In the Dope Show

"The drugs, they say, are made in California

We love your face, we'd really like to sell you"

 

Marilyn Manson - The Dope Show

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"Many of the great economic masters, though they had originally favored radio-bliss in moderation as an opiate for the discontented workers, now turned against it. Their craving was for power; and for power they needed slaves whose labor they could command for their great industrial ventures. They therefore devised an instrument which was at once an opiate and a spur."

 

Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker (1937)

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"The sensories were an inescapable part of 2110, as omnipresent and popular as television had been in Blaine's day. Larger and more elaborate versions of the sensories were used for theater productions, and variations were employed for advertising and propaganda. They were to date the purest and most powerful form of the ready-made dream, tailored to fit anyone.

But they had their extremely vocal opponents, who deplored the ominous trend toward complete passivity in the spectator. These critics were disturbed by the excessive ease with which a person could assimilate a sensory; and in truth, many a housewife walked blank-eyed through her days, a modern-day mystic plugged into a continual bright vision.

In reading a book or watching television, the critics pointed out, the viewer had to exert himself, to participate. But the sensories merely swept over you, vivid, brilliant, insidious, and left behind the damaging  schizophrenic impression that dreams were better and more desirable than life.

[...]

In another generation, the critics thundered, people will be incapable of reading, thinking or acting!

It was a strong argument. But Blaine, with his 152 years of perspective, remembered much the same sort of arguments hurled at radio, movies, comic books, television and paperbacks. Even the revered novel had once been bitterly chastised for its deviation from the standards of pure poetry. Every innovation seemed culturally destructive; and became, ultimately, a cultural staple, the embodiment of the good old days, the spirit of the Golden Age -- to be threatened and finally destroyed by the next innovation."

 

Robert Sheckley - Immortality, Inc. (1959)

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Video games have been outputting more of an artsy fringe lately, but have yet to truly mature as a creative medium. Then again, how long did television take to outgrow the laugh track? Meh, games've got time. Still, re-reading Immortality, Inc. makes me wonder what Sheckley must've thought of the advent of video games by his death in 2005. Standard railing against new media used to revisit the same premise that increasing media sophistication brought audience apathy: the more work done by the program, the less done by the programmed, and thus new media will collapse civilization. When video games came along, the pretext to angst was flipped around faster than Procrustes could make his bed. They prompt too much action, hyperactivity, over-involvement, and THUS this new medium will collapse civilization.

Civilization having... sec (runs to glance out the window; nope, still there)

Civilization having neglected to collapse, we're left with the unsurprising conclusion that games are just another creative medium, amenable to personal or artistic expression, entertainment or propaganda in whatever ratios the monkeys in question produce and consume. Just like books, theater or television, some (like myself) in every generation will be prone to over-indulge by various standards, but as with every diversion the prevalence of indulgence is less an issue in itself than an indicator of the inadequacy of human life.

Engaging my superhuman powers of forevoyeurism for a moment, I can predict that media, genres and fads will continue to arise now and anon, and the relevant question each time will not be of the new mode's quality, but the quality of its creators and audiences. All the more relevant this to our slightly decentralized modern culture, with gamified public discourse encouraging us to score points against each other on every forum and comments section. The depth and complexity of a video game, more than that of a book or movie, depends not only on a target audience's ability to spot depth and complexity but its ability to behave deeply and complexly. Does your grand role-playing adventure consist of being ordered from HUD marker to HUD marker? Is your strategy just a race to the designated best unit? Is your city an endless reiteration of the same cookie-cutter neighbourhood?

 

Does your identity as an imaginary Werwolfe hold any meaning or are you just another werewolf? Games do hold one great, largely untapped potential to alter our thinking: establishing a personal playstyle, mode of interaction, be it expressed in simoleon expenditure, unit ratios or alignment wheel position... or preferences, or fears or aspirations. It gets you thinking about deliberately making your soul. Who were you in 2021, and who will you be in 2022? Have any words, sights, sounds altered your personality? With or without your informed consent? Are you moving or being moved? In our grand, global, interconnected all-pawn clash of psychological influences, are you a player or just another unit?

EndLand

"I squirm into you, now I'm in your gut

I fell into you, now I'm in a rut"

Marilyn Manson - Deformography

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"The same things I've written a thousand times before. After all, an act can lose meaning if you do it often enough."

 

I'd hoped to have more to say about Strangeland but in the end I find myself resenting its ending more than admiring its high points. I will say that despite its initial setup of a man feeling responsible for a woman's death, it didn't quite go the standard "man bad; woman good" route, and it's rare to find any form of entertainment these days not openly trumpeting feminist male-bashing. Unfortunately it does slide into an older version.

Of course, it would be hard to say much about Strangeland in the first place due to its oft-noted brevity. In fact its GoG summary lists most interactable characters and despite (unlike most adventure games) touting some built-in replay value, you'll make most of your decisions during the first zone. Which prompts the first question: how short is too short?

Before online distribution, the answer was obvious: game boxes cost $50 off the store shelf (expansion packs $35) and contained a predetermined quantity of escapism, long enough to ensure you didn't feel the need to buy from other publishers but also just barely short enough to leave you wanting more of the same. A "game" meant a couple weeks' worth of evenings. Then came multiplayer replayability, endless games, the return of quasi-randomized roguelike questing, and multiple play modes (e.g. strategic overland plus personal mission-running) blowing the roof off the high end of that scale. So why do we still prop up the mandatory low end?

 

Absent the overhead of boxing, shipping and storing physical disks, and given the evident accessibility of modern game engines (seems everything I play now carries the Unity logo) the minimal unit price to justify production has been rapidly dropping. Granted, emphasizing play time over sheer sales figures made a better measure of quality, but of course this can itself be abused by designers (especially startups or dilettantes) padding out their campaign's length with ludicrous timesinks and stalling. "Hours played" has recently grown nearly as meaningless a metric as the number of players in "free"-to-play games. Strangeland feels short, especially to those of us who'd hoped for a second Primordia, but it pointedly automates a repetitive task as soon as you demonstrate you've grasped the concept of mouths instead of forcing you to trudge back and forth, and mocks you for being willing to sit in place waiting for a slow reward. Why not pay $10-15 for a condensed dose of recherché psycho-symbolism you'll remember more keenly than you would a hundred hours' worth of Callin' Duties? As a fan of science fiction, that genre most prone to hard-hitting, thought-provoking short stories, I can't help but think our expectations are to blame for a perceived lack here, and depriving us of much potential interactive quality brevity.

Moving on, this is where things have to get spoilery, not only for Strangeland but for the postapocalyptic furry comic Endtown. For whatever my evaluation's worth, they're both worth an unspoiled sit-through, though neither is world-shaking work.

Aside from constantly retconning its cosmology, Endtown (coincidentally enough) has a major problem with endings. The author has set up some intricate intrigues (the milk and meat storylines starting 2012/10/25 and its followup 2016/12/28 being particularly well developed) stemming from his furries' physical and psychological tendencies and internecine squabbles, yet instead of tying up each plot's threads he lops them all off via some nonsensical wish-granter or other deus ex machina. While personally I was most annoyed by the spaceship that runs on feels, the culprit is usually that space wizard effortlessly invalidating all others''s influence. At the same time, formerly competent, driven (or at least cooperative) characters tend to inexplicably devolve to naive, childishly labile versions of themselves, the better for their newfound incompetence to make room for external salvation or damnation.

Which brings us back to Strangeland:

"You have one wish left"

"I wish to know who I am"

"Funny. That was your first wish."

No, that dialogue is actually paraphrased from one of Planescape: Torment's more famous anecdotes. But, given that Strangeland's writer's a well-recognized Torment fanboy and the protagonist's constant deaths to advance the plot recall the Nameless One without fail, I can't help but also question the "know thyself" angle. Though Strangeland's "good" ending ostensibly has you embracing your own worth, it reminded me of nearing the end of an Endtown storyline, the heroes having grappled with demons both inner and outer, conquered existential threats and existential despair, only for a space wizard to swan into the picture and snatch up control of the situation, denying them their well-earned victory. Admittedly, it works better for Strangeland's stricter focus on psychology, as mental disorders of most varieties are so difficult to overcome precisely because they turn all your effort against yourself, raising the stakes for external symbols as lifelines.

 

I'll also admit I'm mostly bothered by exactly that one line about his lover's eyes showing him his bright self. In real life, viewing a man through the female gaze yields precisely Strangeland: a world in which the man is ugly, insane, dangerous and broken by default and in need of a yoke and muzzle (or straightjacket) his life worth an order of magnitude less than that of his tribe's females, the value of his existence defined entirely by his potential utility as provider and protector to a woman and her offspring. I can't decide whether to call Strangeland's interpretation naive or insidious, but it rings painfully hollow against realistic observation of the human condition.

 

Torment's best ending packed you off to eternal war by yourself... but as yourself, your full self. Other noteworthy games from that same period like V:tM-Bloodlines also allowed for individual endings, striding into the (proverbial) sunset finally free of various factions' machinations. In Strangeland, after spending puzzle after puzzle struggling for individual integrity, piecing together my own shattered psyche, being thrown a "good ending" bone for embracing an external influence (even symbolic) betrays the player-as-protagonist's efforts. This "freedom is slavery" reinterpretation reeks of recent decades' cultural decay.

In short, I decided stabbing myself is my canonical lycanthrope-approved ending to Strangeland. I am worthless... but <I> am worthless.

To bring this back around to my earlier point, Strangeland is a short story, and short stories depend heavily on Poe's single effect. Ruin the ending, ruin the effect, ruin $5 of the $10 story instead of 5/50. In turn, this throws a new light on Endtown's ruining various character arcs and intrigues by needlessly contrived endings. If one were to view Endtown as a single over-arching metaplot, as the story of Aaron Marx and his magic powers toying with a postapocalyptic furry farm, it might hold together better. But that's not what you find yourself reading on a page by page basis. As each new protagonist's struggle is invalidated by each new deus ex machina, each short story is ruined in turn. Endtown becomes a chain of abortions, of setups fizzling out again and again, character development, future history and phlebotina all tortured into nonsensical conclusions that the beating of that hideous heart ain't so bad since we invented pacemakers.

 Newly failed short "story" attempt, Deliver, is now up for panning at your leisure.

Faith of our Frotteurs

"Cause the inquisition's here and it's here to staaaaaaay!"

History of the World Part 1

Just thought I'd prompt you to think about religious exemptions to vaccination in light of modern sensibilities to interpersonal harm. The same government, the same company, the same school that would gladly have a man fired, blacklisted, ostracised or beaten to death in prison as a rapist on a woman's say-so for no more substantive accusation than a whistle or raised eyebrow as mortal danger to all woman-kind will gleefully permit the subhuman troglodytes who kow-tow before stone-age superstitions to infect as many people as they can with as many diseases as they can, of varying lethality, for claiming their imaginary magic sky-daddy might frown upon public health.

Fine. Fuck it. Cough it up. Spread the love. Might as well. God bless your mucus.

The absurdity of this idiotic species does little to justify any efforts to save it.

But it does raise the question of why we don't have a religious exemption for hooter-honkin', a Church of the Holy Grab-Ass, a Priory o' Pinchin', a holiday of Fellate Me Mother For I Have Sprung.

If you're willing to condemn women to choke on their own blood for the sake of invisible pigeons with harps, I don't see that hoochin' their coochies by the power vested in me by the blueness of my balls would be anything but a step up.

Lockstep 3: Or, there and back again

Minor spoiler for Vagrus: The Riven Realms

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Unable to find any half-skim guanaco milk for my eyebrow perifoliation treatments, instead I've been trying my hand at That Game That Misspelled My Name In The Preorder Credits and so far it looks quite promising, if still awaiting some fleshing out of its various features. Despite taverns including a hint system pointing you to various content, for instance, I've been having a devil of a time finding the various NPC companions to fill my roster, which in turn is preventing me from questing. About to rail against this lack, I ended up glancing at an online cheat-sheet only to discover I'd hounded circles around what should have been an obvious freebie.

Repeatedly.

Plotting all three of my trips to Deven so far with a view both toward accumulating fetch quests for simultaneous delivery and taking advantage of market prices to waste as little inventory space as possible entailed avoiding the unprofitable direct route along the main road, and consequently the hidden ambush site where you can rescue Finndurath the Spellweaver. I'd still have missed her if not for a damn reddit thread.

While Vagrus explicitly advertises a lack of handholding as one of its core selling points, given the importance of companions to questing and logistics, this one's proximity and the location she asks you to visit, you're obviously expected to run into her quite quickly. It's supposed to be a gimmie, a nice surprise while starting out. She's even located in an obvious spot. Too obvious, in fact, so that any gamer worth his salt will instead hit other locations (like the salt mines) for fun and profit instead of plowing forward. Is sweeping for side-quests before main objectives not a core strategy in cRPGs? Is maximizing logistics' profitability not in fact my exact job description as Vagrus? Why am I being denied an early reward for putting more thought into things than running there and back again horse-blindered, ignoring possible rings of power and profit?

It is possible for game designers to predict their customers' reactions so perfectly as to give the illusion of free choice while laying out a linear path. Off the top of my head, Half-Life 2's introduction (running through the apartment building) managed it beautifully. But it ain't easy, and the nerdier the genre the harder the players are to predict. A managerial cRPG exploration sandbox? Quite nerdy.* So why did you predict I'd simplemindedly rush from big city to big city? The more I play Vagrus, the clearer becomes the devs' very, very precise idea of how your early game should unfold, and entirely too much of it depends on foreknowledge of where and in what sequence to unlock stores with discounts, companions and free stacks of loot... while hoping for lucky fetch quest randomization. Its tendency to over-predict player actions clashes with its fundamental randomization.

Oh well. With a third rusty side-chick in tow, at least now I can re-attempt to lick the neck romancer's swamp hole. Later, comes.

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* edit 2022/12/05 - And that's not mentioning the gratuitous LATIN. No really, why did you ever assume your target audience would go for the obvious?

Hey, what's another name for literary cannon?

A knowitzer.

Will Sinfest Play in Peoria?

"Sometimes you wanna go

Where everybody knows your name

And they're always glad you came"

 

Cheers intro

 

 

Earlier this year when I joked about certain webcartoonists flipping their political switch from Tatsuya Ishida to Jack Chick (thereby confirming my prediction about the snowflake generation) I was ironically unaware that Ishida himself had taken a steep plunge in that direction in recent months, having not checked up on his magnum opus Sinfest for several years.

Sinfest, for anyone who's managed to avoid it, was in the early 2000s a quite funny mish-mash of jokes at the expense of everything from cheap genre movies to religions to poetry slams to recreational drugs to both genders to cats and dogs, to really anything the author could punch a line at. Though not exceptionally original, its trenchant, unapologetic vivacity earned it a place in the limelight. After 2008, the author switched gears abruptly to feminism, more feminism and pretty much nothing but feminism all day every day, increasingly foregoing humor altogether in favor of simply bemoaning his masculinity, bashing men as guilty of all the world's ills and upholding women as immaculate victims of male evil. Apparently sometime last year he switched tracks yet again to right-wing conspiracy theory, now attacking "wokeness" which by his definition includes vaccination and holding up traditionalism, including religiosity, as inherent goodness.

 

First, let's address the author's motivation. For a long time, whenever his name was mentioned, everyone seemed desperate to pin down Ishida's exact position on the political spectrum (most commonly as "trans-exclusionary radical feminist") but I was never clear on what viewpoint exactly Sinfest promoted aside from the general hatred of men (and sex as a representation of male desire) connecting all feminism. However, the more recent swerve into anti-government, anti-medicine, anti-globalist conspiracism, by its very magnitude, throws light on his previous devotion to left-wing extremism as well.

He's weak.

That's it. There's the big mystery solved by the very eagerness, the fanaticism with which the author yet again dives into a new subculture. For all his considerable talent as a cartoonist and satirist and the punch thus imparted to his causes, Tatsuya Ishida is probably a very weak-willed individual hiding behind extremist viewpoints as self-justification. I'm reminded of a page from another webcomic, Questionable Content, where a gynoid with a very large, military-grade chassis storms away from a party in indignation at everyone commenting on her height. The page was titled "othering" in an attempt to equate simply noticing any difference watsoever between individuals as an act of imperialist oppression as per contemporary social constructionist mass insanity.

As an aside, having lived my entire life as a freak for various reasons, it's not that hard to distinguish genuine ill-will from people casually asking where your accent's from simply because it's literally all they know about you at that point in the conversation. More generally, it is natural for strangers to begin their observations of each other by the observable, by their very strangeness and "other"-ness, before learning details. You are not being oppressed simply because the world has not been pruned of everyone unlike yourself. Recent decades though have seen a vast proliferation of those who crib their lack of personality off internet quizzes and would rather lop off their own shins than find themselves of a different height than everyone else at the party.

 

With its second big shift in tone, Sinfest becomes an interesting case study in the mentality of natural followers, born-again minions. The particular cult he's promoting at any given moment might be anything, so long as it provides belonging among the saved in defense against an overwhelming wider world (be it presented as "the patriarchy" or vaccines) and forty or fifty years ago he might've joined the Manson Family or Jonestown; I'm downright surprised he's not a Scientologist. Subsuming the self in such a manner makes for some jarring lack of self-awareness... like, say, portraying anyone who accepts vaccination as a self-debasing masochist... while just a month prior applauding one of the heroes in a sexless relationship with a literal succubus... whom he addresses as "miss"(tress) in case the hypocrisy was too subtle for you.

Which brings us to a second point: has this past year's Sinfest really changed that much from its rabid feminist days? From what I've seen, femininity is still portrayed as the definition of goodness. Sex is still evil and harmful to women. Men are still evil unless explicitly subservient to female interests (see the father/husband in prison, the heroes going to save the world by saving a female personification of the year 2021) and no woman can ever do wrong except by masculine influence. That female characters are now wearing overalls instead of Matrix shades makes little difference once you scratch the surface. The idolatry at the center of Ishida's worship is still that of Venus figurines.

The shallowness of Sinfest's transition supports not only my point that snowflakes' desperation to atone for their original sin in being born the wrong sex/race/etc. will translate to traditional religion in the 2020s but, more important, that Ishida's minion mentality manifests most consistently as self-flagellation over his insufficiency as a servant of females. By genuflecting before women, he will never risk having his height noticed at the party. He's still as feminist as he ever was, and as one whose cartoons one might find taped to social "science" professors' doors in universities all through last decade, his non-conversion reflects upon the movement in return.

 

Feminism, for all it masquerades as left-wing politics, is an overwhelmingly reactionary viewpoint struggling to maintain the traditional precept of male debt toward females. Its popularity, its political convenience as justification for attacking men, spiked most noticeably as the sexual revolution threatened to demystify women's most entrenched means of control over men and incidentally the wealthy's ability to control the entire populace by appealing to half of it. Let's not act surprised that beneath all the fabricated accusations of wage gaps and rape cultures we find the same old Mrs. Grundy preaching animal husbandry.

Thief of Virtue

"I'm in the wrong and I've done it all before

I cannot breathe this poison air filled with lies"

 

Combichrist - Throat Full of Glass

 

 

I decided to hit Strangeland before Lorelai for my next adventure game... errr, adventure, and so far it looks promising, aside from the painfully predictable "man bad, woman good" men-are-gynocidal-maniacs feminist setup which I'm hoping (but not expecting) to see discredited before the end. I got stuck before even finishing the first scene, though.

I don't mean stuck in practical terms. I know the next step (and double-checking with the in-game hint system even confirms it) but I've been trying my damnedest to find any other solution... than lying to the nice, helpful old blind man feeding the birds in the park. Or feeding the nonexistent imaginary doves in a post-death fugue state or-possibly-alternate-dimension and they're actually ravens. Not the point! I don't want to lie!

... Can't I just shoot him or something?

Computer games have always had an uneasy relationship with nonviolence, as clicking things on and off (i.e. into or out of existence) is the most straightforward use of an electronic interface even down to single pixels. From there to making the pointer into a gun barrel is a short path indeed. When they do try to get nonviolent (whether to break the mold or dodge parental groups) the results can be unexpectedly macabre.

Take Thief, for instance:

As the forerunner of modern stealth-based games, Thief made quite a splash by pushing you to knock people unconscious instead of noisily fighting them while you sneak to your objective, in direct contrast to Doom and its contemporary copycats dominating the market. Of course, you also had to move the sapped victims out of patrol routes so others wouldn't run across them and raise the alarm. By the time you find yourself lovingly stacking your twentieth unconscious person in a tiny cupboard where they'll never be missed, you might realize that holy shit, this would actually be less creepy if I'd just killed them!

 

In Strangeland's case, you've already established some kind of journey to the center of the mind in which death only means a temporary reset and your main task is reconstructing reality from fragmentary hints. This makes telling a lie, further fragmenting reality, a crime against your solipsistic universe itself while you have every reason to assume (at this early point in the game anyway) that cudgeling the codger for the breadcrumbs in his pocket would only result in him rematerializing on the same bench a minute later.

And that's ignoring the basic distinction that I'd rather be an honest villain than a lying hero.

Time for the Stars

"We were going to be a short paragraph in history and a footnote in science books; there wasn't room for us in the news. I decided that even a footnote averaged well and forgot it."

 

Superficially, Time for the Stars is very similar to other "Heinlein juveniles" - stories written early in his career (late '40s/50s) for the young adult market. Headline: plucky small-town lad adventures through space! Like the others however, it was deliberately written to expand science fiction past pulp laser pistol duels, and little beyond the protagonist's improbable age would doom them as "juvenile" - certainly not in a market where James Bond and Star Wars are considered perfectly acceptable grownup entertainment. Time for the Stars in particular expands upon some logical consequences of telepathy and relativistic spaceflight. Remember that drawing your junior high science teacher used to explain relativity to you, of two twins aging differently as one of them flies near the speed of light? This is about that twin.

As with other Heinlein stories, he doesn't miss the opportunity for social commentary, but where to modern writers that would mean #killallmen or #killallwhites or #killallstraights fanaticism Heinlein tempers even his favorite topic of individual freedom with reminders of the grim necessities of shipboard life and unified action in the face of unknown dangers. And, as the opening quote's equanimity indicates, most opportunities for the hero to angst over / bemoan his fate are quickly brought up against the reality check that he entered his career by informed choice and in all fairness doesn't have it that bad. I find it most similar to Starman Jones (albeit rather more chipper and less fixated on shipboard etiquette) in how pointedly it builds up the stereotypical hero's journey only to break it down. In fact its last-chapter musings by a temporally-dilated fish out of water seem like they might've at least partly inspired Stanislaw Lem's Return from the Stars (<--- caution: entirely unresearched speculation.)*

 

Strangely, a recurring theme throughout the novel is the hero's lack of understanding of the true nature of his adventure, whether due to his youth, his low rank or his uncharacteristically average intelligence for a Heinlein hero. The author even emphasizes the irrationality of their proposed mission statement (and by extension, interstellar colonization as a SciFi trope) halfway through: "There are too many people as it is; why encourage new colonies? A mathematician could solve the population problem in jig time - just shoot every other one." Eventually, the book becomes less about the trials and victories of daring explorers (or the "specialness" of their skillsets / superpowers) as about the necessity of maintaining the spirit of exploration so as to prevent humanity from falling into scientific and social stagnation. 

 

 

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* edit 2023/10/18

As Return from the Stars was published five years after Time for the Stars (and only decades later in English) the reverse would appear to be the case. Lem even starts his story basically where Heinlein's wraps up, revisiting the theme of the spirit of exploration.

 

Mort

"You put your hand on top of mine

You're talking fast but talking blind

And I can't bring myself to meet your eyes"

 

Missy Higgins - Cooling of the Embers

 

 

The comic PvP Online started as jokes about Ultima Online, branched out into other games and the usual Star Wars / Trek gamut of geek humor of twenty years ago and I wasn't particularly bothered by the fact I didn't play or watch most of the stuff it referenced because video game contrivances made excellent fodder while the many genres we now take for granted were still being established. I've barely skimmed the intervening fifteen years, and nothing I've seen makes me want to. Seems mostly to have coasted on its existing name recognition and remaining readers' brand loyalty. Unlike most of his early fans, I saw nothing fundamentally wrong with the shift away from games toward romance/office/domestic themes... except the author didn't particularly have anything to say on these topics. The mix of Dilbert and Who's the Boss was doing nothing for me. In the early 2000s Scott Kurtz was basically the Jay Leno of webcomics: a very small, simple repertoire of jokes thriving on brusque everyman congeniality instead of originality or wit. And, like Leno, his success depended on typos and flubs from the local press - or rather from the game industry. Such an entertainer's livelihood depends on the liveliness of the news cycle. As long as the universe (real or fictional) is feeding him punchlines, Kurtz is rather good at fleshing out endearing setups. When he turned to stale sources, he turned stale himself.

 

But this year he did something else.

Mort.

A short (~50-ish pages? so far) series centered on a father and son inspired by the author himself trying to deal with his father's severe illness. Normally such a shift in topic can't help but remind me of Kanye West milking his mother's death for audience sympathy for months after years on end, but there's no denying the death or suffering of those close to us has fuelled some of the most impressive expressivity in art throughout history. (Or least impressive as well; taking a family member in for life-threatening surgery kicked off A Murder Mystery - such as it is.)

Mort is beautiful. It lacks the blatant self-censorship of Kurtz' posturing as either the patron saint of webcomics or a social justice warrior over the past fifteen years. He didn't feel the need to replace his own father with a black lesbian whose pain would be more significant for being born a morally superior breed, or write the two men cowering in righteous fear of their female superiors in the natural order, being put in their place by women every single page. The few overtones of his usual routine fade before the real anguish of breaking down the social niceties blanketing our day-to-day lives, the relationships we took for granted. Even the initial gimmick of portraying death as an '80s sitcom wacky neighbour breaks down after a few pages in favor of the simple dark humor of swallowing your pride to help a loved one with basic physical needs. And it works. Beautifully. He's found a source of punchlines most wouldn't dare touch (especially knowing where they go) and he's writing excellent, laugh-the-pain-away setups.

I don't know if he'll continue, and given the emotionally charged subject matter certainly couldn't blame him for shelving this particular side project... but I hope it goes on, for the rest of our sakes, even at the cost of his own sanity. It's selfish of me, but in another decade I may very well find myself re-reading these strips as instructional material.

We all might.

 

Life's funny that way.