First Word
I have a longstanding interest in comics. There was a long period where I wanted more than anything to make a great online experimental comic. I still want to make comics, actually, but as an artist I am debilitatingly neurotic. I delete everything I draw on the computer, trash everything I draw on paper. I spend a lot of time wishing that I knew an artist who would like to work with me and make a lot of money. (I am overconfident in this regard, perhaps.)
Patrick Farley was one of many inspirations. His work has regularly bumped up against the limits of current technology. The results were sometimes awkward and even garish, but they were also sometimes incredible, and they always felt like a glimpse into the future of the form. His new comic First Word is perhaps the first time I’ve read something by Farley and felt that it was doing exactly what it meant to do. The technology, and Farley’s ability to manipulate it, has caught up, and there are several truly breathtaking sequences. I guess I should mention that it’s NSFW, unless you work somewhere awesome.
I’ll admit I’m not always entirely clear on what’s going on — the comic is wordless — but there comes a point where that really stops mattering. Curious what you all think of this.
There is no explicit meaning
From the NYT obituary of Osama bin Laden:
Yet it was the United States, Bin Laden insisted, that was guilty of a double standard.
“It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this,” he told CNN in the 1997 interview. “If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists. When Palestinian children throw stones against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. says they are terrorists. Whereas when Israel bombed the United Nations building in Lebanon while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel. At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the top official of the Irish Republican Army at the White House as a political leader. Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world.”
Words will always be words. I can call something whatever I want and it doesn’t mean a thing until it is validated by power (in whatever form) and then by people because of power. Everyone keeps “rejoicing” and the only people I see or hear questioning that celebration is the people. I’m sure it’s coming in small ways from the left but the President has not denounced it, let alone spoken to it so far as I have heard. If I remember correctly, people were pretty upset about this: