Pie Dreams Squared

"No denouement to the drama of the real."

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Fry: "How can you people be so blasé? Here you are in the year 3000 or so, yet you just sit around like it's the boring time I came from."
Farnsworth: "Boring? Wasn't that the period when they cracked the human genome and boy bands roamed the Earth?"

 

Futurama S03E15 - I Dated A Robot

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I became so enamored of webcomics to a large extent as work put forth by one or two minds, freer from interference, albeit not from comment section pandering. As a bonus, their slow pace often led to the subject matter outgrowing itself. The following two examples are both slice-of-life (slice of > pie, get it? huh? get it?) a genre that rarely grabs me, and to be honest I was never particularly jazzed about them at the time. Both started in 2007. Both have become more interesting retrospectively.

 

Punch an Pie

Queen of Wands was standard early 2000s fare, lots of generic "they can't censor us now" interwebz naughtiness which inevitably slid into twenty-somethings' dating dramedy as its other gimmicks (wiccan heroine, glorified feminist abuse, etc.) quickly revealed themselves to be going nowhere. After its end, though, the author spun off and handed off one of her characters to another writer for a more consistent slice-of-life routine solidly fixated on the inevitable post-school concerns of sex and taxes. Aside from that, it mostly concerns the heroine's character arc growing out of her lingering adolescent emotional fits and unrealistic expectations and taking more responsibility for her own actions.

 

Octopus Pie

"My everyday anxieties don't seem so unique anymore. They don't play out on this lonesome, poetic level." - mid-series turning point. 

Heroine Eve(rest) Ning (get it? huh? get it?) works a shitty grocery job and gets a wacky stoner roommate, hijinks ensue and then sort of waver and peter out. More interesting for its commentary on contemporary middlebrow yuppie/art culture and its pretentiousness, including a quick jab at what's now termed wokedom shortly before its end. I stopped reading sometime before its middle years, when it kept oscillating unstably between trying to maintain its original sitcom zaniness and increasingly indulgent navel-gazing filled with unrealistic stabs at subtlety and deep meanings or just plain art major fappery - e.g. in this strip according to the author's later commentary: "That Eve is laying flat while he's holding onto her is meant to signify that he's in need." Pardon my derisive snort. I returned when, to my surprise, she posted a couple of new chapters long after the fact, with the cast now aging, pairing off, starting families, looking back on their youth less with nostalgia than bemusement. 

 

Train Dreams

Wait, that's not a comic, how did that get in here?

It's not often I agree with film critics on artsy, slow-moving movies (especially concerning a befuddled everyman stumbling through life) but this one was just solid work through and through. If indeed the character-centered piece it superficially appears, it would be boring as all hell, its protagonist displaying all the charisma of mold. But the show's true star is the changing landscape, physical and cultural, personal and interpersonal. It packs the most detail you'll see in a movie about nothing.

 

I could never get into those pie comics while they were running, but they read much better on a binge. From '90s outrageousness to 2010s socially conscious posturing, from in-your-face cool kids to struggling to keep a middle-aged couple together, from the launch of World of Warcraft to smartphone addiction, it's not always easy to untangle the change in author or the author's personal growth from milieu. Futile efforts? Easily forgotten? Twenty years later, about as relevant as a lumberjack from 1920. But watch years' worth of panels grow into the realization that youthful rambunctiousness has stopped being cute or narcissism no longer satisfies a fading craving. There's a glimmer of hope in there for an entire culture to mature. Instead it feels like the end credits are about to roll. Someone did just launch some astronauts at the moon again. Whatever happened in between there?