Archive for ‘Uncategorized’
4 items.
for the site. Comicpress 2.9 and a new header image. And less messing with the leading on a page- I really don’t know why that was ever popular.
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I did some research for this comic.
It was fucking difficult though, way more so than I thought it would be, because of the impressive/creepy paucity of information on women’s prisons.
There is a certain amount of information about Maximum Security prisons with women’s sections, especially at Riker, but Neal would not end up in Max for the crime she committed- she’d end up in Medium Security with the vast majority of the imprisoned female population. And there’s little to no info on that, aside from a California study case file that recorded….well….pretty much every awful thing that happens in the comic.
The rape/sexual harassment of prisoners by their male guards (who comprised like 75% of the guards, if I remember right, just ridiculous), the patronizing language designed to make a woman feel childlike, the Butch/Femme lesbian relationships that were formed, and the sense that these women were animals more than people were all pulled from that case study, which dated from the early 90s- when Neal was imprisoned.
Honestly I doubt anything has changed since then.
One issue that got excluded because I had no real sense of how to include it was race. No one is surprised that a depressing number of non-whites are in jail. We’ve heard that statistic over and over again. I wanted very much to add that to the mix, to this terrible time that April and Neal endured, but as a white author writing a story with two white protagonists I was at a loss.
So I tried to remember to shade background characters in as a darker shade of gray, as some sort of silly compromise, but honestly I forgot sometimes. I was pulling out 2ish pages a day, trying to finish it fast. This page is one of those times I forgot.
Which is what inspired me to write this post. Yaaay. Jail is bad guys. M’kay.
Morgens has evolved a lot since I was a college freshman. It started out with what I thought was going to be a re-invention of the mafia- something so modern and unexpected by ‘the system’ that it would succeed in ways the mob never could. I wanted it to be violent, and funny, and more than anything I wanted it to be a group project. I wanted to be a co-collaborator, not the sole author. I figured a diversity of opinions would strengthen the cast and the stories told.
What I ended up with was a cast of attractive young women all about the same age and body type. So I beefed up a few of mine, changed ages and races around so that it wouldn’t be that homogeneous, but really I should have been more extreme.
Okay, that’s fine. X-Men had a similar issue, especially back in the 60s. Whatevs. N00b mistake, only another one of my goals for the comic was for it to be popular enough that I could actually make some $$ off it. I don’t know if I was just stubborn or overly naive. I forgot that only gay guys are popular on the internet, that lesbians get shoved into a corner and ignored unless there’s some graphic sex and even then- not the kind of audience I wanted.
I don’t want to abandon the project, because I still have a few good stories to tell, but I don’t see it going to the dazzling heights I dreamed of when I started it. So I guess the stories themselves need to change, and I need to quit pretending that they are ever going to be mainstream. Remiss was a good example of something terribly edgy, and guaranteed to never make Morgens popular, ever. But it’s still the only story (aside from the next one) with some decent ideas in it, some decent tension between the way the world is and the way it is perceived. Or some bullshit like that.
So while heists and duals were originally my focus, I guess that should shift to the interpersonal relationships, and the way they fit into our fucked-up society and its craaazy ideas about gender and sexuality. Since that’s not the kind of story I’ve ever really wanted to write, I don’t see Morgens having a long future. I estimate it being over (actually over, not I-Don’t-Care-Anymore over like Ice) by the time I draw the next two stories. The next story I’m drawing has to do with the roots of the mafia, and the one after that its demise. There are some ‘charming’ little one-shots that I will put up here while I’m drawing those two stories, but by and large I’m ready to move on.
And that’s the state of the union.
Swamped with work, comic has suffered for it. In addition to sucking at updating, I’ve not yet remade the links page. Izfree can suck my balls for disappearing completely with no warning.
I should be able to update again next Thursday, if I work my ass off.
I’d say keep voting for the comic, but we don’t quite deserve it at the moment.
