g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est




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Monday, October 10, 2005
11:03 - I'm help-ping!
http://accstudios.com/

(top) link
Something Awful linked to this a little while ago, and after reading the quoted blurb I didn't even follow the link because I dreaded what I might find. Of course, that's usually the case with their "Awful Link of the Day", but this one was something special: a comic book called Liberality for All. It looked like it might be something I wouldn't mind seeing more of, but the part they quoted lent itself without much effort to plenty of their patented ridicule, so I shied away at the time.

A friend drew my attention to it again last night, though, and I went ahead and gave it a more than cursory glance. Apparently there's one full issue nearly ready for release, and it looks (nearly) of professional comic-book quality; it's supposedly "getting major publicity in the talk-radio world", which I guess you could consider a good thing... but that's sort of the problem. As you'll see.

It is the year 2021, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. It is up to an underground group of bio-mechanically enhanced conservatives led by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North to thwart Ambassador Usama Bin Laden's plans to nuke New York City ...And wake the world from an Orwellian nightmare of United Nations-dominated ultra-liberalism.

Series concept: What if today's anti-war Liberals were in charge of the American government and had been since 9/11? What would that society look like in the year 2021? What would be the results of fighting “a more sensitive war on terror” and looking to the corrupt United Nations to solve all of America 's problems? In Liberality For All , the reader sees a vision of that future where there is only one justified type of war…the war against Conservatives and their ideals.

Huh. Laughing yet? I'm not. Read the synopsis; it's even better:

America’s future has become an Orwellian nightmare of ultra-liberalism. Beginning with the Gore Presidency, the government has become increasingly dominated by liberal extremists.

In 2004, Muslim terrorists stopped viewing the weakened American government as a threat; instead they set their sights on their true enemies, vocal American conservatives. On one dark day, in 2006, many conservative voices were forever silenced by terrorist assassins. Those which survived joined forces and formed a powerful covert conservative organization called “The Freedom of Information League”, aka F.O.I.L.

The efforts of F.O.I.L. threaten both the liberal extremist power structure and the U.N.’s grip on America, the U.N. calls F.O.I.L. the most dangerous group in the world. It seems the once theorized Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has now become a reality.

The F.O.I.L. Organization is forced underground by the “Coulter Laws” of 2007; these hate speech legislations have made right-wing talk shows, and conservative-slanted media, illegal. Our weakened government has willingly handed the reins of our once great country to the corrupt United Nations...

Now, don't get me wrong: I would love to see an accessible fictionalized account of this alternate history, a visualization of the world should certain different events have come to pass, a nicely drawn comic set in a New York dominated by the Freedom Tower and an ascendant UN. I'd love to see a comic that tackles these issues and presents them in a way people can relate to.

But not this comic.

Why not? Well, just look at it. There's a five-page preview available online; give it a read.

In it you see that the intro material and synopsis aren't aberrations from the storytelling style—they are the storytelling style. This story really does center around bioengineered talk-radio host superheroes fighting an underground war against French occupation forces. Everything is peppered with cartoonish labels—"ultra-liberal" and "Orwellian" and so on. "Ambassador Osama bin Laden" and "Vice President Michael Moore" and Fox News bought out and renamed to "Liberty International Broadcasting" (LIB). It might be funny if it were intended to be, but it seems to be totally straight-faced.

In other words, it's a parody of itself right from the starting blocks, and so ham-handed that it may as well be a massive prank by people trying to paint conservatives as just the kind of knuckle-dragging buffoons who would appreciate this kind of slogan-ridden fiction. If its goal is to present a case or win over any readers to its platform, it's going to fail utterly—instead, any readers who aren't already thoroughly in its corner will just point and horselaugh, like Something Awful already has. And who can blame them? I don't have the stomach for this stuff, and I'm sympathetic to what it's trying to say. I'm downright embarrassed for it.

What's really sad is that there are some interesting ideas in here. Much of the storyline would probably be salvageable, if only they took a different, much more subtle tack about it. Lose the explicit "conservative"/"liberal" labeling of everything. Ditch the talk-radio-host crap, which makes it all sound like a big ad for Hannity and Liddy and North and so on. (Honestly. What did these guys do, pay for it?) Don't tell us what's going on, show it—it's as valid a rule in world-building as it is in basic writing courses where you have to train budding authors not to just narrate (for example) how much one character "loves" another, but to demonstrate those emotions through the details of the plot. The same goes for all the atmospherics of this story. A bit less caricature, and a bit more character, would do wonders. I can see something genuinely interesting being made from a world where the transnational progressivists have gained the upper hand and have brought European-style appeasement politics to the US; where bin Laden is treated as an "ambassador" and where street youth vandalism takes the form of nationalistic protest against blue-helmeted UN police on New York streets and what amounts to foreign occupation. But for God's sake, do it with the subtlety and the detailed trickle of back-story establishment that we saw in The Watchmen and Astro City, not with a cyborg superhero named "Reagan" born on 9/11/01.

I remember writing something about this sophisticated when I was a junior in high school; it was from the opposite side of the spectrum, but it was just as Jerry-Lewis-clumsy, the way only something can be that's written by someone who's never experienced life in the real world or a contrary thought.

I honestly can't imagine whose worldview this comic strokes, aside from the truly dim. I was told last night of someone's friend who was pro-war because she had the vague idea that Iraq was directly responsible for 9/11—and that it was located right next to France. Now, I will grant that it does not exactly make me comfortable that the pro-war position just happens to be the default sort of place that society's most ignorant stratum falls into, lacking the interest or capacity for independent analysis that would lead them to make an informed decision, and relying on the fundaments of blind patriotism to assume that whatever we're doing is right. Naturally I don't hold to the idea that the more intelligent and/or educated a person becomes, the more he inevitably shifts to the Left; there are obviously plenty of really sharp cookies at the top echelons of both political traditions, and behind both pro- and anti-war platforms. But does this comic pander to anybody but the lowest rung of the analytical ladder? Does it make a case to anyone who doesn't operate on slogans and epithets or who doesn't get all their political insights fed to them by syndicated radio personalities? It's a shame that it was written by someone who apparently has a pretty good grasp on the issues and how to construct an alternate universe based on all the relevant factors, and who actually had the gumption to get a project like this off the ground; it's just very painful to see the result be something this shallow.

In the end it does nothing but reinforce everyone's stereotypes of the kind of people who would vote Republican: hamfisted, simple-minded, pugnacious nitwits who worship name-branded cults of personality rather than analyze the issues, and whose appreciation of art has its high-water mark at Wheel of Fortune. And in the end, that doesn't help anybody.

UPDATE: If the goal was to create a comic-format defense of the War on Terror, this is more like the angle I would have taken. It's something I threw together in early 2003 when I was pissed off one day, which explains why it's so rough and poorly planned out and why I only got about 3.mumble pages into it. Also I realized it was too Scott McCloud-derivative. I'm not saying it would have been any good, but at least it would have been about the issues.

Also, I just kinda like how Uncle Sam turned out. Hee hee.


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