SPECTATORS - Part 84
And for you theater kids, a short play by BKV!
What responsibilities do creators have when depicting violence in fiction?
Brian here, and when I was an eager young college freshman, a writing teacher assigned an essay about that very subject. Less Bald Me wrote that violence should never be glorified, but portrayed realistically, with special attention paid to the consequences of any use of force, blah, blah, blah.
I was ready to receive an easy A for my earnest and thoughtful treatise, but the young professor just scribbled this response on my paper: “Dull and moralistic. Isn’t there value in simply watching Bruce Lee kick the shit out of people?”
Almost thirty years later, I’m still struggling with that question… hence: Spectators, the extremely graphic graphic novel I’ve been collaborating on with my brilliant friends Niko Henrichon and Fonografiks.
If you’re just joining us, this upcoming scene might be particularly disorienting and/or upsetting, so I’d recommend catching up and/or girding your loins in our free-to-read Exploding Giraffe Archives before today’s segment, Not Safe For Work as ever…
Special thanks to Niko for somehow finishing a new hand-painted page while traveling home from Spain, and to Fonografiks (in the UK) for staying up late this evening to letter it.
More horrifying pages coming from these international superstars next Monday.
Last week, we showed off some brain-melting Saga costumes, including a bunch from arguably the “First Family” of Saga Cosplayers:
Thanks again to Lora Nicolas Olaes for the incredible photos, and my apologies for not crediting the rest of her family (who’ve been dressing up as Saga characters at NYCC for an entire decade!): Melvin Olaes, Kalel Olaes (10), and Leia Olaes (4). You four rule (love that Kalel has grown from a Baby Hazel into a full-sized Ghüs!), and we’ll be sending you a small token of our deep appreciation for your astounding work.
I also promised to give away my last few second printings of Saga 66 to a few of you generous paid subscribers in The Tower—as randomly selected by our intern Genesis the Exploded Giraffe—from last week’s bizarre chat thread about what kind of candy we were all handing out for Halloween.
Docfantastic claimed:
King-Size Nutrageous. And if anything I see is slightly amiss, I will exclaim, “This is a nutrage!”
Substack book reviewer Elle Jackson wrote:
I wish but I’m at the top of an apartment building. If a kid in the building did stop by, I have Trader Joe’s gummy bears and four York patties I can dig out of my freezer.
And Charles O. shared:
I always hand out candy that I will also eat, which is virtually any candy, except for anything with coconut in it. Yuck! Completely unrelated, but I also thought I’d share that I was perusing Ch@turbate (don’t judge me), and one of the cam models had Lying Cat tattooed right between her [breasts]. I thought you’d like to know.
You are correct on all counts, Charles.
Thanks to you wonderful Tower weirdos for writing in. Never too late to join our merry giraffe cabal…
Speaking of which, I can neither confirm nor deny my recent initiation into a different SECRET SOCIETY, which may or may not have been founded by one of my favorite writers/judges/man-animals John Hodgman:
In other Friend/Fellow Substacker News, writer Brian Michael Bendis was nice enough to send me the first issue of his new Dark Horse comic Masterpiece, the literal next generation of heist stories, created with Brian’s incomparable partner in crime Alex Maleev. It’s fucking excellent.
MASTERPIECE #1
From the Eisner Award-winning creators behind Daredevil and Scarlet comes an all-new crime comic epic!!
Emma is a brilliant and driven 16-year-old. She has paid for school with her next level inventions and is well-known for her funny and honest webcomics. Then, one day, one of the most famous billionaires on the planet confronts her with the truth about her world. Emma discovers she is the only daughter of two of the greatest, most charismatic master criminals of all time…
First issue hits stands December 13, so tell your friendly neighborhood comic shop to set aside a copy today.
Finally, inspired by this recent New York Times article…
…today’s Question of the Week is: Were you a theater kid?
This dork sure was:
In sixth grade, I was lucky enough to be a winner of the “Marilyn Bianchi Kids’ Playwriting Festival” at the Dobama Theater in Cleveland Heights, where I won a $100 savings bond and learned an extremely important lesson: that there were adults out there willing to give you money—almost enough to purchase an entire Nintendo Entertainment System—for something that you would have happily done for free.
In high school (I went to an all-boys Jesuit institution), I started acting, primarily as a way to hang out with cool girls from our sister schools (if you’re wondering where Y the Last Man came from). And because I’ve always been prematurely elderly, I usually got cast as old dudes—Grandpa in You Can’t Take It With You, Van Helsing in Dracula, etcetera.
In college, I returned to dramatic writing, where I mostly learned that I wasn’t cut out to be a playwright (though I met and eventually married one of the best). Still, not long after I graduated, way back in 2001, a friend secured an off-off-Broadway performance space and asked if I’d contribute a short play to an evening of one-acts entitled Stop, Drop and Roll.
I’m embarrassed that my gin-addled memory can’t recall who wrote Stop or Roll, but I planted my flag on Drop, and I thought I’d share the results with you generous Tower subscribers today.
This may have been the last thing I wrote before 9/11, a major pivot point for my writing (and, um, the planet), but I’m pretty proud of this cocky kid’s script. You’ll see a lot of my early (current?) writing tics, but there are also some clever bits in here I’d entirely forgotten about until I reread this juvenilia over the weekend.
Regardless, if any of you Tower members in good standing ever want to perform Drop onstage, as a student film, a podcast, whatever, you’re welcome to do so with my blessing. Please just let us know if you do!
Everyone else, have a happy and hopefully nonviolent week, and I’ll see you back here next Monday for more free Spectators.