Oh boy here we go.
And yeah, this is tatsuya doing a comic about trayvon. And woa shit is this a nice soft target for an edit.
By the way, I was listening to an interview with Robert Zimmerman Jr, George Zimmerman’s brother, because of course I actually study up on these subjects before I make a judgement on them, unlike most people. But he said an interesting thing about all the rappers and musicians who decided that Zimmerman was guilty, he said that their career is based on trying to evoke emotions out of their audiences, and therefore they’re making a judgement based on their emotions instead of the facts. That might be one of the most astute things ever said, not just about this case but just about anything. It’s the reason why you get so many artists as liberals, and artists who seem to ignore factual evidence about cases such as this. It’s a left brain/right brain sort of thing. Most artists never evolve beyond just the one side of the brain.
However, the GREATEST artists are able to evolve both sides. There’s something to be said for playing people’s emotions, but to be able to do it using facts, instead of distorting facts or manipulating them into half truths or whole lies, would be a skill beyond I think even famous artists. But that’s something to strive for. For me, anyway. For the people making the webcomics we cover here, no, I wouldn’t trust them to hold my dick for me while I piss.
But I think there’s a lot to consider still. I think if you’re going to make some sort of emotionally evocative art, you may have to disconnect from facts. But you should be able to do that without lying, or at least without misrepresenting a real event, to make people think false things about it.
This is why people will remember 1984 for years to come, while the rest of the world has already long forgotten shit like Redacted, or Rendition, or Lions for Lambs, that turned situations based on reality into fiction or fabrication (Redacted) or strawman type of polemics (Lions for Lambs).
These are things that any real artist should constantly be considering, and wondering how this should factor into the art they create.
I’m not even going to use sinfest as an exception, because even in this shitty strip you can read here, you can tell he’s going for an emotional response. It’s a very shallow one, but sometimes the shallow ones work the easiest. “Oh no that black girl is being victimized by evil racist white people.“ It’s a very popular emotional tag. Certainly abused beyond the point of meaningless, in fact the fear of criticizing any black person in popular media is the reason why the “magical negro” trope exists, which tatsuya is unintentionally continuing here. It’s so shallow that even his own fans are desperately trying to dig some depth into these comics, saying that “well actually this character is very militant and blah blah" but there’s no emotional depth or literary depth to anything in sinfest, at all, ever. It’s as shallow as a spoon, and it doesn’t care. And any of us could do the same in a comic and get fans, because all you need is that emotional response. A shallow emotional response will still give you shallow fans, though.
So what I’m saying is you can’t rely purely on plain old facts to make your story spark, you do have to try to manipulate emotions. But you can’t do it cheap, you can’t just throw in, “oh yeah his parents died" and then suddenly the audience will care. You’d have to have his parents dying, and then show that he deals with it by trying to imagine new parents, or his parents being reincarnated into his toys, or something like that.
Anyway that’s how I feel about it, but there’s a lot of ways you could go. You could do the opposite of what I say, manipulate people’s emotions cheaply and obviously and without any respect for the audience, and still be popular and perhaps even adored by a fanbase, and maybe there’s nothing wrong with that, if you can game the system and become successful, and that’s all you want.
Just some stuff to contemplate.
I just find it funny he keeps using the dated as all fuck Matrix reference to represent the forces of sexism and racism, despite the fact that the humans were the actual bad guys of that series and had caused almost every major problem and conflict themselves. It almost makes those theories that Ishida is doing this as some sort of extended Andy Kaufman.like satire seem plausible… almost
