I enjoy SLOP because of the story... It's unique because it does not cater to the 'specifically-acceptable' when taking the whole "online comic" arena into play.... It tests us,...not because it is specifically tailored to be "witty" and "tricky" per-se,...but because it honestly portrays a "difficult" story,...one that's not necessarily easy to stomach.
It does it in two ways...:
1). It let's us, sometimes forces us, to take a hard look at a seriously broken person. Someone who wasn't always "that" broken, but who has, over the years, become more and more of a monster... Not a mythic bogeyman,..but a real-life monster... The kind you might accidentally run into when walking back at night from the corner store... this story is not always easy to watch for me,...and it's meant to be this way,....which is why I admire it. It makes me think about the human condition. In the hard and gritty truth of the current human condition, the fearful truth, is that this could be anyone we know,..this could be us... Anyone can "break" for a variety of reasons,...at any time,...and that's a little hard to deal with...
2). It places the reader in a situation where they must see the main characters of the story in an "animal" light, exposing more brutish, animalistic aspects of their personalities that would otherwise not exist (or more importantly, get ignored) in a non-anthropomorphic story of exactly the same kind. What tickles me about this is NOT necessarily the fact that they are portrayed as animals in the story,..I mean,..that's not as important to me as the fact that the Artist/Author of SLOP has decided that to make this feel "real",...to make the reader "believe" in these animalistic traits, he has developed a world in which the fact that they are animals is a foundational event in its tangible past... They don't just happen to look like animals,..they ARE animals. And when placed in situations that present some mirrored aspect of OUR (human) everyday world, we are reminded that we, in truth, are animals too; of a different species, yes...but animals nonetheless. We are bestial when we least want to be, and we are often bestial to one another in ways that this "comic" brutally portrays.. Not cute,..not "furry",..bestial.....and all the rest of the trappings (the cell-phones, the cars, the clothes) are there to force us, the reader, to accept that these characters are us... And where as we might not always want to see ourselves portrayed in this manner,...we must,..because this is the journey the author is taking us on... And we can't look away...because the "animal" is always with us,..inside of us,....no matter how much our "polite society" teaches us otherwise.
It is because of this,..because of these two things,..that I graciously overlook and place little importance on details like the mini-gun (and whether he technically could or could not carry it around) and those nicely rendered martial art stances (and whether they would or would not be effective when used by someone with digitigrade legs). When details are obviously added by the author to take advantage of the fact that these are not human-shaped characters (such as chairs with tail-holes and interesting shoe designs), and that their society has developed in completely different ways from ours because of their unique attributes, then I'm excited and grateful that the author has consciously decided to add even more emphasis to the "alien-ness" of the world, where appropriate. But likewise,..I also recognize that the author/artist has a VERY difficult task on his hands; the task of making sure that we are also carefully ensconced in an atmosphere that we can identify with personally and fairly easily relate to....one that doesn't twist the eye away from the story he is telling by throwing so many "alien" things at us that we are distracted from the "feelings" (1 and 2) that he is trying to portray.
This is, no doubt,..a hard and daunting task,..and I'm fairly certain that he must think about this each and every time he puts ink and pencil to paper... "What do I make alien this time, and what do I allow to remain familiar...?" Make something too tailored to the alien world, and it throws readers off the emphasis of the story (thus harming #1 as mentioned above) ,...make them too "normal' (to our world), and you lose the sense that this is not a different world based on "uprisen" animals of various kinds (thus harming the delicate sensibilities evoked in #2 as stated above). This is a hard, hard, question.... And it becomes even harder when the "little things" are poked at, prodded at,..and their validity scorned by those who are supposed to be "enjoying" it...
Just remember,..these are hard decisions to make,..and he's making them as an author,...for us....every single time he sits down and begins this daunting task. Aside from all of this, he’s also very much an artist, and the hardest thing for an artist to do is actually place his or her art out in the open for others to either enjoy or tear apart… It can be like laying one’s baby in the arms of a total stranger, trusting them to hold it gently.
What I’m NOT saying as that we should avoid ALL critique (after all the best “babyâ€
Last edited by Jadugara on Sat Aug 18, 2007 6:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
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