This is an unintentionally topical section of the comic. Those of you who weren’t born two seconds ago will know that immigration has been a subject of debate BEFORE five minutes ago. I feel like I should say that as you’re reading along as the comic is coming out if the characters say something you disagree with, rather than throwing a fit and stomping off after telling me what a monster I am, you might let the comic get its entire thought out first. If you want to stomp off after that, be my guest. People have gotten into a bad habit of not hearing an entire premise before making a judgment. It takes weeks for an entire thought to work itself through the process of me making it in to pages. I feel the need to preface this since I kept getting accused of things over the squabbling lesbians, and other older pages, that were addressed in the narrative when it had a chance to get where it was going. Of course at this point if my extremely mild storytelling has you flipping your lid there’s nothing I can do to mitigate the issue anyway. For my part I grew up on the ground floor of the immigration debate in a place in the US that no one ever thinks about and I want to say my piece on things through my art, so I will. If you’re gonna be mad at me for not being on your side fine. I’m always not on anyone’s side but my own anyway.

As far as the page goes, whenever John is saying a direct quotation from Thomas he’s doing an impression of him too. Which is why he takes on Thomas’s facial expressions and stance. I almost went way further with it, but decided to pull back since people seem to have a problem understanding what’s happening when I do some sort of visual gag you can only do in something like a comic.

I’ll be entertaining guests for 3 or 4 days, but I should have the next page up on time on Monday, so I hope to see those of you who don’t abandon the comic then. Have a safe weekend. I know that’s becoming a much more difficult task recently, but I urge you to try. If not for your sake then for mine.

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I love how John has known Thomas so long he does a very good impression of him.

Also first!!1! ?? Moment

This makes, what, three impressions so far?

Thomas as Reggie.
Brooksie aa Tommy Wiseau.

I can “hear” the characters doing it. Good stuff.

“That doesn’t sound like them.”

I agree Mike, they definitely don’t give that impression. It seems like John also realized how that sounded, and was quick to correct/explain.

Look, simple fact is: humans are different. We all got different cultures, different expectations, and different languages. Hell, just ask people what they casually call a can of Coke to see the difference.

“All humans are equal” is correct as far as morality is concerned, everyone deserves the same basic rights and all that jazz. But if ya try to say that ‘humans are the same,’ that is just wrong. Our differences should be explored instead of being pushed under the rug.

Looking forward to how this shapes out, should be a fun ride.

Yeah, just as America is a tapestry not a melting pot. You can try to workshop the melting pot idea but a lot of possible interpretations just come out anti-diversity.

That was SUPPOSED to be the point. You come to America, you BECOME an AMERICAN.

Kind of like how alloys are made.You throw iron and carbon and oxygen into the pot, you get steel. You don’t have a “tapestry” of iron and carbon. You have steel.

But even with steel, you get variations. More like Damascus metal than pure steel. Especially as you’re working with way more than just three ‘pure’ elements.

Part of the problem is you have people throwing together iron, carbon, and oxygen, and getting upset when they don’t get back gold.

Yeah, sure, and in terms of ‘everyone’s an American, everyone’s equal, everyone can achieve the American Dream’, that’s all well and good. But then- look at how identity is, nowadays, just about the most important thing to every single person out there: you have ‘proud Irish-Americans’, ‘proud Chinese-Americans’, etc etc. It’s not sufficient simply to be ‘an American’, society nowadays seems to push one to ‘speak out’ and ‘claim’ one’s identity, so… that’s what people are doing. Whether that’s inherently or necessarily good or bad, I have no real idea.

Thank you for the caution about patience and allowing the statement to reel out, Jackie. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes. I find your comments about the things you put into your work fascinating, they help me appreciate it even more.

Without big agriculture a place like Marbleton would barely exist. And it was mentioned about the packing plant in town having closed not too long ago.

Looking forward to this arc and our host writing what he knows.

I’m a suburbanite, and in suburbs too many people think of agriculture as something depicted in Currier & Ives prints. It’s not the same, just as steel mills, mining, and such aren’t the same as they were for much of the last century.

People lost the media literacy to understand that sometimes characters say and do things that are incorrect as flawed individuals.

The lesbian thing gets especially harrowing because you run into the “Galbrush Threepwood” problem. Where by depicting characters that are messy, dramatic, and complicated, but also gay, becomes narrowed into “lesbians are messy, dramatic, and complicated.”

That idea is just factually inaccurate, even in the comic, but a perceived negative depiction gets treated in this weird way where it’s a representation of EVERY PERSON OF THAT GROUP which it is not.

I’d say it’s an older problem. Not sure who to point the finger at first for this, but as an example, feminists once started to complain about how women were depicted in media. And at first, it was entirely understandable; they said it was very limited how few traits women could have, and all the “good” women were quiet and demure and obedient and fell in love with the square-jawed male lead no matter what. But we are now at a point where having a singular movie where the female lead is like this is seen as a harmful message saying all women everywhere should be subservient, or alternatively, that it’s insulting to all women because one character was a manipulative and conniving mistress. Likewise with complaints that having a black male character as some gangbanger is demeaning to all black people, etc. We went from “A trope done to excess sends the wrong message” to “Every character in fiction from a minority group is to be treated as the face of that entire group and so any bad traits are insults to millions, or billions, of people.”

Seems like we can’t have two separate conversations, one about real-world political or social issues, and one about specific characters and how they work in-universe. Everything has to be a political battlefield, so we end up with movies that, ironically, are just as limited and one-note as many of those old ones, as the people making them are afraid of being digitally picketed for a cultural faux pas.

I do think this is a very interesting point that alot of folks don’t really recognize. It’s not about combativeness, it’s just a natural confusion. I live in Denver currently, and we not only have foreign immigrants, but boatloads of Americans who have moved here recently from all over the country, and it does create a situation where people just aren’t sure how to behave, regularly feeling like they are getting side-eye for perfectly normal behavior, while ironically giving the same side-eye to others for what those people consider perfectly normal behavior. Political comments, edgy jokes, the tone people speak in, all sorts of little things that are homogenized in a closed-off community, end up causing tension and confusion when you mix all sorts of people together.

I think it’s also basically the internet; small pockets of the internet remain where most of the people there communicate on the same wavelength and understand each other, but when those communities mix, say on a platform like Reddit, it can quickly escalate to a firestorm as people misread, misinterpret, assume the worst, and so on. The term “troll” has become ubiquitous as countless people struggle to wrap their heads around the idea that someone could honestly disagree with them (or if they do honestly disagree with them, then they are lizard people from the earth’s core trying to destroy humanity, as no human being could possibly think corrupt politician A is superior to corrupt politician B).

2833 Assimilation.

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