The Remake Genie
Added 2020-12-07 18:00:27 +0000 UTCThis is a fairly old-school style comic-- no dense text bursts, just a sort of comedy-sketch style gag. I think it's just okay. The humor rests almost solely on familiarity with outside material, and even though the art is alright in some parts, there are other where you can clearly tell I just said "fuck it, I don't care." Designing a hulking, bejewled genie is a lot more fun in theory than in practice. The girl, on the other hand, is a sort of genderswapped J Helzer, with some other little character design elements I wanted to practice thrown in. In this universe she has no powers, but presumably owns her own car, which is about as good.
Confession time-- I've never actually read Infinite Jest. I've really enjoyed some of DFW's short stories and essay writing, but the density of his prose is just too much for my cartoonist's pea brain. I did, however, learn that apparently a major plot point in Infinite Jest is the existence of a piece of television that is so entertaining (aptly dubbed "The Entertainment") that you can't look away from it, and die of starvation. Incredible. So unsubtle, so anti-consumerist, so Gen Z it hurts. The sort of thing that would accrue tens of thousands of upvotes on the shittiest of reddit's creative writing hovels. My roommate, an avid reader, informs me that "The idea was not yet hack." I'll have to take her word for it. In other news, keep an eye out for my next short story-- about a video game SO REALISTIC that anyone who plays it starts to lose touch with what is real and what is fake. Haunting, no?
