In progress.

This is a post for comic book artists preparing their pages for their publisher or colourist. I’m aware that many pros still don’t know some of this stuff, often because the bigger publishers have production teams who will take the incorrectly sized or shaped pages and adjust them before passing on to colourists or for print. However, this a) is giving more work to people that you can easily do yourself and b) reduces the amount of control you have over how your work is printed. It makes sense to provide files that will present your work in the best way possible.

So, the basics of a digital page file:

Many, many people are either wrongfully convicted, or grossly overcharged due to mandatory minimums in drug possession, minor crimes, and three-strike rules. Disproportionately, these sentences fall on people of color, especially poor people, and particularly black people. 

Prison is dehumanizing and deprives people of far more than their liberty. Individuals with a felony conviction, even once released, have trouble finding housing, jobs, income sources, etc., and society provides barely any aid or recourse. Bless these employers for going against the tide and helping change a brutally unjust system. 

The second and final installment of my comic Take the General! is now up on my webstore: http://aaronshattuck.bigcartel.com/

You can get it by itself or bundled with part 1. Both have screen-printed covers and black-and-white interiors.

I’ve been describing this thing as a 1970s-themed action farce. An obsessed sort-of crime fighter squares off with an obsessed master criminal in a swanky pad, with a boy dictator caught in the middle. (The dictator is a sadistic, tantrum-prone brat in a somewhat clumsy alliance with far-right ideologues, so there is of course no relevance to our current decade.)

Here’s a 12-page preview from part 1: http://aaronshattuck.tumblr.com/ttg-preview

I made a little booklet called “YES”. It’s not a comic, more like an illustrated short story- sort of like a Little Golden Book, but instead of for kids it’s for cool tastemakers.

Alternative titles for this essay include:

Why U No Read Femslash?!? One Fan’s Screed

Pin the Tits on the Jackass: Writing Effective Escapism

How to Win Friends and Influence People with Lady Porn

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So I’ve been thinking a bit about femslash. 

About how even on the rare occasions I find a female character in film/tv that is both 1) well written and 2) relatable I often find the fanfiction version of this same character to be oddly … sanitized in a way that makes me find her less relatable.

I used to watch Grey’s Anatomy for Christina Yang - Charming Genius Asshole Extraordinaire. I’d then go on AO3 to look for fanfic and I’d get Christina Yang - Hard Worker and Good Friend. All of her abrasiveness was smoothed over. She wasn’t funny anymore. She wasn’t fun anymore. She was boring. 

I have a similar issue with het fanfiction [see discussion], where even when I find the rare tv/film het pairing that defies the usual gender normative romcom tropes, the fanfic writers for that pairing will often go out of their way to reimpose those same tropes. Perhaps the most egregious example was the Game of Thrones fanfiction author who thought it was a good idea to cisswap Jaime/Brienne.

But I digress.

My favorite fictional relationship dynamic, romantic or platonic, same gender or different gender, can be summed up as follows:

Character A: You’re such a tool.

Character B: Your face is a tool.

Now I know plenty of women who share this dynamic. I know a very small handful of female characters in film/tv who share this dynamic. I’ve been in fandom for 15 years and I have yet to read a single work of femslash that reflects this dynamic.

People are afraid, I think, to write women being obnoxious, or abrasive, because they think it will make those women unlikeable. Yet these are the very qualities that make us fall in love with male characters. Fandom loves Failwolf!Derek Hale and snarky malcontent!Stiles Stilinski. Flawless queens make for great photosets, but boring stories.

We live in a culture of gender double standards. 

It is much easier for us to imagine men being layabouts, or workaholics. A woman who is either very lazy or very career focused is viewed as unloveable and neglectful. It’s easier for us to imagine men as pranksters. When a woman pulls one over on her friends her actions are viewed as malicious. 

Escapist fantasy is defined very differently depending on the gender being catered to. I go into further detail about this disparity: [here].

To summarize: 

Women get perfection fantasies. Stories about girls who are beautiful inside and out (they don’t know they’re beautiful) (that’s what makes them beautiful) who work hard and hone their skills yet always find time to help out their friends. 

Men get power fantasies. Stories about morally dubious loners with obsessive personalities who achieve success and acquire an entourage of unconditionally loyal friends/sidekicks all thanks to having one single marketable skill. 

People in large part read fanfiction for the escape. That’s not the only reason, of course. We also read it for critical analysis, and for representation. But when we look at escapist fanfiction, and in particular what makes escapist fanfiction successful, it has been my observation that power fantasies make better escapes than perfection fantasies.

Mary Sues can be inspiring. But I think after a certain point, the female reader becomes disillusioned by the reality of living in a sexist world, and perfection fantasies stop being sources of inspiration. She becomes tired. The idea of being the perfect leader/lover/achiever becomes exhausting even to think about. The idea of a hapless fuckup finding love/redemption/success in spite of all their personal failings becomes more and more appealing. 

What does that mean for femslash? Consider some of the more popular femslash ships.

Andy Sachs/Miranda Priestly:

I think part of the reason The Devil Wears Prada fandom has been so prolific with regards to femslash is that Miranda Priestly offers a kind of escapism usually reserved for male power fantasies, being that she is a filthy stinking rich morally dubious corporate mogul.

Emma Swan/Regina Mills:

Once Upon a Time’s Regina Mills, aka The Evil Queen spent one season committing mass murder and another three changing her ways and redeeming herself (all while living in a mansion and blowing things up with the power of her mind). Emma Swan seems to have gotten the same character arc in reverse.

Rachel Berry/Quinn Fabray:

I haven’t really read any Glee femslash, but I do know that the most popular femslash ship in that fandom is Fayberry, and that Rachel Berry’s is portrayed as obnoxious, to a degree that few female television protagonists ever achieve. Female tv characters with true type A personalities are exceptionally rare, and are usually portrayed as unlovable.

Popular femslash pairings are generally comprised of female characters who defy conventions for what the media defines as “acceptable” female behavior. 

But more than that, popular femslash pairings feature female characters who enjoy the same freedoms and privileges (redemption arcs, loyal sidekicks, material success, destructive powers, influence) we expect for male protagonists in male power fantasies. We don’t just love The Evil Queen because she breaks the rules, but because the narrative allows her to get away with breaking the rules, thereby making her a viable power fantasy.

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Writing nuanced female characters who screw around and fuck up is only half the battle. If women who break the mold are constantly scrutinized and punished for doing so, the story comes across as cynical, or even worse – as preachy. The opposite of what your average slash fan is looking for in the average fanfic.

If we want readers to enjoy reading about diverse, flawed, nuanced female characters, we need to put those female characters in worlds where their behavior is normalized and celebrated. Where they can play.

TL&DR

This is that social media thing happening, where I only share my good works and ppl get some wrapped sense of how talented I am. The solution is to draw a lot. Get to a ‘monkeys and typewriters’ situation where the sheer amount of doodling you do means statistically you have to strike gold 1ce or 2ce a week. Post those doodles on your blog and convince people you’re a genius.

🌱💀Taproot is available for pre-order on Amazon!💀🌱

I never posted about it here, so just in case anybody doesn’t follow me elsewhere: Taproot is being published by Lion Forge comics! 

It’s longer (80 pages –> 130 pages), prettier (every page is redrawn) and has a complete epilogue now. The book is coming out in September, but you can pre-order it now!

Thank you all so much for following the comic a few years back, I wouldn’t have been able to do this without you! I hope you check out the new version, because I’m super proud of how far I’ve come and how nicely it turned out. This book is really important to me and I hope you enjoy it too!

Here are some tips about pitching to comics anthologies, from an editor’s standpoint!

Hey, everyone! There’s a cool new ebook in the ICC shop! 

Creating manga is kind of like you’re a child who’s stolen some money, and when asked about it you lie and say you found it on the ground, but then the grown-ups keep asking more and more questions, and you have to keep making up more and more lies and make it more real. Like, I’ve already gone and said that I’d make this series, so now I have to follow through on that original lie to the end and make it look like something real. People who are good at making manga are really good liars, I think.

“Right? You don’t see me fuckin’ goin’ into your shitty man-stables and tellin’ you how to milk horses, do ya? So instead you come down here, disrespect me, disrespect my pa, and how ‘bout you stop fuckin’ disrespectin’ the Great Fuckin’ Tree that grew whens’t the world was young and carries all our fates ‘n its boughs, okay?

“I said, ‘okay?’

So I’ve been training this neural network to generate cookbook recipes by letting it look at tens of thousands of existing recipes.

The generated titles can get a bit odd.

There’s a creativity variable I can set when the network is generating new recipes, and when I set it low, it comes up with its best guess at the most quintessential recipe titles:

Cream Cheese Soup Cream Of Sour Cream Cheese Soup Chocolate Cake (Chocolate Cake) Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Cake Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Cake Chocolate Chips Chocolate Chips With Chocolate Chips

When I tell it to get creative, things get even weirder.