#byzlp

i want to either return to it or at least revisit those ideas and characters in some form or other (as i've mentioned on here a few times, i have very complicated feelings about comics as a medium-- and even more complicated feelings about the current state of webcomics but those also apply to basically every form of telling stories on the internet in a way and in a place where people will read them)

but at the same time it's not really realistic to think about that too much until i'm done with byzLP, since right now that's consuming most of my 'telling stories with words and pictures' energy so taking on a second project on that scale is ill-advised

obviously they are an empire and therefore, in absolute terms, bad, but they’re obviously one i find very interesting, both just intrinsically (there’s a lot of very beautiful, very intricate byzantine art i’ve seen in museums— i remember the met in NYC had these frankly breathtaking byzantine ivory miniatures). and it has all of the fun stuff you love to see in any monarchy— dynastic struggles, civil wars, guys getting their eyes poked out, etc etc

but i also just find the byzantine empire interesting in terms of the historiography around it, the way it kind of defies periodization (even ‘the byzantine empire’ is a retroactive term obviously; they just called themselves romans), the way it stretches from antiquity to the cusp of the renaissance. it goes against the kind of received wisdom version of ancient history, where the western roman empire’s fall in 476 ad led to classical antiquity immediately immediately collapsing into ‘’’the dark ages’’’. was the roman empire of augustus the same as the roman empire of constantine xi palaiologos? the latter would have been unrecognizable to the former, but also you can’t really draw a clean line between them— diocletian reforming the principate into the dominate? constantine embracing christianity and moving the capital to constantinople? the failure of julian to restore classical paganism? the happenstance of theodosius dropping dead as last ruler of a unified roman empire? the ultimate failure of justinian’s ambitions to reclaim the west? etc, etc.

ByzLP update!

there's a new byzLP update for your perusal!

Sometimes, it seems like the whole world has shrunk down to Amiens, the beaches at Dieppe where the evacuation is being staged, and the narrow corridor still connecting the two. It's so, so much more than that, though.

ByzLP has updated!

It's just a lot of mud, blood, explosions, and death, seen through view-slits and hatches. Go forward. Secure this crossroads. Forward again. Try to tune out the constant cacophony inside the compartment-- and the smell, that exotic cocktail of diesel and the odor of five human bodies stuffed into a confined space for hours and hours. Watch out for the anti-armor emplacement that just blew away one of the landships from Second Troop-- and don't look back at the wreck, it's someone else's problem now. Zuan loads a round, Isaakios turns the landship a few degrees left, Sabina lays down suppressive fire with the bow-gun, Warsame squints into the rangefinder and makes minute adjustments to the angle and inclination of the turret, I give the order-- and then the deafening report of the main gun firing, percussive blast of an explosion, bodies in Austrian uniforms left strewn about like broken dolls.