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Fandom - A Comics Quadrilogy
🕑 Added 2021-01-13 18:24:25 +0000 UTCHere's another comic about twitter. As with most character design projects, I got way mor into it than I needed to for something that would only appear as a one-off gag, so there are some design sketches at the end there.
There was an interesting little moral question that went into the creation of the second comic-- the main joke is essentially lifted from, well, real life. Someone had retweeted a screencap from a screencap aggregator twitter account ("cringe political posts" I think it was) where two people were arguing in earnest about whether or not Stalin impregnated a 13-year old girl. The exchange went down in essentially the exact same way as the comic. "You chode, she wasn't thirteen" "How old was she?" "Fourteen". Sublime comedy. I would never steal a joke, of course... but this was being said in complete seriousness! Who does the joke belong to? The person who screenshotted it? The screenshot aggregator that posted it? Certainly not. Its a found object! Duchamp would be proud!
I agonized over what to give Darth_Cestuous, the true heel of the comic, as an avatar. It had to be fandom related, yet bizarre and ugly. I settled on a gross fusion of Pinkie-Pie from My Little Pony with the facial structure of Bart Simpson character-- except combined in such a messed up way that Bart's skull is microcephalic and connects directly to his eyes.
The scenarios presented here, though goofy, don't even begin to scratch the surface of bizarre drama that unfolds in online "fandom" communities, which I am, thankfully, mostly isolated from. Why try and out-funny a reality that's more absurd that imagination could ever hope to be? It would be the SNL Trump problem all over again, so I went in a slightly different direction, going for more bait-and-switch comedy. Except for the first one, of course. Two white guys calling each other uncle toms-- I mean, what else does one have to say about that?
