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I could write a long essay about the problems of bias worming its way into the media, but fuck it. Nobody cares.

In the earliest possible drafts of what would become Between Failures the title was Memento Mori. I bring this up because the phrase has been popping up online a lot recently. Enough that I noticed it almost 4 months ago & now it’s getting to the point where even normies are noticing it. People ascribe the phrase different translations, but I’ve always known it to be “Remember that you must die”. Seems like a lot of words to come out of two words. It seems to me that a better way to say it would be “remember your mortality”. Little vestiges of that version of the comic still exist. The town is named Marbleton. A marble town is an archaic term for a graveyard. The town is known for having the largest continuously operating graveyard in the state, within the fiction of the world. Carol’s surname, Graves, is also a holdover. She was originally going to be the lead character. Her design from that time still sort of exists in the form of Gail, a character from another comic I never actually made, but had a loose script for. The skull in the logo, and the one Brooksie wore for a while, are also little vestiges of that early draft. Eventually though it all shifted to the story of a game store, & then to the version I actually reworked into what you know today. The title would probably have still worked, but it had evolved so far away from that it had been that I changed it to Opposing Forces, which sounds more like a military comic, or some such thing.
In any event, the resurgence of the phrase memento mori into the consciousness of the internet made me recall those days so many years ago. It also makes me wonder what caused the phrase to come around. Apparently a very popular youtuber used it as a show title, but I’m not sure if that is what caused it to bleed into my corner of the internet. Something about it feels sinister to me…

I think the gift shop for Disney’s Haunted Mansion is called Memento Mori.

It’s probably for the best that I went in the direction I did with this comic after all. There’s a lot more here to work with than the rather limited scope of the original idea. That was probably a limited series at best, & I’m not sure I had as much to say as I thought I did at the time. That’s what 15 years of perspective can give you though.