diversity. I think that is the word I am looking for. The subject matter down here is so diverse, and that is its strength as well as its weakness, because you can’t really get a pool of marketing together with several titles working together to help market themselves. ANDELMAN: Do you think that there will ever be an Australian title that will break through the American market? CHALONER: Yeah, I think there will be, actually. There are some amazing comics being produced by Australians down here, and there are a lot of Australian creators working big time over in the States at the moment, so again, there are two ways where Australian creators can go. They can be a creative force, like Platinum Brick, which is absolutely amazing. That is a web-based comic at the moment, Platinumbrick.com, but it also produces trade paperback collections on the web, relying heavily on Internet presence and word of mouth because it’s such a good comic. ANDELMAN: Well, Gary, you have been very gracious and kind with your time and, of course, your technical know-how, without which we would not have gotten this far, and only you and I will know how difficult this has been. CHALONER: This is true. I am standing on my roof holding the TV antenna and my left foot out! ANDELMAN: I think we all have a good picture of that now. Maybe you could get your wife to snap a picture of that, and we could put that up on the web site. CHALONER: Wait until I get some clothes on. ANDELMAN: Now you’ve ruined the whole thing. Gary, thank you very, very much for your time. CHALONER: It’s been a pleasure.

Order Will Eisner: A Spirited Life (2nd Edition) by Bob Andelman, available from Amazon.com by clicking on the book cover above!

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