Saturday Revue March 11: Hominids

For A Swingin' Good Time, Look No Further Than

Imagine Avatar re-written in an intelligent, soul searching manner. Imagine Tarzan with a brain. That, dear readers, is Hominids. Created by Jordan Kotzebue, this is the adventure tale you always wanted and never got. All the adventure, all the beauty, all the raw living power of the jungle is here, but this time there's a heart and mind to match. This story will steal your heart and entrance your eyes. Prepare yourself for a trek into a tale.

The Rating

A True Tale Spinning Feat.

The Raves

This rave must begin with the art. Gods, the ART! Lush, rich, vibrant and viridian, the artwork of Hominids is stunning. The creator is truly a master of their craft, capturing body language, expression, lighting and atmosphere with a breathtakingly deft hand. The color of a flower, the light on a leaf, the gleam on a blade all draw the reader eyes-first into a living breathing ecosystem. You can almost smell the loam and leaves, breathe the humid fragrances of strange flowers and sweat and feel the grass between your toes. This art is exemplary.

But beautiful artwork is only the first strand of the web. Onto the storytelling, which is more than a match for the art!

Hominids is aptly named, for it is, in effect, a story about people: their loves, their hopes, their dreams, their motivations, and what circumstances and culture can make them into. Angel or monster, heathen or heretic or high priest, it has nothing to do with who you are and everything to do with who your culture THINKS you are. The best people can be twisted into beasts by a culture with a domineering mentality. And the angriest people can be eased by a culture that focuses on peace and cooperation. Hominids is a parable about interacting cultures on one level: what has in other places been called 'the dance of the givers and the takers' is portrayed here. Cultural interaction between cultures with entirely different priorities can very quickly get problematic.

On a creative level, you can't help but be impressed by the creative worldbuilding and scientific dedication that went into this work. For instance, the ecosystem is based on and in some cases drawn directly from anthropological research on what various branches of the human family tree might have been like, and exploring a time when we coexisted is FASCINATING. The subtle attention to plant and animal species appropriate to the setting really impressed me (being a horticulturist in my professional life, people who get plants right make me happy!) and there are many deft and subtle bits of ecological and evolutionary design: for instance, the tree dwellers are perfectly designed for their forest home. They even have dappled patterns on their skin that aids them in concealment. THAT impressed me. This creator did their homework!

 On another level, this is a story about the interaction between individuals and the moral code of their culture. In Hominids, people ask eternal questions: do I believe what I was taught? Was I brought up with the right beliefs? What if there's another way? As the characters ask themselves, we're all encouraged to ask these questions along with them, and we all grow stronger for it.

But wait, there are still more layers! There is a spicing of sci-fi hidden under the fantasy of this tale, a hint of an older and far more technological civilization hidden under the vines and creepers, metal under the jungle loam. Now what happened here, the reader must ask. What indeed...

But that hint will remain, for now, just a hint. This vibrant ecosystem of story works holistically: none of these elements jar or push out the others. It's part of what makes such a complex story work.
 Another key element is extremely strong writing. The dialogue is crisp, clean and believable, the story moves along at a perfect pace, and there's just the right amount of pleasant, sweet and amusing banter mixed in to keep the story upbeat in the face of deep, difficult and complex themes.

In a true master stroke, every single character is well-rounded, strong and believable in their motivations: serious homework having been done is evident again in the careful use of psychological motivators, but this story reads as a STORY, not as a text book, and that's what takes it from good to great. You can understand and sympathize with every single character, even the ones you despise. And that is true greatness in storytelling.

The Razzes

There's not a lot to be said against this comic: it's stunning. But a few little areas could use some polishing up.

First off, dearest creator, when you've made something as AMAZING as this it doesn't deserve the rookie mistake of missing a page favicon. I'd add one as soon as possible. As a reader I noticed this little detail when, flipping through the tabs on my taskbar, I couldn't find the one for Hominids at first. Because it had a blank favicon that looks like any other neglected waif of a page. Let's fix that!
Simply put this code into the header of your site's HTML: 

<head profile="http://www.w3.org/2005/10/profile">
<link rel="icon" 
      type="image/png" 
      href="http://example.com/myicon.png">

and replace 'example' with the url where you store your image. Done and dusted. Your icon should be 160 by 160 and say something about your page....for Hominids, might I suggest a leaf?
The only other thing I might suggest is a little work on tangent lines and dialogue layout. Occasionally the reader's eye is confused about the direction of speech in a conversation. The creator has color coded the speech, which helps enormously, but careful attention to word bubble placement is still essential.
Always remember that English readers read up to down, left to right. Throw that off even a little and you have confused eyeballs.

The Revue

A wonderous and enchanting MUST READ. Fern Gulley for adults, Avatar for intellectuals. Enjoy!

Monthly Matinee October: The Masks We Hide Behind

The Masks We Hide Behind; Geek Culture, Free Speech, Harassment And Internet Anonymity. It Matters For All Of Us.

 The Magic

Masks. Pull one on, and your identity is concealed, revealed, improved or obscured. It's an intoxicating thing, this freedom. It is, in fact, so beguiling that the German language has a word for it: Maskenfreiheit, the freedom conferred by masks.  We love the power a mask confers, especially those of us who read comics and delight in comic culture. Conventions, cosplay, roleplay, stepping into the protagonist's shoes. Behind the masks, we do all the things we didn't dare. Behind a mask, a blind man becomes the savior of Hell's Kitchen, a mild mannered journalist saves Metropolis, a wealthy dilettante becomes the Dark Knight and a scared girl becomes a Marvel with a capital M.
 A quite unassuming person pulls on a mask and SHAZAM, they're a superhero!
Or a supervillain.

The Mask

In the age we live in, we've been given the best mask of all: the world wide web. On the web, we're free to really be ourselves, to indulge the things that we might not be able to talk about or do in our daily life. On the web we let out parts of our personality that yearn to be free. We change all kinds of things when we interact on the web in venues that range from chat rooms to rolepaying games: species, sex, social standing. Some of us are heroes on the Web. Some of us are teachers, storytellers, performers, artists, friends, guides, students, guardians.
But behind the masks, some of us transform into something else. Sometimes, we become monsters.

The Trolls 

Art by Wil Huygen

We call them The Trolls, those who use the anonymity of their masks to indiscriminately hurt and shame others. If you create content on the Web, chances are you will someday encounter a Troll. They're the person who randomly posts 'you suck' on your new art piece. The person who goes on a rant on your comment thread and destroys the conversation because you don't agree with them on a point, however minor it is.
Some trolls are simply annoying. Some are terrifying.
Cyber-harassment or 'trolling' is a problem that's gone from bad to worse in the last few years. It can affect anyone, but it tends to fall most heavily on people with progressive views and women in the media. If you're both, you might as well have a target on your back.
Take Gamergate.  In Carly Smith's IndieWire article GamerGate: A War on Women Hiding Behind a Mask of “Ethics” , she wrote up several disturbing interconnected cases that occurred in 2014, started by an angry ex-boyfriend of Zoe Quinn and infecting the lives of two other creators:

*The case of Brianna Wu, an independent game developer who was threatened so badly and so often online that she has had to move her family from an address disclosed by a troll online and ask for a security detail when she attends conventions. Why? Because she defended Zoe publicly and said 'You cannot have 30 years of portraying women as bimbos, sex objects, second bananas, cleavage-y eye candy," she said. "Eventually it normalizes this treatment of women. And I think something is really sick and broken in our culture." You can read more about this on the well-written Inc article by David Whitford.  

This was an actual Twitter account linked  to a game
that let users punch
an image of Anita in the face. 

*The case of  Anita Sarkeesian. According to Smith, 'For pointing out demeaning stereotypes of female characters within video games in a series of YouTube videos, feminist cultural critic Anita
Sarkeesian has received bomb threats, shooting threats, rape threats, and death
threats from certain parts of the gaming community. Just this past week,
Sarkeesian canceled a speech she was going to give at Utah State University,
citing possible dangers and insufficient security measures after an anonymous
threat promised "the deadliest school shooting in American history"
in response to her presence on campus.'

The ubiquitous Troll

We can talk about these cases all night, unfortunately. The wonderful actor Leslie Jones of the new 'Ghostbusters' movie was recently harassed off of Twitter by misogynistic, racist viciousness. Back in June Jonathan Weisman, the deputy Washington editor of the New York Times, quit Twitter after a barrage of anti-Semitic messages. And now Chelsea Cain has been bullied out of social media, just this past month.

Chelsea's crime? A t-shirt with sass

Chelsea Cain is a comic writer and an artist of her craft. Recently, she celebrated and joked about the short run of Mockingbird (Marvel Comics) as it ended by putting the heroin in a tshirt reading 'ask me about my feminist agenda' on the cover of the last issue.
She was harassed so badly that she deleted her Twitter account.This is Chelsea's experience in her own words. https://chelseacain.com

An artist was just forced out of the space of public discourse by viciousness and misogyny.
Why?

The Troll Caves

Unfortunately, there's no easy answer to the reason people become Trolls. Psychology, social status, and cultural conditioning all play a part in creating a Troll. Psychologically, the very anonymity of the internet helps to allow for Trolls. Several psychological experiments have proven that people, when they feel they aren't being watched, will behave much more badly than usual. We need other humans to act human, essentially. When we feel that no one is watching us, some of us feel free to indulge our darker urges. It's so easy to lash out when there will be no repercussions.
In his article for Dark Psychology, Michael Nuccitelli, Psy.D. wrote  'the Internet Troll is a unique creature to say the least. In essence, the Internet Troll is what this writer calls Cyber Environment Dependent.

Cyber Environment Dependent simply means that an Internet Troll requires access to cyberspace in order to engage in their nonsensical passive aggression. Without having what this writer calls the “veil of anonymity” available to all online users, Internet Trolls would be non-existent. If anything, and without going into a long diatribe, if they could not hide behind their technology, “they would quickly have their ass kicked for their incessant provocations.” Prior to the internet, Internet Trolls were men, women and children who kept their subconscious fantasies for power, control & dominance between their ears hoping to one day ascend to a position in life whereby they could feel psychologically superior. Now with the internet and a cyber environment to interact with others without being in the physical presence of others to communicate, the Internet Troll flourishes.'
Okay. That might be a wee bit over the top in terms of rhetoric. But several reputable news and research groups have looked into this issue and found much the same thing. The trolls? They really are losers. They're miserable, and they give vent to misery by attacking others. For a moment, they're the one in charge. For the moment, they have power.
Paul Jun, in his insightful and useful 99U article  Don’t Feed the Haters: The Confessions of a Former Troll put it best of all when he described what drives a Troll:

1.They’re bored: Trolls lack stimulation “IRL” (in real life), for good or ill, so they seek it online where it’s readily available and easily acquired. A troll’s behavior reflects a deep insecurity so having someone respond to their words gives life meaning, regardless of how pathetic that may sound. I raided that wedding because I wanted to be noticed and talked about. Random people cursing me out through private messages or the general chatroom invigorated me. I was so bored with my real life, and even my virtual character’s life, that I learned to find joy in harming others. If a troll had something better to do, like work or a hobby, they wouldn’t have time to troll. The next time you find yourself posting a negative comment think about why you’re doing it.

2. They want attention: All a troll wants is you to turn the spotlight onto them. They want you to repost their comment to your followers. They want you to write a blog post or status about them. They will use anything and everything to get it. They will criticize you, post inflammatory comments, or write remarks just to make you wonder how someone could be so dumb. The problem is that you will feel compelled to respond to “set things right.” Even if you respond in a cheerful or positive way, you’re still feeding the troll.

Art by Vaejoun on Deviantart

I'll add a number three to that: Trolls are usually unsatisfied with their own lives. Not just bored. Miserable. Unfulfilled. UNHAPPY.
To illustrate the point, Joel Stein tells this story in his Time article:
"I’ve been a columnist long enough that I got calloused to abuse via threats sent over the U.S. mail. I’m a straight white male, so the trolling is pretty tame, my vulnerabilities less obvious. My only repeat troll is Megan Koester, who has been attacking me on Twitter for a little over two years. Mostly, she just tells me how bad my writing is, always calling me “disgraced former journalist Joel Stein.” Last year, while I was at a restaurant opening, she tweeted that she was there too and that she wanted to take “my one-sided feud with him to the next level.” She followed this immediately with a tweet that said, “Meet me outside Clifton’s in 15 minutes. I wanna kick your ass.” Which shook me a tiny bit. A month later, she tweeted that I should meet her outside a supermarket I often go to: “I’m gonna buy some Ahi poke with EBT and then kick your ass.”

I sent a tweet to Koester asking if I could buy her lunch, figuring she’d say no or, far worse, say yes and bring a switchblade or brass knuckles, since I have no knowledge of feuding outside of West Side Story. Her email back agreeing to meet me was warm and funny.

I saw Koester standing outside the restaurant. She was tiny–5 ft. 2 in., with dark hair, wearing black jeans and a Spy magazine T-shirt. She ordered a seitan sandwich, and after I asked the waiter about his life, she looked at me in horror. “Are you a people person?” she asked. As a 32-year-old freelance writer for Vice.com who has never had a full-time job, she lives on a combination of sporadic paychecks and food stamps. My career success seemed, quite correctly, unjust. And I was constantly bragging about it in my column and on Twitter. “You just extruded smarminess that I found off-putting. It’s clear I’m just projecting. The things I hate about you are the things I hate about myself,” she said.'

Few trolls are so honest with themselves and others. Some have been taking pleasure in hurting others so long that there is no changing their behavior. So what's to be done?

The Battle

So what do we, as a community, do about the trolls?

Respect. Reflect. Rethink.

First, we can make sure WE aren't part of the problem. Here's some good rules from Edutopia

Starve The Trolls

What trolls need, what they CRAVE, is attention. Recognition. They want to know they've had an affect.

Don't. Feed. Them.
Don't respond. Don't acknowledge. Put them on your blocked or ignored list so you don't see the messages. Don't even talk about them publicly; if you have a friend online, sure, vent in PM, but DO NOT let the troll see you squirm. Know from the start that they're not here for a reasoned discussion, they're here to see you flinch. Don't blink. Turn your back. This may make them more vicious in the short term, but in the long term animals don't stay where they're not fed.

 Stand Together

Art by Simon Love

People targeted by the worst of the Trolls often feel terribly isolated. In Stein's Time article, Leslie Jones said this regarding her serious internet harassment: “I was in my apartment by myself, and I felt trapped,” Jones says. “When you’re reading all these gay and racial slurs, it was like, I can’t fight y’all. I didn’t know what to do. Do you call the police? Then they got my email, and they started sending me threats that they were going to cut off my head and stuff they do to ‘N words.’ It’s not done to express an opinion, it’s done to scare you.”
Don't leave a frightened victim to suffer alone.
If someone you know or someone you know of is suffering a trolling, get the community behind them. Don't just chat amongst yourselves about how wrong it is: contact the person directly with support. Flood their walls with positive, friendly messages. Ignore the trolls, but make absolutely sure their voices are drowned out by better things.
Here's a good example. When I heard about what had happened to Chelsea Cain through an acquaintance, I researched it, then got on several art forums I'm a part of and posted about it. On Sunday we'll be sending over 30 images of our own characters in the same t-shirt that Mockingbird wore to show our support. This is the internet equivalent of taking your neighbor a bottle of wine after they've had their house robbed and staying over to keep them company. It's how we let each other know that they're not alone.

Stop The Game

If things are escalating and the person being trolled starts to feel unsafe, there are groups out there to help.


TrollBusters: 

TrollBusters is a rescue service for women media creators. According to the site, "TrollBusters provides just-in-time rescue services to support women journalists, bloggers and publishers who are targets of cyberharassment. We use our virtual S.O.S. team to send positive memes, endorsements and testimonials into online feeds at the point of attack. We dilute the stings of cyberbullies, trolls and other online pests to support you, your voice, your website, your business and your reputation."

Crash Override, founded by Zoe Quinn, is another anti-trolling group with a lot of work under their belt and an extensive resource center. The site describes itself like this: " Crash Override works with clients before, during, and after episodes of online abuse with a combination of public resources, private case work, and institutional outreach."

*Author's note: I was unable to discover
 the artist of
several images in this piece,
 especially the girl with the masks.
 If anyone knows, please tell me so
I can credit the creators.

Paint Your Own Mask

Unfortunately, there will always be trolls growling in the dark corners of our society. Somewhere, someone will always feel entitled to hurt someone else from some seat of perceived superiority. There will always be that person who has come to feel that their comment is funny and if you don't take the joke you're being too sensitive. Somewhere there will always be someone who feels so helpless and angry about their own life that hurting someone else is their only way to feel accomplished. It's sad but true that as creators, responsible readers and artists, we have to learn how to fight them. 

But we are a strong community, full of talent, vibrancy, wit and humor. We'll paint and craft our own online masks, weave them out of our art and our wits, our worldbuilding and our storytelling. We'll make carnival masks so beautiful that, when we walk together, you won't even be able to see the trolls for all the beauty. And we'll keep on walking through this wonderous parade called life. 

Grab your mask, it's carnival time.

Saturday Revue Octobe 21st: Moses Jones,Apocalyptic Mama

A Girl's Gotta Do...

What A Girl's Gotta Do...

Modern parenting is hard, and it just keeps getting harder. Teething troubles. Deadbeat dads. Zombies?
But Moses Jones has four mouths to feed, Madonna the Katana and a lot of moxy. She isn't letting a few undead slow her down. 'Moses Jones: Apocalyptic Mama' is her story. Written by Em Mccarty, this is zombie dystopia as you've never seen it before.

The Rating

Hmmm....close, but no katana.

The Raves

At its best,  'Moses Jones' reminds me of  the art therapy journal of someone coping with trauma: raw, beautifully lucid and painfully candid. The story revolves around the deep emotional bonds Moses forms, and when it stays on those themes it's wise, moving and meaningful. The emotional content packed into the work is palpable even in the simplest phrases, and the piece really does make you feel for the characters when it stays focused.
The art style is a pen-and ink lucid dream, as raw in its execution as a piece of folk art and as bluntly powerful when at its best. Sacrificing finesse for emotion, it delivers a gut shot that reminds me of Cheyenne artwork: its stark simplicity doesn't give you any wiggle room. You have to face it head on. This story pulls no punches, in storytelling or in style.

The Razzes

Unfortunately, those powerful punches are often thrown with the finesse of a wild haymaker, and too often they miss the mark. I admire the style that Mccarty is aiming for: the wistful lucid dreaming of a sensitive woman in a dystopian world, coping with her issues through her art. But both the storytelling and the art have a long road ahead of them before they can support such a powerful tale.
Here's my advice: do a lot of study on the anatomy of the human face and head. Here's the basics:


1. The eyes sit at the vertical center of the head or just above, about halfway between the top of the skull (not the hairline) and the bottom of the chin.

2. The bottom of the nose (not the bottom of the nose tip, which can be angled however) sits halfway between the brow and the chin.

3. The ears stretch from the eyes to the bottom of the nose.

4. The width of the eyes is roughly 1/5 of the distance from outer ear to outer ear. In wider faces, this doesn't apply.

5. The eyes are one eye-width apart.

6. The width of the nostrils is the same as the width between the eyes.

7. The center of the lips is located 1/3 of the way down the distance between the bottom of the nose and the chin.

8. The width of the lips (from side to side) is roughly pupil to pupil.

Fix the faces and the rest of the art will look at least twice as good.

Now, storytelling is harder to fix, but  my main advice is this: KISS. Keep it simple sir. Too often, the storytelling rambles off hither and yon: into the lives of side characters who aren't even named at first, into the past, off to moon about an absent lover. All these storylines have their place, but they feel more like loosely connected strands than a story fabric. I understand that the creator is aiming for a personal journal feel, but sacrificing story for style is a cardinal sin of comic making. Tighten the story up, or you're going to lose your readers.

The Revue

I'm keeping my eye on this one. With a little more attention and practice, it'll be shooting off zombie heads at two hundred paces!

PrideCon Weekend! Lessons Learned

Pride And Con In One Denver Weekend
What Is This Madness?!
Whatever It Is, We Like It!

So, some thoughts:
Denver ComicCon was, as always, a wonderful event. This year I had so many friends running tables and was elated to see them doing well. I saw so many people enjoying themselves!
My favorite nerdy podcast, Beyond The Trope, is strutting their stuff at the Podcast Corner. Emily, part of the group, poses here as the grown up Hazel (of Saga, a must read comic) with her wanted poster.

The wonderful Sarah Menzel is there at Booth 400, rocking it.

 The beautiful Moko Press table of Robin Childs looked lovely as ever at booth C042.

 My friend Karen Lechenberg is selling her geektastic prints for her company, The Mona Chewy,  at booth H309.
 Native Realities Press  is there and keeping it real at booth AA23. Karl Christian Krumpholz is an oasis of snarky calm at booth AV066. Sherry D. Ficklin, J. James McFarland, Dylan Edwards and Vivian Caethe are all there, and She Paints With Blood is beautiful at Booth 204.

 I could go on, but I'm starting to sound like an advertisement. So, moving along! 

Myself, I took it easy this year. In years past I've powered through all three days of events and spent the following week EXHAUSTED. This year, I did a one day event, and at times even that felt overwhelming. In fact, when I first hit the merchant's floor, I almost turned around and walked back out.

SO MANY PEOPLE.
Instead of running as my anxiety suggested, I went to a panel. I sat and listened to a wonderful discussion on self publishing, and I remembered that I like people! Especially the off beat ones. And I remembered that it's okay to have moments of fear. What's not permitted is surrendering to them.


I also remembered, in this time when the world seems so dark, that connecting with others helps us cope with our problems. I suffer from two issues that cause social problems; anxiety and hyperinsulinemia, which is an insulin issue that can result in me acting quite odd as my body runs out of glucose.

I cope with these issues by finding a quiet corner or space until the problem passes. It's amazing who you'll meet in the quiet corners. While my blood sugar straightened out, I sat and chatted with a couple of ladies who've been together thirty years and just got married. They gave me chocolate covered peanuts, which I accepted with grateful, shaking hands.  I commiserated with a mother and daughter who both suffer petit mal seizures that leave them in the same kind of situations I end up in when our bodies act up on us. I talked with an exchange student who was feeling overwhelmed by having so much going on around him, just like me. We talked, we joked about our issues and we laughed, and we realized that we weren't all that strange, and not nearly as alone as we had thought. Later, a sweet man walked me up from Pride to my apartment. We talked about Con, Pride and his wonderful costume; a rainbow American Flag with 49 holes in it covered by crochet mandalas. Each mandala had the number of strings denoting the age of someone who died in Orlando. He told me 'I went and gave my parents a hug before I came to Pride tonight, you know? Just in case.' The words nearly made me cry.

Some years I take copious notes in panel about a wide variety of comic craft subjects: social media, dialogue, pacing, layout and style.But this year, I was learning other lessons.

• Our differences do not divide us. Our egos do.

• Having a weakness does not make you weak person. It makes you a person who is resourceful in your way of living; you are faced with challenges and you learn to overcome them. You are a resource. Not a liability.
• Treating your own needs as less important is really, really not helping. If you're feeling overwhelmed, it's okay to sit down. If you're feeling run down, getting guilty about skipping a day of Con is dumb. Pay attention to your body, and you'll have a lot more fun.
  (this includes your stomach. Pack water and a decent lunch. Con food is expensive and, often, it's crap)
• We must take care of one another. We do better together. All of us.

• People need stories. We need to tell our stories, and we need to listen to the stories of others. We are made more human by sharing our stories. If you have a story that will help someone else in this world, that will uplift or affirm someone else, then you have a sacred duty to tell it.

So here's my takeaway from the weekend: hold your head up, take the hand of your friend, your neighbor, your cousin in this great family of humanity, and keep walking. It's a long road, but I think we're going somewhere good.