Imperator Furiosa

The long version is that the Mad Max series is a narrative within a narrative, with the movies being legends and campfire stories, an oral tradition of the storytellers of the wasteland, all of whom are, to some degrees, unreliable narrators because they're telling stories of things that happened a long time ago from their point of view, if they happened at all. The events of the movies are likely either exaggerated or outright invented whole-cloth in the same way that the myths and legends of antiquity were. "Mad Max Fury Road" is the founding myth of the Citadel, and if the Citadel is Rome, then Furiosa is their Romulus.

At some point, someone founded Rome, and the character in that legend may have been based on a real man, but how that man aligns with the myth is almost immaterial. The myths and legends of antiquity, crucially, all took place in what the ancient world would consider "the ancient world," in a mysterious far-off time period when the gods still mingled with mortals. Whether Max or Furiosa or Immortan Joe or any of the characters we see in the movie "actually existed" within the movie's world is as irrelevant as whether The Real Herakles at the root of the legend was actually the son of Zeus. In the story, he is.

"Max" as a character exists on the screen because a lot of the real stories in that world involve mentally unstable loners with obvious PTSD showing up, helping people out of a situation, and then leaving without telling anybody anyone about himself, and the oral histories and myths reflect that. "Max Rockatansky" is a stock character whose general identity and loose backstory is retroactively ascribed to any characters in any legend who fit that basic description.

To try to figure out the chronology and continuity of the Mad Max movies or the associated protagonist is like trying to figure out how it's possible that The Big Bad Wolf is killed in both "The Three Little Pigs" and "Little Red Riding Hood," or determine in what order Prince Charming married so many different fairytale heroines or why he never mentioned any of his past wives.

CLOSURE

in McCloud’s Understanding Comics he defines it as the “phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole.” the most obvious closure is how we fill in the motion that connects these panels

but it applies to all stories told through comic (and I’d argue works in written word too, though in some different ways because the medium is different)

I think one huge flaw of CAD is that it holds your hand through the whole joke and either gives you too much not necessary for the joke to land or else just walks you through it so slowly that it’s telegraphed well in advance and thus isn’t as surprising

the closest one from above is clues

while not telegraphed, that middle panel just isn’t needed. it dilutes the final panel and that final panel has so much more than it needs to convey what’s going on that it dilutes the punchline on its own. the edit above tightens this in and gets rid of extra unnecessary bits so the joke lands harder and cleaner

bringing this back to closure, the above two-panels rely on the reader for a lot more. you’ve gotta do more work and you’re doing it all in the time it takes you to look at those two panels. they’re gonna land a little differently for everyone. especially when the juxtaposition between the two panels is greater, each person is going to have a wider array of possible reasons they’re connected. and this is also the instance where you’re more likely to get people who tune it out and call it boring nonsense. but that’s a risk of art that asks people to do more–some people will say nah, not going to

MAD MAX Fury Road

Hey one of my best friends wrote a book!

You can order it at the link above in ebook, hardback, or paperback.

It's a fantasy/sci fi story in a modern setting that is fun in a dysfunctional sort of way. Here's the blurb from the back of the book:

A seemingly normal teenager discovers her extraordinary origins. Caught between two worlds with no real place to call home, Shiloh Frear must work to uncover the hidden truths of her reality. Can she rectify her choices and escape her prescribed fate, or will she remain a permanent fixture in a strange and uncertain world?

I also know that the second book for the series is already well under way.

Oh, and there's a cute lesbian romance. :)

Weird bins, right? I have assumptions about how this breaks down and want to see how they stand up to some data.

And like it may not die as a meme and the big stuff will still get out to a wider audience, but it’s less inviting for new people to come in because rather than just looking at a poster and thinking “what would I want to see in a 1970 gangster flick?” and making something up that fits that, there’s this feeling, this obligation, that you’ve gotta work with the “canon.”

Just think, everyone and everything in his world is made of Lego pieces. They are as fundamental as the subatomic particles that make up our world.

From the characters' perspective, the humans are gods that created these fundamental elements as drastically simplified playthings imitating their own world. Imagine finding out that the periodic table of elements was constructed by gods in order to build a simulation of something thousands of times more complex, and we are just simulations being puppeted by these gods for their amusement.

This also explains why objects like the Kragle and the Scepter of Q-Tip are considered "relics" with unnatural powers—they are discarded items from the higher, far more complex reality that follow the rules of THAT reality, not the characters' reality. That is why they can influence the character' world in ways not normally permitted by that reality.

like a broken world view driving you mad is kind of like, yeah ok sure it could do that. that’s not limited to cosmic horror. the twist it often brings is this new understanding of the world and our place in it where it isn’t a broken perception, but a new twist on it, or maybe just an epiphany. like oh there are gods but they are inhuman and uncaring. we’re ants to them so I’m going to live like the ant I am--which is madness to somebody who hasn’t seen cthulhu or whatever, but it’s a different madness than the guy wimpering gibberish in a corner because his brain’s just broken now. it’s that character who the reader sees as nuts and extreme at first, until enough is shown and the world clicks in place and suddenly it’s clear as day why they’ve done what they’ve done, however horrifying or inhuman it might be

there’s a philip k dick story where aliens are trying to abduct some guy. this guy is a scientist working on atomics or something and basically he keeps seeing mirages of wealth and luxury, trying to lure him. he recognizes them for what they are and avoids even the most tempting and realistic ones, at first rationalizing it might be a foreign power trying to kidnap him to work in their own program. then he figures it’s actually aliens/extra-dimensional beings. from there he flatters himself that these incredibly advanced beings so desire his expertise, his mind, that they are going to lengths to abduct him. he imagines the sort of funding and technology such beings would afford his research. and with that thought he steps into the latest “trap” and allows himself to be captured...

...only to end up in the hands of an alien creature saying “that’s a big one! it’ll fry up real nice.” and he realizes he allowed himself to be captured by the equivalent of redneck alien fishermen and has perfect understanding of his errors and the fate that awaits him

I think the whole madness because you see something that’s incomprehensible to your view of the world is really difficult to separate from lovecraft’s racism--it’s the literal metaphor for it he used in just about everything he wrote. even where you manage to separate it from racism, it still basically does work of arguing that the status quo, the safety of the known, is what we need to protect or else we fall into ruin. that’s a chunk of the work the house in House of Leaves does (though I haven’t read it in years and can’t recall if it’s able to transcend that by the end). in short this conceit is inherently reactionary and authors should at least be aware of that if they’re going to try to utilize it