Inspired by this article by Barbara Ehrenreich, and also her earlier book Bait And Switch which describes how life coaches train unemployed people to believe that the only thing standing between them and a brilliant new job is themselves. Not, y’know, the crap state of the economy, or the thousands of other equally brilliant unemployed people after the same job, or dodgy hiring and firing practices or any larger social forces like that. Just themselves. (And if they still don’t manage to get one, it’s their fault.)

It’s a beautiful thought, and one that I’ve been tempted by from time to time, the idea that your thoughts create your reality. (And they do, up to a point. Belief is a very powerful force.) It’s just odd how often a statement like that is followed by one like ‘…so the poor are just not wishing hard enough’, and odd how something that sounds pretty radical always seems to end up as an excuse for the way things are.

Don’t get me wrong. I am in that audience.

Dan and I only went to see Avatar because we wanted to be able to join in the conversation about it properly. We’d read all the critiques and watched the parodies and we were expecting it to be terrible. The thing about going to see something with rock-bottom expectations is that it’s almost a certainty they’ll be exceeded. “Cue the generic ‘tribal’ music,” I said to Dan as it started, discernment goggles still firmly in place over the 3D ones, and then it all went a bit wrong.

See, there are things – in the absence of a better term I’m going to call them ’squee triggers’ – which, if they appear in a work of fiction, torpedo your objectivity from a height and convert you to a helpless, fascinated five-year-old. I reckon everybody has at least a few. Among my friends they range from the fairly nerd-culture-standard (giant robots) to the downright odd (fantasy worlds with well-thought-out economic systems). This was like Squee Trigger Bingo for me. A few of mine are: Rites-of-passage rituals. Mysterious dayglo plant life. Collective-consciousness type things. Networks. Flying. Rainforests. Flying over rainforests. So yeah. I would say neuroscience, but there wasn’t any proper neuroscience in it. Neuroscience flavouring, maybe.

But oh, the ambivalence about this gigantic corporate movie whose villains are working for a corporation. People being kicked off their land by business interests and dictatorial regimes is something that needs to be talked about. On the other hand, having the topic co-opted and sold back to me in this shiny, slick, breathtakingly expensive package with what feels like no actual convictions behind it – and what’s more, told so Anviliciously that you can’t even take that aspect of it seriously – it’s like… It’s like a rail of mass-produced Topshop T-shirts with identical rips and patches, factory-positioned safety pins, and spray-painting saying “Punk Rebel”.

And that’s without even going near the racefail.

And yet I spent most of the damn thing prostrate and saucer-eyed, and came out feeling simultaneously thrilled and icky, as if I’d just had the best sex of my life with a smooth guy in a shiny tie who’d lied about doing charity work in order to talk me into bed.

What are your squee triggers?

—

OK, my week’s shifted a bit and from now on I’ll be updating on Thursdays, rather than Wednesdays. And this is the first of a few strips which are responses to specific things I’ve seen or read recently. I know it’s scrappy and sketchy, but it’s been a month of crisis and random misfortune and my brain is leaking out my ears.

[Edited to add: A rather less disingenuous eco-fable from my childhood. Dr Seuss's The Lorax: Part 1 of I think six]

Update schedule FAIL! But here it is, the last part of this series, a day late. It seems sort of appropriate that this was a struggle to finish because I was up to my neck in bureaucracy and stress.

It’s only good ethical practice to let you know that this comic is a conscious act of magic. (Shave my head, I wanna be wanna be wanna be Grant Morrison.)

And I can’t show you a youtube of it, but this is the song that was in my head while I was doing this: The Weakerthans – A New Name For Everything

So I have inexplicably decided to rename this series of strips after a pretentious line from a Covenant song. Covenant being a goth techno band I was into in the early noughties. Okayyy.

This is part 2 of 3.

I’ve been a hermit lately – several weeks of a lingering cold and ice and then SNOW, lots of it. It doesn’t help that I keep missing Tuesday comics pub because I’m busy making comics. But! Next month I’ll have a stall at the Alternative Press Fair near Euston Station in London, selling comics and craft stuff. Come and say hello!

This was still unformed and not ready to go up yet when my friend James texted me this morning to wish me a happy Epiphany. And it seemed too good a moment to, er, waste.

This is my wish for all of you for the shiny new decade.

Someone’s set up a Livejournal feed for me (thank you) – you can read my comics on your friends page by going to http://syndicated.livejournal.com/wasted_rss/