this post is brought to you by tide. ‘Tide Pods now come in cherry, mango, and tutti frutti!’

i’m just kidding, don’t eat tide pods. that being said, if you do, the rest of us can probably get along without you.

it’s hard not to feel superior as an adult when you read things about the salt challenge, or the whatever challenge that kids are taking on these days, but i think a lot of that is selective memory. that and the hate on that people who’ve spun around the sun as many times as i have, seem to have for the ‘millenials’. it’s funny, cause i think the arguments could have been applied to us, and were. rightly so in some cases, but i remember being labelled a gen x’er, and having been written off by a certain strata of ‘too bored to think’ adults.

i think as we get more comfortable with a 24 hour news cycle, and people have to come up with more to say, they end up write op-ed pieces about this and that. buzz feed created a whole site dedicated to pointlessness, but other outlets are not to be completely out done. so, in the end, we get endless articles about how this new generation, ooooh, what a bunch of ingrates. sometimes it’s true. but not across the board. so far, i’ve met alot of younger people in my biz who’ll at least pretend to listen to my grampa stories about how things were when i was first in the industry. i appreciate the effort, wrap myself in a shawl, suck on a butterscotch, and drink a weak tea till i nod off.

truth be told, i thought i would take the world by storm too. i was going to impress everyone with my energy, my endless opinions, and they would be awed with how well i dealt with fame. only when i got out of my 20s did i realize what an insufferable ass i probably was. so, i try to take younger people now with a grain of salt.

Altered Carbon

feeling pretty good about this one, only 2 episodes in. definitely worth a watch. it’s a new sci-fi netflix series if you haven’t heard, which gives me a spark of hope that one day i’ll be able to get virgil to the small screen. keep going, netflix. i’ll be in touch shortly.

this isn’t a spoiler, but the one thing that bugs me about it, is a sci-fi gem that goes back as far as i can remember, which is downloading your memory. i’ve never been down with this concept. the idea being that so long as you had a copy of what someone WAS, and you uploaded it into a new body, that would be the same as coming back to life.

the concept relies heavily on this premise, so you either take it on board immediately, or you won’t be able to get very deep into the story. i imagine not many people find it a huge stumbling block, but i think it’s an overused ex machina. if it were brain transplants, i could see it. for all intensive porpoises, your brain is you. but if you carried around a storage device since birth, that soaked up all your thoughts and whims, you wouldn’t have a version of you, you’d have, at best, a blueprint for a predictive algorithm, a concept beautifully illustrated in black mirror’s episode s02e04, ‘white christmas’.

i also thing that backup versions of oneself sets up for lazy plot twists down the road. not that that is happening here, but if you set up the possibility for it now, down the line, after enough main characters cheat death to a degree where they seem immortal, nothing much will have any weight.  i don’t know if that feeling has a name, but i think i’ll call it the ‘jon snow paradox’

‘hey jon…. golly, i’m happy to see you’re alive… but…. does death not count anymore? and why did the gods want you to live, but the little girl who got burned at the stake need to go? was she less deserving, or just less of a plot point?’

on a sidenote, some of you may have noticed style…. fluctuations recently with the comic. that’s cause as much as the story is something i’m telling over the course of years, i’m also improving, or in some cases, just changing. all in an effort to hone my craft. i remember seeing other artists doing it in a much less dramatic fashion, wishing they could just stick with something, for gosh sakes. gosh being the dad of jeez, i guess.

point is, this is an epic tale and my sketchbook. one day, things will settle into the look i want, but in a way, i hope it doesn’t. whenever i feel like i’ve nailed the style, i see someone else doing something i feel i can learn from, and try something new. at the very least, it won’t be stagnant. and i’ll try to keep the characters from changing too much, design wise.