Don’t be; it’s the fall that kills you, but also don’t watch this video, of climbing to work on a 1700 feet height antenna tower. Everytime you think, this is not so bad, the horror gets kicked off a notch. An elevator ride 1600 fee tup? Not so bad. Climbing a ladder up from there safely inside the tower? A bit worse. Freeclimbing on the outside of the tower on a small ladder? Getting scary. Ladder stops and you have to climb the actual frame. Okay, I’m out. Whoops, you now have to climb the antenna itself, using an even flimsier ladder, the hoist yourself over the top and stand over 1700 feet high while trying to do your job? Whoa.
Manara again
J. Caleb Mozzocco, off off Every Day Is Like Wednesday, muses on my own dismissal of Manara’s version of the Scarlet Witch:
Wisse is right, of course, but then, do any characters look like themselves anymore? Close your eyes and imagine just about any superhero character, the Scarlet Witch is a fine example to do with.
[…]
Hell, if Batman and Spider-Man, whose costumes cover somewhere between 90% and 100% of their bodies, look completely different depending on which artist is drawing them. Neither DC nor Marvel use style guides or character bibles or character designs of any kind to dictate how characters look anymore. The Hulk can be anywhere from six feet tall to 20 feet tall, a foot across or eight feet across. Sometimes Spidey’s built like a praying mantis, sometimes like a runner, sometimes a swimmer, sometimes like a competitive body builder.
It doesn’t need to be this way. If you google for images of classic Belgian comics character Spirou, the images you get, whether by Franquin, Fournier or Janry, are recognisably of the same character, even if you omit the bell hop uniform he insists on wearing. (This is also a great example of how “simple” you can make a character design and still make it distinctive). Granted, European comics have always been more stringent in setting guidelines for what their characters look like than American comics have been doing for decades, but even in American comics it’s possible to have widely divergent art styles and still show the same recognisable character.
Remember the New Mutants? First ongoing X-Men spinoff series, back at a time when that was still unusual, it debuted with a graphic novel (also unusual) written by Chris Claremont (who else) with art by Bob McLeod, who also was the first artist on the series. McLeod was, how shall we say, competent but a bit dull, a bit worthy, a decent realistic draughtsman in the Adams/Byrne tradition. Then, with issue 18, a new artist took the reigns: Bill Sienkiewicz, whose style was quite different. Yet if you look at the McLeod version of the New Mutants and Sienkiewicz’s version below, you can still recognise who’s who.
Art style, interpretation, house style, even the technical competence of an artist can make a hell of a difference in what any given character looks like from issue to issue, but they can still be recognisable as that character even out of uniform (or even nude, as iirc Byrne once said). With Manara’s Scarlet Witch this just isn’t the case: strip her uniform away and she’s just another Manara woman.
What I had wanted to do last weekend
Not quite the weekend we had hoped for
It’s been a bit of a bastard weekend. On Friday I was going off to the far flung and sun kissed exotic wilderness that man call Drenthe, for a weekend in a holiday house there with my parents and younger sister. Originally my parents would be going to a wedding of a cousin there and didn’t want to hurry back hme, but sadly the wedding had to be called off as the father of the bride had passed way. But since the house had already been booked and paid for, we decided to go anyway. My sister had also brought her baby with her, as her partner was going on a stag do for my foster brother, who will be getting married next month (in the best Dutch tradition of having lived together with his partner for donkey ages and having two children already).
Unfortunately things went wrongly quickly on Friday, as my sister’s baby, my niece, got a fever, which didn’t go away but got much worse, so much that my sister took her to the nearest g.p. surgery for consultation. Who took one look at her and called her an ambulance to get her to hospital. With her fever reaching 41 degrees celcius the worry was that she might have menigitus, rather than “just” some bacterial infection having turned nasty. Luckily, this seemed to have not been the case, but my niece still had to stay in hospital for observation until this morning. Her dad had already driven over on Friday night and he and my sister stayed in the hospital around the clock; not quite the relaxing holiday/stag party weekend they had looked forward to…
It’s scary enough having to bring any loved one to hospital, but when it’s a less than a year old baby, doubly so. Fortunately everything worked out in the end, but was stressfull and frightening nonetheless…
Fandom should get its act together
To cut a long story short: at Readercon Genevieve Valentine got (sexually) harassed by what turned out to be a high powered sf fan (don’t laugh). Readercon having a zero tolerance policy for that behaviour was supposed to ban him permanently, but decided to make it only a two year ban for reasons. Once Genevieve went public with the verdict and her disappointment about it, the inevitable internet outrage firestorm happened and it got changed to the lifetime ban it should’ve been in the first. In the process the problems fandom has with sexual harassement were highlighted once again, with various cons examinating their own processes for dealing with this sort of toxic behaviour. A good development all round, right? Perhaps, but it did take its toll on Genevieve, still dealing with fallout like this two months later:
You will find out that, seven weeks after a “sincerely regretful” admission of his behavior at Readercon, your harasser was put in a position of power at a con, overseeing volunteers. He cornered a woman to talk about how hard this has been on him; he spoke inappropriately to a woman while bartending a party, to the point that a stranger intervened.
You will see some people are wary of these reports, because they think that, having been named, the harasser’s behavior was under scrutiny. (That this should be an advantage of identifying harassers, or that any harasser could avoid censure by not harassing women, is, as of press time, not under discussion there.)
The fact that a known harasser can just stroll into another high profile voluntering position is depressing enough, but more so is the idea that so many people are wary of believing further accusations against him, for fear of, what, some sort of crusade against him, of women getting their kicks by inventing abuse and see him as an easy target? The first can be explained if nto excused by ignorance, the second seems more like a wilful denial, where it’s more important to absolutely exclude the possibility of a false positive than it is to believe the women coming forward with their own stories of harassement. I’m all for giving people the benefit of the doubt, but not when they proven already they can’t be trusted and have done nothing to remedy that.
The more I learn (secondhand) about how sexism, but also racism or transphobia and homophobia, operates, the more it becomes self evident how important it is to believe the victims when they report harassement, or it continues. Fandom as a whole still needs to learn that, though it is slowly getting better (I hope).