Something about Saigon.

Serious Déjà vu.

Bulk of yesterday went to a comic idea I had - a sort of Two-Fisted Tales sort of thing. Wound up with something so incredibly offensive that I'm not honestly not entirely sure what I should do going forward. On one hand, anything that I get this far done, it's hard not to look at as a project I'd like to polish and finish - on the other, I can't imagine any kind of artist that I could hand this script to, and by the end of it they'd still want to draw it [not that I have a load of artists lined up interested in my stuff anyway]. So. There's that.

I'm not blanket against offending people. There was a time when I prided myself on my ability to do it. But then isn't now, and it's easier to shock people when there's nothing behind it, or worse, when you're just out to piss people off for no reason. But that's not really worth anything, that doesn't do anything but piss people off, and if I'm going to piss people off, I'd like to feel justified in doing it.

What to do, what to do. I'd like to sleep on it - though that hasn't happened yet. I don't like getting into these habits, though looking back in the blog it is fairly common for insomnia to hit me around this time of the summer. It'd be interesting to know why. Maybe not helpful, but interesting. Trying to back off the worrisome habits, too. Thinking lately that there are a few people in my life who don't need the worry.

Change is hard though.

Script as it is now is pretty loose. All in the moleskin. So I'll just sit on it before typing it up. I just want to make sure, you know, if I'm going to write something like this, that I actually have something to say.


Had a better idea for the beginning of "Alone in the Universe." The History Channel and the Discovery Channel might be two of the cooler modern day resources writers have at their disposal - all happenings, no plot. Or characters. Maybe Hitler. Print history is always a hard sell - always some writer spinning some creative license on it, at least the stuff that's best to read. Though I'm sure as soon as I say that, there's someone reading who likes to casually thumb through encyclopedias who will be terrible offended by my statement.

But what am I saying? There's no one reading.

So I guess what that means is that I'm not abandoning "Alone in the Universe" after all. Updating tags in the meantime.

Finally broke down and bought an external hard drive. A whole terabyte of portable goodness. Needed to do it for a long time - saved a little money by shopping around, and buying a color I wasn't wild about. I suppose if it bothers me too much, I can always paint it. That I haven't been backing up files is just wildly irresponsible of me, and the last serious computer problem I had ended with me having to buy something special to rescue everything. Amateur hour, as a computer owner, really. Still, memory is always so damn expensive...

Sometimes I have these paranoid thoughts about the future of information, ownership, and how communal everything is getting, without actually being shared. Paying for access, but not owning anything. As things get more and more digital, sometimes I worry about that becoming the norm, and the only people who have memory storage of the their will ever really have control over the things the can access. Like I said, paranoid. But "clouds," oceanic servers - the wind and the sea, and unlike their natural counterparts, the people who put them there have a much stronger moral leg to stand on when we ask who they are to keep us from these things.

Buy memory. And don't forget about print, either. Or maybe I'm paranoid. Maybe.

3 comments :: Something about Saigon.

  1. I'd love to know more about your project and how you feel it will offend people.

    Also, I share your concerns about these "clouds" and things

  2. It takes a lot to offend me. Send it here, sir!

  3. Thanks, guys.

    @Cheri - The short of it, what I don't mind talking about, is that it's a war comic in the old EC style, "Two-Fisted Tales" and stuff like that. Because it deals with Vietnam, because it deals with the horrors of war, and more particularly soldiers, but in a sort of dark, at times fantastical way, I feel like that alone will piss most people off who look at it.

    But the thing I've noticed about soldiers, or really any group of mostly male persons who work in high pressure situations, sports, the boardroom, etc., there's this level of obscenity, of dark and gross-out humor, really offensive stuff that we sort of just let fly because of the situations they're in. I'm hinging the ending of this thing on that - looking at that, turning it on its ear, so not only would I be repeating already offensive jokes, but I'd be deconstructing them too.

    Some of my trepidation, honestly, comes from my kid brother joining the military recently. I worry what he'd think about it, what people important to him would thing, and if working on this is a reaction to his choices in life, which I support.

    @Ian - When I have something that's a little more concrete, I might send it along. Right now, I'm obsessing a bit that if I'm going to do something of this nature, I should try to make it as polished as possible - I worry that it would be too easy to skate by with shoddy work because I was saying something that people might be offended by.