1044 You’re Good.

At least one version of the site is being tampered with. If you’re reading it on the one in question you can probably tell. I don’t know if it will make the site function significanlty better, but whatever. The bar is pretty low. Feel free to voice your opinions at any point.

I redid about half of this page tonight real fast. I don’t know what my problem was the fisrt time I did it, but it was below even my typical standards. I was clearly not doing well that evening. Luckily I had a framework to start from so I was able to do the schedule page AND fix this one. I’m back on schedule more or less. Unfortunately I only got 2 days worth of guest comics, so I have to do something about that. Depending on how you look at it I’m actually 2 days ahead now, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. I think you guys will get a kick out of these guest pages.

This is kind of a strange topic shift, but I was looking at my wall and realized something. When my paternal grandmother died I inherited these two… ornaments I guess you’d call them. They’re kind of busts of two literary characters. Part of an incomplete set. They are Bill Sikes and Fagin the kidsman. They are kind of unsavory observers; Sikes a murderer and Fagin an abuser of children. In addition to this Fagin is probably the most racist thing I own. I’m not sure I won any other racist things in fact. I’m sure there must be other things that I am not offended by that would offend others, so I leave that judgement open. I digress… Fagin is a pretty brutal caricature of a Jew. He’s actually reffered to as nothing more than “the Jew” for a large portion of the book. This wasn’t unnoticed in its day either. Dickens responded to the allegations of anti semitism saying he had nothing but friendly feelings towards Jews, in general, and Fagin was simply a sadly accurate depiction of the criminal underworld at the time. He also stopped the printing of the collected book and altered how Fagin is identified in the unset pages.

I’ve never actually read Oliver Twist. I find Dickens’ voice intensly boring. My understanding of the character came mostly from the musical Oliver! Which actually makes him kind of a lovable rogue, rather than an almost complete bastard. I suppose it only makes sense that a musical adaptation is going to be less grim than its source material. Anyway, I always thought that Fagin and Dodger scampered off into the sunset in both versions of the work, but that is not the case. LITERARY SPOILERS! Dodger ends up getting sent to Australia (at least you can inffer as much) and Fagin gets hanged. Dark, huh? Although, on the whole, Australia doesn’t seem all that bad compared to hanging… Arguably. In addition to that Oliver’s half brother tries to destroy him, is given a second chance by Oliver, and end up coming to a sticky end in spite of this.

In any event these are strange faces to look out over a sea of robots and super heroes. If you want to see the ugly things you can search for their names and the word Bosson. Which was the manufacturer. Alternately you can click this last word. For wahtever reason my heads don’t look exactly like any of the images online. Fagin seems to have some paint application ommitted. Not worn away, just never applied. And Sikes looks way more angry than the others I’ve seen. Some of the ones online look almost jolly by comparison…