dresdencodak
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Dark Science #67 Pencils
🕑 Added 2016-08-12 23:01:26 +0000 UTC As most of you probably know, most of Dark Science is written ages in advance, but now and again I’ll rewrite or tweak things once I get close to drawing a page. This page went through several versions this month, as my portrayal of law enforcement in Nephilopolis ended up coming way to close to America’s police violence epidemic we’re currently dealing with. Essentially, it got a little too serious and felt explicitly topical. Here I reworked a few things, specifically making Amon a bit more outrageous, so as to maintain the satire I was going for.
Comments
Sen
I think there's a misunderstanding here with what I mean by satire. Good satire has to go beyond commenting on a specific event, otherwise it loses its relevance over time (at best) or becomes hackneyed and shallow (at worst). I did not say I was removing themes, only how they would be executed. Being on the nose and (seemingly) pulling from headlines undercuts one of the main advantages of science fiction: to look at a real-world issue from a different angle, or without the built-in biases we bring to the table when discussing them. The militarization of police, identity politics, and the manipulation of public trust are all themes present in Dark Science already, and will obviously continue to be. This case is more of an issue of my original satire not being outrageous enough from real life, and me having to up my game.
Brian Richard Pauw
Your comic portrays a pretty accurate image of the academic world, though! :).
Why did you decide to distance the comic from actual events? Put a different way, what about your conception of the comic universe made you decide to remove themes that could be explicitly related to modern day societal problems?
