Tiny Tiny Life

1933 shanghai slaughterhouse

This post is not about making iron-clad Rules for Good Rep.

This post is about actually paying attention to your community, and the communities of the people you are portraying in your writing, and putting a little thought into finding the underrepresented and portraying it. It’s also about taking a breath and absolving yourself of the need to do it perfectly as a marginalized person. There is no perfect way to do it, because no group is a monolith.

I’m just a little weary of having to manage moral scrupulosity in myself and my community.

If I followed this rule to the letter, as a queer author who loves tragedy, I would not be allowed to write a single-character work of tragedy and make it queer. You know? Can we be messy? Can we let each other be messy?

And the post is also not limited to queerness.

If one does not like how the usual stories go — if one feels unseen — then the solution is more stories, rather than clamouring to take away other people’s pens.

We're all looking for black and white rules that will allow us to be 'good' or 'bad', that we can confirm something is 'good' or 'bad', but reality is far more mixed than that and what we all need to work on is being comfortable with things when they are grey. If you find it easy to condemn, it's worth probing into why that is and what is satisfying about coming to that conclusion. We'll all have things that we draw lines against, and that's no bad thing, but trying to apply that line to others is where things get messy.

Dresden Codak turns 21! Prehistorical incarnations aside, my first proper DC comic launched on June 8th, 2005 with THE TOMORROW MAN!

Two decades and change since picking up the pen and I have to say I feel like I've made some improvements since then:

As higlighted by SOSBrutalism, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that was housed there officially relocated elsewhere, and the fate of the building is uncertain (also considering the context created by the "architectural opinions" of the orange disgrace).

Washington D.C., USA.

© Roberto Conte (2019) Follow me on Instagram