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chthonic bell posted:But also, I can't really be skeeved out by something like Bosom Enemies or Afterdead. Horses with human faces? Half-horse, half-men beasts of burden? I just find that poo poo hilarious, even if it is at least partially sexual to the creator or some of the audience. Bosom Enemies goes even further off the rails than you'd think. Also, there's an absolute massive proportion of it dedicated to condemning the treatment of the Native Americans by, uh, white horses kind of? This seems to have become one of her pet issues and it shows up in her other work on occasion. She lives on the Olympic peninsula, where there is still a conspicuous presence of Native Americans so that might have contributed.
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Mar 6, 2014 02:21
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She keeps making me think about my country and its many and varied gently caress-ups (if you haven't read the refugee detention centre comic commissioned and distributed by the Australian government in the Political Cartoons thread, go read it and know despair  ). I guess the easiest way to describe her work is that's she's mashing the  button hard and for some reason thought it would be a good idea to make the Nazis sexy while doing so.e: Yeah, she seems to be very strong on Native American rights, which I can totally get behind, horse-fetish or not.
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Mar 6, 2014 02:23
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CROWS EVERYWHERE posted:I would not like to explain to any of my German friends why I have Afterdead and her blogs/dA bookmarked. Though my disappointingly poor taste should not come as a shock to them anymore. You think you have it bad. The man I'm marrying is German. His uncle was the one who took us around to see the sights when we visited Munich, which means he showed us Hebertshausen (that's where they executed Soviet POWs) and we went to the Dachau memorial. No one can ever know I read this poo poo.  sweeperbravo posted:It's really weird, because I normally have a kneejerk aversion to anything to do with Nazi Germany, to the point where I really can't enjoy even the most U.S. centric WWII documentaries/POV stories without kind of wanting to get up and leave (making it through Band of Brothers was difficult as I kept just waiting for the inevitable depiction of a concentration camp and my own unstoppable tears to click on). But there is something so deranged, dedicated, bizarre about her art that I really, really am curious about reading more. I actually visited the Dachau memorial twice. The first time I got so upset that I couldn't make it the way way through and we left having seen about 3/4s. I sat in the car, on the way back, just totally dead inside. I couldn't even begin to process what I now knew, even though I'd studied this poo poo in school. The second time, I think I got through two rooms before I had to ask to leave, because I couldn't handle it emotionally. And yet, Donna Barr's work doesn't really bother me on that level. It's weird. I'm weird. But you're not alone, SB, either in your reactions to WW2 or your reactions to Barr!  Pick posted:Bosom Enemies goes even further off the rails than you'd think. Also, there's an absolute massive proportion of it dedicated to condemning the treatment of the Native Americans by, uh, white horses kind of? This seems to have become one of her pet issues and it shows up in her other work on occasion. She lives on the Olympic peninsula, where there is still a conspicuous presence of Native Americans so that might have contributed. Huh. I mean, I can't really imagine how much further off the rails it could've gone, but I can't lie and say I'm not curious.
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Mar 6, 2014 02:26
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It was more than I could ever dream of.
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chthonic bell posted:But you're right. I'm not comfortable saying Barr has no right to write the poo poo she does, especially since she has put way more research into the topic than most people would put into anything they write. But I'm also not going to not have reservations about something like The Desert Peach. Yeah, I guess that's part of it--does being hugely more knowledgeable and aware about a topic make you more entitled to be somewhat fatuous about it? I especially thought about this in terms of her chapter of Desert Peach about the introduction of a woman to their battalion, where she was a woman in the military. Some parts of it felt a little off-color (Rosen, jesus loving christ) but I have a hard time thinking I'm in literally any position whatsoever to say so compared to her. I don't even know how much I don't know about WWII (though I am pretty interested in the Eastern front), but it's clear her awareness of the facts is leagues ahead even if she doesn't adhere to those facts strictly.
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Mar 6, 2014 02:33
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Here is the beginning of the asylum seeker graphic novel commissioned by our previous, ostensibly left-leaning government, which continued to be distributed by our current very right-wing government. (We call our conservative party the Liberals because we are a crazy upside down country where cats chase dogs and hamburgers eat people.) The premise is "So you're thinking of leaving your war-torn oppression-filled country for Australia's glorious freedom? Well, guess what, we're going to do our best to make your stay even worse. That's right, we would like you to come away with the feeling that our camps are worse than what you are currently trying to flee from." Almost the entirety of our previous election was based around a campaign of "Stop The Boats" and the names for everything are variants on "The Pacific Solution". The fliers the Liberals distributed in my neighbourhood had pictures of little sinking boats with the slogan "We'll Stop The Boats" up the top. e: It is a running joke that the reason we no longer sing the second verse of the national anthem is because it contains the lines "For those who've come across the seas/We've boundless plains to share."
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Mar 6, 2014 02:41
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chthonic bell posted:I mean, I can't really imagine how much further off the rails it could've gone, but I can't lie and say I'm not curious. At some point time-travel is introduced and they go to America. They're then human again sometimes but then not other times. However, they can't take their clothes off or look different or their clothes will hunt them down (the hats can jump). One guy's wife recognizes him and doesn't even think the situation is weird as far as I can tell. Then they flash back to being forced to cross-dress as circus horses and then some things are maybe hallucinations and others aren't. Another guy is abducted from Vietnam and charged to carry the sun, but he panics and kicks a Tehran and runs into the sea.
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Mar 6, 2014 02:53
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 That honestly sounds like a fever dream. Scratch that, I've had medication-induced dreams that were more coherent than that.
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Mar 6, 2014 02:55
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That's after the Native American sequences though. It's strange but completely comprehensible up to the introduction of the time-travel.
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Mar 6, 2014 02:57
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chthonic bell posted:Yeah, just for the record: I'm a gay Russian, I'm disabled both physically and in the "I'm broken in the head" way and I'm an avowed leftist and always have been. I do not have a Nazi fetish. О, да? Что провинции вы?
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Mar 6, 2014 03:03
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That is gibberish, but assuming the best: I'm from the Urals, originally, but I currently live in Europe and have since I was 10. I have a Russian passport and know some old propaganda songs.
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Mar 6, 2014 03:20
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My Russian could use some work. I don't have anyone to practice it with like Spanish and French. I also only really know how to speak it (poorly).
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Mar 6, 2014 03:28
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Is there an easy way to sort Barr's online archive for Stinz, or is reading it one page at a time scrolling up a page backwards the only way to read it there? Because god drat is it sorted terribly. EDIT: Also while searching Google for an easier way to read it, I stumbled on this: San Diego State University Collection MS-0072: The Donna Barr Collection A Fancy 400 lbs fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Mar 6, 2014 |
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Mar 6, 2014 04:58
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Once you click on an image, it takes you to a more traditional nagivation scheme. Try this. 
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Mar 6, 2014 05:05
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I think it's either that or standard webcomic first/previous/next/latest movement. If you click on any of the individual image it takes you to that instead of the read-everything-backwards format. It took me a while to forget that out too  e: It gets even more broken when you try to read the last two episodes of DP/first two episodes of Afterdead on the Desert Peach site. That was fun to navigate. e2: Afterdead itself lives on at least three different parts of the internet. e3: It's all part of the genuine Donna Barr Experience. CROWS EVERYWHERE fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Mar 6, 2014 |
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Mar 6, 2014 05:06
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I didn't even think of clicking the individual pictures.  Thanks.
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Mar 6, 2014 05:12
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Speaking of the last episodes of Desert Peach (e: before the "beginning of Afterdead" ones), it was very nice of her to have a kind of bittersweet "happy ending" in the second-to-last one, then (after Kjars' wacky writing shenanigans) go right back into depressionville for the final episode. Just in case you were feeling a little bit  at Pfirsich and Udo's reunion, blammo, more concentration camp stuff with depressing endings. The perfect send-off for DP.I guess it shows effective story-telling with how well and with such consistency it manages to deliver metaphorical kicks to the gonads.
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Mar 6, 2014 05:12
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Afterdead has some depressing flashbacks too. In case you dared think that Udo got to die happily, after Pfirsch dies he dehydrates to death under an overpass.  What shocks me is the things we've never seen that I assumed (wrongly) would be in the first chapters of Desert Peach. (Due to how the site is set up, I'd read the later ones before the earliest ones.) For example, we have no idea why or how Rosen proposed, which I always thought was one of the most bizarre things to never mention.
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Mar 6, 2014 05:23
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Pick posted:Afterdead has some depressing flashbacks too. In case you dared think that Udo got to die happily, after Pfirsch dies he dehydrates to death under an overpass. Pfirsch seems the right amounts of old-fashioned to want to get engaged and Rosen seems the right amounts of "would be a masc, str8-acting dudebro who totally wants to act like everything is the same as had he been with a girl" to actually propose.
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Mar 6, 2014 05:29
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Pick posted:Afterdead has some depressing flashbacks too. In case you dared think that Udo got to die happily, after Pfirsch dies he dehydrates to death under an overpass. Pfirsich did not get the good end of the stick in the descendants department  And seriously though why was the skinhead grandson a centaur
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Mar 6, 2014 05:30
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CROWS EVERYWHERE posted:Pfirsich did not get the good end of the stick in the descendants department It did seem like self-image was the defining aspect there. This does not answer your question, unless the skinhead grandson was otherkin or something, which is like disappointment squared.
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Mar 6, 2014 06:23
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Upon re-reading, the weirdest thing in Stinz is Donna Barr's smell/pheromone thing, whichever it is. It comes up often enough in the comic itself, but way more often in her comments for each one, sometimes when it really doesn't make much sense. When Stinz just fought off some wolves, what's Donna got to say about the situation?quote:And the boy’s all sweaty and smells good, now. At least to her! Come to think of it, so does she.
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Mar 6, 2014 06:52
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Okay, wait, is Pfirsch rooming with Udo (who doesn't remember him) in Nazi Hell? And whatever happens to the gunbird that bonds to him? I'm so confused and not by the things I thought I'd be confused by. EDIT: Oh wait, there's the gunbird. Donna's art has rather gone to hell, so I couldn't tell. painted bird fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Mar 6, 2014 |
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Mar 6, 2014 07:00
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Pick posted:It did seem like self-image was the defining aspect there. This does not answer your question, unless the skinhead grandson was otherkin or something, which is like disappointment squared. If only Pfirsich self-identified for longer as a zombie, I am of the opinion that there need to be more fantastically flaming zombie characters in popular fiction. The smell/pheromone thing is really weird but I suppose part of it is that I don't find sweaty men appealing.
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Mar 6, 2014 07:01
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Neither do I and I'm sexually attracted to men. But sweat just smells.  EDIT: You know, I can dig Afterdead in concept. It'd be a fun personal project, to map out people's afterlives in a fairly bizarre realm. But Afterdead is a total mess and reads kind of like fanfiction for the things it follows. painted bird fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Mar 6, 2014 |
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Mar 6, 2014 07:03
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My grandmother liked to terrify me with stories of the bad old days before deodorant was A Thing. The reverse-shoulder-pad things in the underarms of olde timey dresses etc being there to soak up sweat, etc  Also Pfirsich is hanging out with Udo (who now doesn't go by that name and is trying to ignore Pfirsich because ?????) in order to, uhh... Something to do with toaster ghosts. Toaster ghosts have something to do with guns. Toaster ghosts are also a metaphor for ?????? There's more of it here than is available, currently, at this site, which is the one that is supposed to be currently updating and is where crowfeathers etc posts updates from. Though the current last comic (with the horse milk) on the webcomicsnation site was definitely NOT there last time I checked, so who knows.
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Mar 6, 2014 07:11
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chthonic bell posted:Okay, wait, is Pfirsch rooming with Udo (who doesn't remember him) in Nazi Hell? And whatever happens to the gunbird that bonds to him? He's just trailing Udo, he still lives with Ham. CROWS EVERYWHERE posted:If only Pfirsich self-identified for longer as a zombie, I am of the opinion that there need to be more fantastically flaming zombie characters in popular fiction. Afterdead is completely worth it for a gay Nazi zombie in hiphop gear.
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Mar 6, 2014 07:15
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Right, right. But for some reason, Udo (who died relatively soon after Pfirsch) somehow did a 180 on his beloved old boss and now thinks he's an annoying tagalong?? Also, Pick, I now know what Barr Girls is and. You're in for. Something. Not horse-cock-induced death, at least, but Something for sure. (It's actually the comic that finally cinched my opinion of Barr as someone who has absolutely no understanding of the word "implications".)
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Mar 6, 2014 07:18
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chthonic bell posted:Right, right. But for some reason, Udo (who died relatively soon after Pfirsch) somehow did a 180 on his beloved old boss and now thinks he's an annoying tagalong?? Well, it's a pretty major plot point that Pfirsch took an exceedingly long time to get out of Hell, so Udo/Isador has potentially centuries of new experiences that might have changed his perception of things.
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Mar 6, 2014 07:19
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Oh. Oh. All right, that makes sense. As much as anything in Afterdead. The gunbirds are adorable, though. I'd like one. 
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Mar 6, 2014 07:21
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Yeah, Pfirsich spent 6,000 years rattling about in hell/purgatory, steadfastly refusing to reincarnate or anything, which everyone else finds very strange. Everyone else went off and got reincarnated into hot babes before deciding moving on to the Afterreich was a good plan. e: also occasionally taking over shoulder angel duties for his descendants/telling other descendants how much they suck (and blaming himself for all their terribleness of course)
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Mar 6, 2014 07:25
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CROWS EVERYWHERE posted:Also Pfirsich is hanging out with Udo (who now doesn't go by that name and is trying to ignore Pfirsich because ?????) in order to, uhh... Something to do with toaster ghosts. Toaster ghosts have something to do with guns. Toaster ghosts are also a metaphor for ?????? Udo needs the gun to protect the roller derby girls from the earlier chapter, since he is their manager. Everyone thinks this is silly since they can take care of themselves. He's using the name Isador because that's his real name (his Jewish name, mentioned in DP). The way you get a gun is that you fish one, and the person who rescues it from you bonds with it (so actually someone else should catch it for you ostensibly). Meanwhile, his toaster stopped working (I'm less clear on this) so he got a new one. Appliances are powered by ghosts of people who were originally living in that word--not Afterdead. They consider this an extension of the duty they practice in life to the Reich, so it's Pfirsch's good nature being misguided again and he is hit with a bagel.
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Mar 6, 2014 07:25
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Pick posted:Udo needs the gun to protect the roller derby girls from the earlier chapter, since he is their manager. Everyone thinks this is silly since they can take care of themselves. He's using the name Isador because that's his real name (his Jewish name, mentioned in DP). Ah yes, I remember most of that now. I knew Udo was going by his birth name but I wasn't sure why he was ignoring Pfirsich other than "because the plot says so". e: not just horse milk, also elephant milk and orca milk
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Mar 6, 2014 07:27
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CROWS EVERYWHERE posted:Ah yes, I remember most of that now. I knew Udo was going by his birth name but I wasn't sure why he was ignoring Pfirsich other than "because the plot says so". Also, note that Udo doesn't have black fingernails, so he doesn't remember the good things about his relationship with Pfirsch, ostensibly, but he can remember the bad ones. However, in the chapter where Pfirsch tracks down Kjars' sister, it's implied a good memory sufficiently strong can sometimes be recalled with prompting. e: Oh yeah, the toaster was stolen by the Barr Girl who is causing the roller derby team issues.
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Mar 6, 2014 07:29
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Pick posted:Also, note that Udo doesn't have black fingernails, so he doesn't remember the good things about his relationship with Pfirsch, ostensibly, but he can remember the bad ones. However, in the chapter where Pfirsch tracks down Kjars' sister, it's implied a good memory sufficiently strong can sometimes be recalled with prompting. Oh, I hadn't noticed he didn't have the black fingernails. That makes a whole lot more sense, then! Relatively speaking, of course.
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Mar 6, 2014 07:41
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Yeah, so when they're fighting over the porno reel in the first roller derby chapter, Udo remembers some things about their relationship because he and Pfirsch had interacted over that tape in the past. Prior to that, he doesn't remember Pfirsch or the war so it starts to come back. Rosen says something to that effect too. When Pfirsch first showed up in the field and meets Ham, Ham explains that it "fades", people don't lose their good memories immediately.
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Mar 6, 2014 07:43
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Pick posted:Udo needs the gun to protect the roller derby girls from the earlier chapter, since he is their manager. Everyone thinks this is silly since they can take care of themselves. He's using the name Isador because that's his real name (his Jewish name, mentioned in DP). Actually, it's only the pink gunbirds that bond only when rescued: all others bond on first touch. At least that's what I gathered upon re-reading.
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Mar 6, 2014 07:46
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IronicDongz posted:I think that the original point being made was that that's why she isn't in that one documentary about women in the comics industry, and if they were trying to show positive examples of women in a medium that often ignores them I can totally understand leaving out that weird lady who draws tons of gay nazis? Yeah, this is all I meant to say. Like I said, I don't think she's a bad person, I don't think she legitimately hates anyone; I just think that if you're making a documentary portraying women in comics in a positive light, then it seems like the reason for not including Barr is kind of obvious. Her comics make a lot of people uncomfortable, and they probably didn't want to have to deal with that. All that aside, I found a used copy of Hader and the Colonel at the comic shop today, so I picked that up. I have no doubts that no matter what else it is, it will be an interesting read. Also: This Afterdead chat is hilarious, as someone who's never read it. I would legitimately not be able to tell the difference between what you all are saying and some sort of random story generator.
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Mar 6, 2014 07:47
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I only read the latest chapter, got incredibly confused and totally gave up. Maybe I'll tackle it later. But no, it doesn't actually make that much more sense in context.
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Mar 6, 2014 07:52
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chthonic bell posted:I only read the latest chapter, got incredibly confused and totally gave up. Maybe I'll tackle it later. Afterdead really needs to be read in chronological order, certainly more than the others. It makes more sense than you'd think at first glance; the worldbuilding seems to be consistent, it's just very very odd. The details are completely bananas though.
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Mar 6, 2014 07:53
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chthonic bell posted:I only read the latest chapter, got incredibly confused and totally gave up. Maybe I'll tackle it later. If only you had started in one of the two arcs where everyone is naked. e: one of which involved the harpy rapist, aka the "harpist"
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Mar 6, 2014 07:54
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