Weird Romance: Cathy & Alex

Cathy's relationship with men can be described as being desperate, while also being unsatisfied seekers of perfection only to attract disasters, and being the inspiration for missing Newspaper Comic Collection titles.

And in the rare occasions where there were acceptable men, they were either too good for her, leading the lead character to back off out of fear that there might be something wrong with someone who'd want her as a companion, or snapped up by her friends later.

Early on, there was a kind accepting boyfriend, Emerson, who had all the qualities Cathy wanted in a man, but just not in his kind of man.  And he was quickly forgotten.

For the most part, her definitive man was Irving, an irrepressible clueless jerk who was somehow endearing despite his faults.  He would be the backdrop against all the other awful men Cathy would go out with, serving as a barometer gauge of awfulness.

But there was one instance where Cathy found a potential soul mate that would wind up being one of her longest lasting relationships over the course of a year.  It all started innocuously enough in January 31st of 1994 when she signed up for gym membership.

Cathy is described as being a lot of things, (overeater, overdoer, workaholic, shopaholic) but a Cougar isn't normally one of them.

The following isn't Alex-related, but I decided to include it for continuity's sake in showing Cathy's reaction later.

I don't have a date for this Sunday, but this seems like the appropriate place to put it.

To further present the divide between Cathy and Alex, Alex decided to go on a camping trip.

If there's one complaint about Alex, it's that compared to Irving, there wasn't as much argumentative drama.  Alex was simply too easygoing, and his childish immaturity was more a core character than a fault.  If anything, he seemed simply too good for Cathy.

Assault on Irving was something that was deserved, but the same level of violence aimed towards Alex lacked that same sense of reciprocity.  It seemed somehow... mean.

Then in an attempt to impress everyone involved, Cathy decided to undertake the laborous task of preparing Thanksgiving dinner all by herself.

Of course, when anybody ventures out into new territory, they have a tendency to fall back on the old patterns they're most familiar with.

Cathy's relationship with Alex while fraught, was still healthier than with Irving, and was said so in a Newspaper article I managed to find, back when going through physical microfiche archives was still possible.

At the beginning of February, we were treated to a teaser of what we could expect: the usual itinerary of anxiety of an approaching Valentine's Day and all the implied pressure it carries.

And then on February 14, 1995, a year after Cathy met Alex, without any fanfare foreshadowing or buildup, we were suddenly faced with this:

This isn't the last that Cathy and Alex would see each other, but this post is running long enough already, easily outpacing my Epic BC posts.  Maybe I'll post a followup sometime next year.

License Re-request: Epileptic 2

David B.'s seminal comic biography about his epileptic brother is one of the most seminal comic works ever seen, easily outpacing the likes of Persepolis and Maus.  His drawings have a grandiose dreamlike essence with a strong Mayan influence, giving a monstrous symbolic representation of the disease that took over his brother's life.  Paul Gravett writes more eloquently about the masterpiece than I ever could.

Yet people may be largely ignorant of the fact that there was a followup after the 6-volume epic ended.

I only knew about this because there were samples made available in the pamphlets during Free Comic Book Day in 2006.  However, I only flipped through the pages of the Fantagraphics sample (inappropriately titled Funny Book #2), since I wanted to make sure I'd get my money's worth, and didn't want to get something that would take up valuable space. 

I'm guessing hardly anybody saw these pages, either from being largely unimpressed by the interior, or the subject material not being to their taste.  Don't worry if you're missing anything - you're seeing the best that the issue has to offer.  And it was freely available back then, so I have no compuctions in sharing it again now.

This seminal footnote was from Babel, and was only a scant 32 pages, with the promise of more to come.  So far, only 2 of the 3 issues have been translated.  As such, there's too little material to justify collecting everything in one comprehensive book.  It doesn't even qualify as an add-on for the already oversized tour de force tome that is Epileptic.  Not to mention that some of the material retreads stuff that was already covered before, retelling it in a different manner, making the addition somewhat redundant.

BTW, there seems to be a translation error here, where the text says "my brother ran into one of Professor T.'s assistants", when it clearly shows his parents instead.  The latter seems more likely - Jean-Christophe hardly talks to anyone outside his dwindling circle he’s not intimately familiar with.

That would've been the end of it, but there was another preview in 2008 in another FCBD book, not in Funny Book, but I.G.N.A.T.Z. instead.

There's been a smattering of David B.'s other works translated into English, such as, Black Paths, Incidents in the Night, and The Littlest Pirate King, but none of these titles have really gripped my interest the same way that Epileptic does.  The only title that does is his adaption, Hâsib & the Queen of Serpents: a Tale of a Thousand and One Nights.

There were occasional forays in history and David B.'s dreams within the pages of Epileptic, but these segues however tangentially related still felt like part of the narrative.  When I read his other works, these elements don't mesh as seamlessly.  It's probably a mixture of history, violence and dream logic thrown together that works better for an adaptation than his other stories.

One fair criticism of Epileptic is that David B.'s sister makes her presence known, and then is completely neglected for the remainder of half the book.  A fault mentioned by his sibling.

I'm not entirely sure how a collection of just three(!) issues could be bound together.  It's something like how Super Spy: The Lost Dossiers was an expanded extra package never intended to be part of the narrative, just a special promotion for those who heavily invested in the property.  I don't really have a suggestion in the matter.  I just wanted to bring it up.

I greatly identify with the story, despite not being epileptic myself, seeing it as a cautionary tale for what could’ve been me.  If my parents hadn’t fought as long and hard as they did to overcome my deafness (and my Aspergers), I could’ve very well ended up like Jean-Christophe.

Despite all of David B.’s parent’s attempts to circumvent a cure for his brother’s condition, they never stopped trying, constantly moving from one to the next, never finding solace from any, as none worked for very long.  At a certain point, Jean-Christophe just gave up fighting, and became utterly dependent on his disease.  I still need help with basic living, but I can still contribute to family and society in my own special way.

Computer AI Comics

There's been an ever-increasing influx of AI doing increasingly complex formulas to recognize the imagery and language that many of us intuit naturally.  But there's still one area that computers are sorely lacking in, and that would be the realm of storytelling.  Sure, there's the humourous botnik website showing mock algorithms displaying a kind of warped dream logic storytelling that showcases programs almost but not quite getting it.  Showing classics such as a Star Trek Next Gen script, or a lost Harry Potter chapter where all kinds of weird stuff happens, or Keaton Patti's claim of forcing a bot to watch 1000 hours of media and create a script based on what they read, then showing us the first page.

This has led to the amusing creation of turning human-made computer-prompted scripts into actual comics.  A kind of recursive creativity.  But this practice is far more different than what actual computers do.  See, predictive scripts while useful in spurts, has limited practical uses.  It can't plan ahead for long-term storytelling, such as inserting a Checkov's gun to be applied later.

When we look at a comic, there's more than one way to do so.  Some people look at the text first, before moving onto the pictures.  Some look at the pictures first before looking at the words.  And some skip reams of redundant dialogue and narrative, and skip to the end entirely to see how it all turns out, then goes back to see how it got to that point.  Those plans work fine for humans, but for machines, their thought process is much different.  Instead of looking at an individual panel and wrestling meaning from it and making connections from one panel to the next, the computer has no idea what's going to happen next.

To parse the difference between words and pictures, computers would have to take in two disparate elements of fiction at the same time.  A way to bypass this overwhelming influx of information would be that rather than analyze every page on a panel-to-panel basis would be to absorb the entire page at once.  This would be equivalent to devouring the entirety of a novel in one go.  There’s no sense of pacing, of slowing down or speeding up individual panels for personal dramatic effect.  There’s no wandering eye, trailing from the text, to the images, (or images to text) and back.  It’s akin to speed-reading on a quantum level.

Storytelling is basically telling a puzzle, making due with limited information gradually revealed over time.  When the story is finished, we may mull over it, trying to figure out what made parts of it work, and others not.  What possible reason could a machine have for going over the tropes of a story?  Other than trying to parse obvious connections that crop up over time.  (See TvTropes)  For a machine to appreciate comics, they’d have to understand narrative.  And the best way to do that would be to create works that speaks to their tastes.

I’m sure you can see the logical fallacy here.

In order to create a comic that would appeal to machines, we’d have to devise an algorithm that would work along their preferences.  And what appeals to machines may very well be indecipherable to human taste.  Here's an example of a comic created by an AI program:

As creative entries go, it's certainly different. The poetic nonsensical prose reminds me of Josei narratives. Still, the lack of clear cohesive storytelling and abstract art makes telling what's going on near impossible. What's the comic even about?? That's the kind of maddening question that's going to plague linguistic comic schools.

The AI also has trouble with exaggeration of facial expressions, even though a human could easily tell when someone’s deforming their body under extreme stress or for comedic reasons.  Then there’s psychedelic backgrounds to heighten emotion or using unique pay layout to showcase optical illusions.  All various ways of using the medium to convey a message.

What we’re seeing is like a child’s first attempt at making their first comic without really understanding what they’re creating.  Of course it’s going to be a narrative mess!

Before machines can conduct stories of their own, they need to understand how stories work.  And the best way to encourage them is by giving them a basic setup, then have them try to figure out what happens next.  The whole appeal of cliffhangers is that the audience is filled with anticipation for what may or may not happen in the next installment, which can lead to runaway imaginations that can sometimes be better than the actual product.

You know how in movies, they show the T-800 using their infrared sight, getting data helpfully analyzed for the viewer?  Chances are a smarter computer would multitask, inputting thousands of pertinent and irrelevant information all at once.

It’s the difference between seeing a movie play out, and reading the wikipedia summary.  The webpage could be taken in as a whole, but wouldn’t have the same impact as the film, despite both sources containing the same information.

Computers have enough difficulty deciphering a simple image all on its own.  How’re they supposed to figure out how two seemingly meaningless panels individually connect?

You’d think the randomized Garfields would be a logical parameter for working with, but the Garfields that've been popularized online only work best when given limited parameters.  When given only three panels to choose from, the alignment is completely randomized, with no thought given to whether the resulting mishmash is funny or not.  No actual creativity is applied there.

The Garfield computer-generated remix results in panels where the trio of the cast, Jon, Odie and Garfield morph into each other, the background and the text winds up being backwards and nonsensical with no meaning attached to any of the made-up panels present.  (Check the link to see the animated sequence in action)  In that light, that’s an *actual* presentation of a truly randomized Garfield.

I posted an entry that the best way for a computer to learn would be through constant repetition of repetitive layouts with different captions, so they could figure out the pattern for setup and punchlines.  The iteration of Wizard of Id and BC strips would be a better factor in figuring out patterns than anything, since the use of setup, timing and punchline would give computers a way to figure out the formula much sooner.

I think comics is still something solely dominant in the human domain... for now. (Randomized Garfields notwitstanding) The computer-generated Manga page I posted earlier may seem impressive at first, but it was actually half of a page.  Even if you saw the other half, you'd hardly notice.  Do the two sides narratively connect?  Look at the repetitive panel layout! Apart from the speech bubbles bleeding over the borders, it's static, but boring.  This?  This is the computer equivalent of doodling.  Free-thought association without coherent goals, letting ideas flow from one subject to another.

For computers to understand a narrative, it would be helpful to see them adapting another work of fiction to their interpretation.  Then we could see how much they put of their own take, depending on what they add and/or subtract from the narrative.  Though I would suggest starting with smaller simpler stories before moving onto more complex works such as Frankenstein.  But even the simplest Fairy Tales have a kind of internalized dream logic that has an inherent morality that would escape their mindset.

At least there's SOMETHING we puny humans are better at than computers!  Until a machine can comprehend the elaborate innovative storytelling of Cerebus, we're a useful source of amusement.

"I HAVE FOUND MY CALLING."

"Don't give up your day job."