To be concluded next week.

Whenever I go looking for photo references for Tempin’ Bear, especially ones of hunting bears, there are lots of cute pictures and not very many fierce ones. Except this one photo that keeps coming up in Google Images. It’s of a polar bear standing over a bloody carcass of something or other. And it’s nearly always on right-wing loony websites. There’s the “climate change is a conspiracy by evil scientists” ones that you’d expect, but earlier today I clicked on one that didn’t sound like it had anything to do with the environment. It turned out to be mostly about the dangers of being nice to Muslims, who are Taking Over The World. Ew ew ew.

What really annoys me is the way those sites use the photo – almost always with smug accompanying text saying something like “So what do you think of your poster child now? Not so cute and cuddly now, is he?”* It’s as if these people think environmentalists don’t know polar bears are carnivores, and if we see a bear killing something we’ll go “Oh my God! We were wrong! Let’s melt the icecaps right now!”

Considering some of those bloggers’ love of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, you’d think it’d be a bit risky for them to claim that only those who don’t kill anything and who love all God’s creatures deserve to have their interests protected. But then self-awareness doesn’t seem to be their strong suit.

***

Please excuse the missing week, and the general not-managing-to-update-on-Thursday, lately. I’ve been building a website for my freelance work and it has eaten my brain. Code to comics is a difficult context switch. It’s fun, though, and it’s nearly finished.

First person to tell me what the first panel’s a reference to gets a prize!

* When they aren’t gleefully quoting seriously dodgy research by Bjorn Lomborg erroneously claiming that polar bear numbers are rising, that is.

This is sort of a companion piece to We Love Trees.

So my friend Kathy linked to my Avatar comic on the Livejournal community deadbrowalking, and lots of people came to have a look, and I followed the referring links back to the community and had a read.

Now I’d been thinking that I’d kind of handwaved away the cultural appropriation problems with the film in my post about it – just went ‘hey, look at this article on io9′ instead of addressing it. And linked from that community was lots of useful and interesting discussion of that, and of cultural appropriation in general. And this strip is sort of me thinking out loud about it.

The Japanese song is the theme from Hayao Miyazaki’s brilliant film My Neighbour Totoro. The lyrics mean, roughly, “Let’s go for a walk! I’m feeling lively!”

You might not even realise that internalised critical voice is there, until one day it shuts up for a while and the silence where it was is blissful.

Thanks to everyone who came and said hello and bought comics at the Alternative Press Fair. Bemusement, rather than thanks, to that one guy who declared “There’s a fuckin’ MINGE in your comic,” like it was an insult or something. The only possible response was a cheery grin and “Yes. Yes there is.”

Then the next day I went to Orbital Comics, who are now stocking One Word For Everything and also Urban Beasts, by boyfriend Dan with Karen and Anna Rubins. Go! Buy! Enjoy their giant beanbags and their exhibition of original thriller-comic art by Arthur Ranson!

And check out the new Stockists page above. It seemed worth making a page now that I have more than two stockists. I’d like to get some more to add to that. If there’s a comic shop in your city that takes small-press stuff, please comment and let me know.

To be concluded next week. Not that I’m particularly full of self-loathing at the moment – it just struck me the other day how people who say disapprovingly ’she’s let herself go’ are essentially saying that keeping yourself on a very short leash is the right way to live. Frankly, fuck that noise.

Hello to all the Livejournal people who dropped by in the last week because of this strip! I hope some of you stick around. You can get my comics on your friends page by going to the Livejournal RSS feed.

One more time: I’ll be at the Alternative Press Fair this Saturday, near Euston Station in London, from midday to 6pm. Come and say hi and let me press stickers and MooCards into your hands.

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/