New issue of SSBB is out now. :)

[quaedam]

HAI. Yes, so the excellent folks at Shousetsu Bang Bang have put out another issue, themed Historical Romance. Their stories are always quality, and good clean fun--I recommend you check it out. I did them up a cover for this issue based roughly on this old photo. 1950s existentialist kids at the Cafe de Flore, that sort of thing. (WE HAVE ALWAYS

Comments

[bookshop]

akfjksldjada. you are amazing <3 the color scheme is amazing, the GAY MARXISTS ARE AMAZING, IT'S ALL AMAZING

HI

[quaedam]

HI! :D

Ah, I've wanted to draw some gay Marxists in France ever since reading the Roads to Freedom and furiously shipping Brunet/Schneider in the third book. (Iris Murdoch shipped it too! Of course in this case, this is post-WWII, so there will be no terrible tragic ending, with the one dying in the other's arms as they try to escape a Nazi prison camp.)

[selve]

Gorgeous, as always! I love the muted tones, the cigarette ash, the curls and smoke swirls and sense of being a rubbernecker being drawn in by the almost unreachable intimacy of the focal point (actually, at first I thought I was looking at them through a windowpane, but I think that effect was due to the ribbon-shadowing...anyway).

I also love the way you put the words "existentialist" and "kids" together. That's awesome.

[quaedam]

Thanks! :D

And...aha well, you know. :D The impression I always have of that time is of a lot of very young people talking about the bleakness and emptiness and loneliness of a life they've barely experienced at all yet (I remember my Art History prof., who was a feminist, mentioned some professor of hers back in the day who considered himself an existentialist, and he used to say to her "You know...you're born alone and you die alone.", and she said "...yeah, you're alone. Except for that woman straining to get you out of her body.". And then you have sculptors like Giacometti whose figures are always gendered by whether or not they're walking--men walk, women just STAND THERE. There are plenty of philosophers and writers and artists from that movement and period whom I like--there's just plenty of crap to be deconstructed out of all of it to find the useful part.).

[selve]

...yeah, you're alone. Except for that woman straining to get you out of her body.

OH. SNAP. I've heard "you're born naked" but never "you're born alone." That's gold-star fail, right there. I detect a whiff of Freudianism: birth is REJECTION by the mother. LOL. This guy exited the womb and promptly started to smoke the cigar given to him by his father, amirite? With a little beret...I'm kind of caffeinated right now.

[quaedam]

Freudianism: birth is REJECTION by the mother

That would definitely explain a lot. THOSE CRAZY WOMEN AND THEIR SEPARATE PHYSICAL EXISTENCES. I don't quite know what an equally neurotic interpretation of the 'basic facts of existence' that took women rather than men as the default starting point would look like, but I'd love to find out. CONCEPTION IS ABANDONMENT BY THE FATHER. IDK. I've only recently started reading anything in the psychoanalytic tradition and...I have to say--a lot of what I've seen of it so far just strikes me as completely ridiculous. I know there's so much in art and literature and literary theory and so on and so forth that rests on some part of that tradition, it's true, whether on Lacan and so Freud, or Jung, or Eric Erikson (I liked the Richard Sennett book 'The Uses of Disorder' back in the day when I read it, and he spoke about drawing on Erikson, who in turn drew on Anna Freud's writing on childhood, and on her father...), and so I do want to give that worldview a chance to let me understand it in full on

[dollarchan]

Interesting! I wasn't aware of that zine, thanks for that link. The picture reminds me of the people I went to uni with..

[quaedam]

You're welcome! :D They've got some really great writers who contribute regularly to them, so they're almost always worth a look. (And at least one of them looks almost exactly like a guy I went to college with. Hopefully to no one but me, though.)