Happy Media for the Chronically Cynical

Martina Foquet is a J.D. candidate, class of 2022, in USC’s Gould School of Law. She took my Masters seminar on Arts and Culture journalism in the Spring and wrote two really compelling papers I wanted to share with you. Both consider contemporary television in a post-Pandemic or Late Pandemic framework.

Happy Media for the Chronically Cynical

Martina Foquet, USC

In the shadow of prestige television, cynical perspectives reign. Succession is a comedic but depressing look at the omnipotent power of America’s oligarchy, every Euphoria character experiences a traumatic event before they turn eighteen, and Squid Game introduced us to charming characters who were brutally killed in attempts to course correct their lives. I’m a self-proclaimed cynic and recent data suggests that I’m not alone. For the first time, the longitudinal General Social Survey found that Americans reporting they are not too happy exceeds the Americans reporting they are very happy. Naturally, media reflects the increasingly downtrodden emotion permeating the country.

But everyone needs balance and too much darkness is not a sustainable consumption pattern. The problem is that, for the cynic, happy depictions can feel vapid as the happiness is often reliant on unrealistic solutions or some deus ex machina plot device. To melt a cynic’s heart, conflicts and obstacles that are common in everyday life need to be thoroughly addressed and confronted. The cynic does not dismiss positive outlooks altogether, but rather struggles to find comfort in optimistic depictions that rely on unrealistic elements. However, a slew of recent television shows and movies have, in my opinion, successfully addressed the cynics' need for realism and optimism.

Adult Swim’s Smiling Friends stands out because within eleven minutes, the show’s episodes manage to address the most controversial topics in culture today while also imbuing fun irreverent humor. The show confronts suicide, cancel culture, cultural appropriation, and celebrity worship all while remaining accessible to all people along the political spectrum. The topics don’t feel heavy because they are appropriately contextualized, finding humor in the series of events that bring about the controversial topics as opposed to relying on opinions on the topics being humorous. In the first episode, Charlie and Pim are tasked with making a suicidal man, Desmond, smile. Pim optimistically pursues happy activities while Charlie immediately dismisses the man as a lost cause. Pim’s activities reveal the fallacies of a family or friends first approach and the limitations of escapist self-care days. When the pair realizes that it may not be possible to “cure” this man of suicidal ideation, they return to the office only to accidentally have Desmond find his purpose in bliblie termination services. Smiling Friends is a successful show because it understands how humor works. Humor finds absurdity in reality and great comedy understands the details that make even the most serious topics funny for all.

Abbott Elementary has taken America by storm and its sitcom format may trick the viewer into believing that it is another happy go lucky show. However, the show effectively addresses the reality of many teachers in America without succumbing to a dreary aura. The colorful cast of characters are all deeply flawed, frequently oscillating between being an encouraging presence and a nuisance. Janine consistently brings a positive perspective, but often disrupts the delicate balance that keeps the lights on (literally). Ava is a self-indulgent and corrupt principal that brings a necessary levity to overbearing conflicts. Barbara is a veteran teacher who sometimes adheres too rigidly to precedent. In Abbott Elementary the teachers are underpaid, understaffed, and overworked, but find realistic solutions that make coping in the environment possible. A key reason for the show’s light feeling is that both the cynical and optimistic characters have legitimate perspectives. This provides an environment where no one is demonized but rather the show highlights contexts where characters are strongest and weakest.

Free Guy also successfully addresses the ails of Big Tech while not succumbing to the “big bad tech” tropes. Two moments in the movie stood out to me (spoiler alert!). When the code-stealing tech CEO
Antwan almost completes his destruction of what remains of the Free City servers, Millie, the shrewd coding protagonist, proposes the exchange of what’s left of Free City for coding rights and the remaining profits from the game. Antwan identifies the offer as the “dumbest deal” he’s ever encountered. While a seemingly throw-away portion of the confrontation, it felt comforting as a born cynic to see recognition of the true cost of the offer. While Millie proceeds to justify the deal because she “built something special,” there is an underlying business rationale behind her offer. Instead of having Free City upheld in endless negotiations that would diminish the hype spurred by the NPC Guy, Millie and Keys are able to capitalize on the attention and monetize what remained of NPC Free City. Additionally, the film does not rely on the “boy gets the girl” trope. Free Guy addresses the limitation of a relationship between artificial intelligence and a conventional human. Even though it would seem like Guy is abandoned, the reappearance of Guy’s best friend Buddy leads to Guy’s happy ending. The movie suggests that romantic love is not the only type of love that leads to a fulfilling life.

In contrast, I would argue Ted Lasso struggles with the Ellen Degeneres syndrome. The podcast “Celebrity Memoir Book Club” identifies the Ellen Degeneres syndrome as the skepticism people feel when someone is overly optimistic. Optimism isn’t the issue, but optimism as the sole motivating factor can feel empty when other factors of life are not taken into consideration. In Ted Lasso’s first season, Rebecca, the new owner of the AFC Richmond football club, hires Ted to spite her ex-husband. Ted has never coached soccer and is subject to abuse from the team and fans, some who openly call him “wanker.” Despite the abuse, Ted is able to charm himself out of criticism. A smile and pithy aphorism seems to mends all Ted’s interpersonal issues. In a way, Ted is presented as a Messiah whose kindness converts everyone around him. While Ted Lasso is certainly a fun watch, the cynical viewer may not be moved by the fact that the show foreshadows the superiority of Ted’s approach. There is no real conflict between Ted and the other characters because the audience already knows that Ted will successfully convert all those around him. The solution to every problem seems to be smiles, homemade biscuits, and dad jokes. While the show is comforting, the cynic knows that the hope isn’t transferable to real life and therefore the show is not as satisfying. Season 2 seems more interested in developing Ted’s character, but the cynic may not be motivated to continue the show after an unconvincing first season. While the streaming era seems to treat television and movies as disposable content, a lot of innovations are occurring under the streaming model. And in the world of unhappy Americans and dark anti-heroes, some shows have proven powerful in brightening our black hearts.

Fandom and Neurodiversity

Dutch acafan Martine Mussies lives in the Netherlands, where she is writing her Phd about the Cyborg Mermaid. She is also working on a project about King Alfred, with support from Leiden University. Her autism plays an important role in her scholarly work. She pleads for a type of fan studies research that incorporates neurodiversity.

If I had received a dollar for every time the children at the schoolyard asked me where I really came from, I would have been quite a rich kid. As for bodily features, I ‘pass’ as a Dutch woman in the Netherlands. I might be a bit on the short side, but solely in terms of skin tone and hair color and eyes, I’d say I fit in quite easily. Still, something has always been ‘off’. The children’s question was a keen one, and in line with the feeling that has accompanied me all my life. A sense of not-belonging, as if I am some sort of wandering alien, accidentally lost on planet earth. Throughout my life, many people around me saw how this Otherness of mine manifested itself in my way of moving, talking, dressing and above all: thinking. From exactly the same building blocks, I consistently constructed a narrative that was completely different from the one constructed by my neurotypical peers. Because autism has such an enormous influence on the way I experience the world, it is logical that this has also affected my academic work. 

Looking back, this was already visible when I was still an undergraduate in musicology - a decade before my diagnosis. In terms of grades, my studies went rather well, but in terms of cooperation and contacts with teachers... not so much. I did not really understand what they expected of me and, despite working hard, I regularly clashed with the university’s neurotypical norms, which made me feel like a freak. Yet, I vividly remember one presentation in which my autism was actually an advantage to  me. It was in the context of a course about ways of experiencing music. I tend to experience colors when I hear sounds. This neurological phenomenon, commonly referred to with the umbrella term "synesthesia", is more common in people with autism (20 percent of people with diagnosed autism also have reported synesthesia, much more than the average 2-4 percent). In order to demonstrate this to my classmates, I made a computer simulation (in ActionScript - good ol’ times) that showed the colors I experienced with certain sounds. I played the piano and the colors simultaneously appeared on the screen.  My classmates could also type in words, which would then automatically appear in the "right" colors. To arm myself against disbelief and suggestions of paranormality, I had included an interview with none other than Professor Robbert Dijkgraaf which he had given me prior to the demonstration. He was already a national celebrity at the time, explaining on TV about the universe, string theory, quantum gravity and the border area of mathematics and particle physics. And he is a synesthete as well. It worked. I received applause and the highest possible grade, but much more importantly, it was the first time that I felt how my Otherness could be an asset. 

Fast forward a decade. I have been officially diagnosed with a "very severe case of autism spectrum disorder" and work from home on my dissertation and numerous other projects. I delivered over 30 paper presentations and published over 40 articles. My interests are wide and intense, but they are united by a common thread: autism. This label refers to a range of complex neurological aspects that causes the autistic brain to be wired differently. But just like a jam pot label might list the ingredients but reveal little about the taste or one's experience in eating the jam, the label that a person likes to identify him/herself with tells little about lived experiences. What does it mean to be an autistic individual in a neurotypical society? As I wrote in Transformative Works and Cultures (in a special issue on "Fan Studies Methodologies"), “I plead for a type of fan studies research from the angle that everyone has different perceptions in mind and that the human memory is more reconstructive than reproductive in nature. That means that nobody can accurately interpret our actions and feelings without us expressing them ourselves.” Because everything I do is done from my own framework, formed by my own brain, all my work is directly or indirectly about autism. This allows me to offer a unique perspective that is useful to academia - and with that, to our society - rather than a deviation that needs to be adjusted. Moreover, as I will never fit into the mould of any neurotypical society, with their static categories of identity (immigrant/autochthonous, male/female, child/adult, gay/straight etc.), I now consider it one of my tasks to problematise these pre-formed pigeonholes.

The greatest challenges in academically working with and from explicitly neurodiverse perspectives come, of course, from a methodological point of view. My undergraduate studies (musicology, Slavistics, conservatory) were quite traditional in their methodologies. In the Utrecht musicology department, we nicknamed this approach "the Pollmannian tradition", after the 2005 book "De Letteren als Wetenschappen" (The Humanities as Sciences) by Utrecht Professor of Linguistics Thijs Pollmann. In it, the author argued for "rationality" and "truth-telling" within the so-called “alpha sciences”. Central to his thinking was the philosophical tradition of science, and questions around the purpose and function of humanities research play a rather subordinate role in his book. Fifteen years later, even within the more traditional disciplines, voices are raised against the so-called objectivity of the researcher. My methodology, which I call “autiethnography” (a writing of and about the autistic self), aims to show how neurotypical status affects auto-ethnographic perception. Subsequently, autiethnographies can cross the boundaries of humanism by providing examples of metahumanist subjectivity. Moreover, by zooming in and out of the writing of an autiethnography, I can address issues of intersectionality versus simultaneity as well.

I would like to end this Statement with a little disclaimer. Don’t get me wrong, it is by no means my intention to argue that my autistic mode of analyzing (or even my whole way of being in the world) is somehow “better” than the many non-autistic ones. I am not in any competition; I mainly want to offer alternative understandings. A diamond has many facets and you can only see a few of them at one time. However, looking at it through an autistic lens can show you a facet that you may not have noticed before. Use it as you wish.

Celebrating Rice Boy and Vattu: An Interview With Web Comics Creator Evan Dahm (Part Three)

Current Issues and State of the Field

James Lee: So maybe we can shift to talking about platforms and other issues, the state of the field here. You've been through many changes in the field of webcomics from the early days of web rings, the push towards merchandising t-shirts and such, and so on. How does this current era compare to prior times and what do you see as key issues these days?

Evan Dahm: Whoa big one. Okay how does it compare… I feel like I got in sort of on the tail end of the merchandise-heavy thing or that it’s never been a big part of my stuff because I approached webcomics not being totally aware of webcomics and not being interested in the sort of gag comic strip thing that a lot of webcomics were at the time. But because my stuff has been so tailored towards going to be a book, book sales have been a huge part and a type of limited self-publishing have been my thing in a larger way and I feel like a lot of my contemporaries.

Well, the big shift to me is that death of the independent Internet thing. The fact that people don't tend to leave social media platforms. I think a lot of people only a little bit younger than me don't have any memory of an Internet that's a little more made by individuals, and so it doesn't even occur to them they can put a thing on a platform that's their own.

I’ve been re-serializing Vattu on Webtoon, the big Korean webcomics. I don't have to explain that to you. I look at the numbers on there, the millions and millions of people reading some of that stuff and that those numbers are so big that that is what the medium is for them. There is a huge number of people just on that platform making and reading that I just wasn't aware of until a little while ago.

So, I feel like that's kind of what webcomics is now. And what does that mean? That means that people making comics for that platform and tending to not put them anywhere else are tending to not have their own place and their own audience and brand building project outside of Webtoon. That just leads everybody into the same rut that YouTube creators or whoever is on where they're just trying to appeal to the inscrutable audience dynamics and algorithms of that platform and they're trying to not get their content banned because they mentioned or deal with any particular narrative content. And then they try to make a living just off the back of that platform, which is apparently feasible, and people do it. I have like 7000 followers on there and as a result, I was not aware of this, I get 100 or 200 bucks a month in ad sharing. That's great but you need an insane amount of readership there if you're going to make a living off of their ad revenue. Or you need to be contracted to do their Webtoons originals or whatever. It's just not self-publishing. It's great that platform is there and that there's so many people there. And people are doing great work on it, but it's compromised. It could shut down at any minute. They could kick you off at any minute.

The amount of money that you could make doing your work it just pales in comparison to what you could do, in theory, if you could bring that audience somewhere else, and just sell 1% of them a book or a t-shirt or whatever. I don't know, I'm kind of rambling but that's the shape of the shift as I see it. It sounds like I'm being judgmental of people operating in that scene as it is now, but I don't mean to be because it's kind of like that's what it is. There's so many people there that how could you not? We're so divorced from the idea of artists having their own Internet spaces that why would it not seem self-evident to you that the only thing to do is just build up as much of an audience on Webtoon as possible and hope for the best? It just puts people in a really, really delicate precarious position and it's kind of self-publishing but it removes a lot of the benefits of self-publishing as I have seen them.

James Lee: Yeah it's been an interesting shift to observe when we think back to the earlier with the Wild West days of the Internet there was this old idea proposed by Scott Mccloud, comic theorist, about the infinite campus basically that with this great new tool, the Internet, that we would be liberated from the constraints of the physical and there would be this golden age of people experimenting in weird and interesting ways. But I think we've seen over the years there are constraints that people consider. If you want to print for book, for example, if you want what you made to be available in book form, then you have to consider print dimensions, resolution size. And now with Webtoons you have this long vertical scrolling format designed for the mobile experience. So it's another kind of set of constraints and maybe more limiting and not necessarily let's say as liberating as other paths that could have been taken.

Evan Dahm: The thing is I'm kind of an apologist for that. I think that he was basically right. The infinite canvas thing got used in a few like gimmicky token ways throughout the years. I made Rice Boy in 2006-2008. It's formatted as a book. It does not take advantage of the infinite canvas Internet thing at all. But structurally that book could not exist if not for the Internet. You can't just publish a 500-page comic book anywhere but the Internet. There was no publisher would have done that. That is a kind of infinite canvas type thing as comics have always been limited by not only the physical size of the pages but the means of their production and distribution. I think it's important to keep in mind that maybe comics on the Internet haven't taken advantage of that physical trim size limitation being lifted, but certainly they have profoundly taken advantage of a huge opening up of the limitations by means of production.

James Lee: Even with Webtoons we can think of the infinite scroll as being kind of an application of this.

Evan Dahm: Yeah, and there's sorts of stories all the time being produced now that could not have existed were they subject to all of the constraints that existed in form before the Internet.

James Lee: Yeah, it's interesting because there are a lot of key issues going on now, but also people can make the argument that now is the best time to get into this stuff. You can just make anything you want and post it on any number of platforms. Burying some of these issues of censorship and other factors.

Evan Dahm: As long as you're as long as people have in mind that you can put it everywhere. I see kids - that's rude of me – I've seen a lot of people agonizing over “I'm making this comic, should I put it on Webtoons or whatever?” You should put it fucking everywhere. Why not? You're trying to get it out there. These are these are platforms that you can use. There's no there's nothing wrong with it. Just don't think that any one of them is going to make it all happen for you.

James Lee: Yeah, I think also related to this is that the field is open to everyone. So, in essence people feel they have a lot of competition with people with more developed skills. You have professionals, aspiring art students making webcomics as well. Big departure from the early days when this very small kind of amateurish works that existed back then compared to now. Could you talk more about this idea of polish which you've spoken about previously?

Evan Dahm: Oh yeah, I was just talking on Twitter about that. A lot of it is that everybody's on the Internet now and everybody who's making art is putting it there and there's just so much of it that it kind of pushes everybody in a different way than it used to. But also, I think that we, I don't know, I feel like audiences are expecting a certain level and type of polish in a way that they weren't before. And I don't know if that's good. I feel like audiences are expecting a high budget movie type of polish from a piece of art made by an individual and I don't like that. I have this sort of loose and indefensible theory that we're, at least in America and maybe at least in the Anglosphere, we're kind of atrophying our understanding or we're losing our understanding of drawings as such. We're not really understanding what goes into them what decisions are being made what they are. So, as a result of that maybe we expect drawings to have an extreme level of polish or kind of internalized embarrassment of the fact that they're drawings or something.

I think about American animation and how animation for kids is allowed to be really visually inventive and rich and visually smart, to fully lean into drawings as a beautiful thing to be explored in their own right. Animation for adults in America is stuff in the Family Guy mold where there's nothing there. It's just making a joke of the fact that it's a drawing – like “isn't this show funny? Isn't it funny that it's a drawing?” – and it's kind of embarrassed to even explore the possibilities of drawing. It is made of drawings and that's enough. It was a very loose kind of idea…

James Lee: I think definitely there is something there. You look at these animations for adults, things like Family Guy and others in that genre, and it feels terrible in a way that you don't see with cartoons aimed at kids.

Evan Dahm: Right so there's the sense that emerges out of that, I think that drawings are for kids or finding beauty and interest in drawings is something that adults should not do. Adults are supposed to look at realistic highly developed images.

James Lee: Yeah, it's a very specific way of thinking of polish that closeness to reality is the metric of, say, artistic skill or quality.

Evan Dahm : Exactly, closer to the optical even. I find that deadening because you're never going to, I don't know, we don't live in reality. We live in our little poetic socially constructed image of reality. This is connected to that objectivity and worldbuilding thing I was talking about. How are you going to objectively represent something that everybody has their own perspective on? There's optical reality, there's the reality that the camera shows us, but I think we do a disservice to our visual engagement with the world if we treat that as the one thing that every representation has to go for.

James Lee: Why do the job of the camera when the camera already exists?

Evan Dahm: Yeah, and we don't live in that reality. We have optical input from the world but there's a lot more to our visual experience of the world than that, I think, and there should be in our production of images too, I think.

James Lee: Okay, so building on this, over the years we've been seeing more encroachment from outside players who have been more interested in profitability in the spaces and tools used by independent creators like yourself. We have cases such as Amazon I think back in 2018 at Small Press Expo showcasing their original print-on-demand service. We have Kickstarter’s foray onto the crypto roller coaster. And, more recently, we had the Toronto Comic Art Festival (TCAF) giving space to NFT art and being met with backlash this past year. So, what are your thoughts on this trend, especially in relation to independent art?

Evan Dahm: Generally, it feels kind of bleak. The NFT thing particularly just feels like a really apocalyptic cashing in thing. It's so nakedly wasteful and all of the sort of futurist arguments for its miraculous capabilities, I think I am smart enough to be able to tell if there's something there or not and I just don't see it. So it just feels totally just like nihilistic cash grab type people. The Pink Cat, the NFT person who was invited to TCAF and then disinvited has just I think cut and run like she just vanished from all for social media platforms. So, what is that a rug pull? Is that what people -

James Lee: Yes, that's the term. A lot of these scam terms are becoming very popular these days.

Evan Dahm: Yeah, and that’s related but I guess that's a separate thing from Amazon buying all this stuff. That’s related to what I'm talking about with the Internet being locked up, and all these platforms. It's exciting to see people pushing against that and it's exciting to sometimes have this sense that there's this broad backlash against it, that people remember that they can do things outside of these platforms, that self-publishing is a thing in various ways. I don't know what to make of it really. I am encouraged that there seemed to be a lot of people who understand that it's happening, and that you can operate in spaces outside of it to at least some extent. I try not to get too doom and gloom about it with myself, I guess.

James Lee: Yeah it feels very easy to fall into this negative cycle, especially when it feels like it's inescapable. As much as you try to ignore terms like NFT and crypto they just keep coming up.

Evan Dahm: Yeah it's inescapable, but I feel like for me a lot of a part of why I'm able to not get sucked into it, maybe just my disposition, but also it feels good to be making something consistently that is out there in its own little space and that is entirely mine and that I'm not dependent on any of these – I mean I am dependent on platforms – but I doing this thing separate from Amazon and all this stuff. People are reading it and I feel like I'm doing something that helps me.

James Lee: So, compromise is a recurring theme that you mentioned, at times, specifically the kinds of compromises, you have to make to keep doing what you want to do, and to survive. At times, this might mean buying into corporate structures, whether that be working with them or engaging with others on their terms, on the terms set by those structures, such as the walled gardens that you mentioned before. So, while we may be critical of these, there can also be no functional alternatives, especially when it comes down to a matter of survival. Can you speak more about this kind of ambivalence and how you navigate it?

Evan Dahm: I'm doing this as a career so there's an aspect of me that is just a totally cynical striver about it. I can try to navigate it with principles or whatever, but there is no way of having a career doing it where I stick to all of them or where I don't engage with any part of the culture or the Internet that I don't like. I think it's been kind of easier for me to wrap my head around that because I've been working in comics and that medium has always been thought of and I've always thought of it as pretty compromised from the jump. It's a commercial medium. It's a commercial illustration turned into entertainment storytelling. There's so many different aspects of what I'm doing that proceed from these rich traditions of compromise and commodification. I don't know how else to look at it really. When I was in college, my minor was in studio art and at that time the school I was at the arts department was entirely aimed at the fine art world which has always been kind of just frustrating or uninteresting to me. I learned an awful lot like technical drawing and stuff doing that, but the idea that there's any pure art free from compromise or engagement with the material world is just silly and frustrating to me. And it was it was kind of funny I guess to be working on Rice Boy, this very tacky pop-y illustrative thing, at the same time as I was taking classes in this program that just had no interest or understanding of illustration or comics or anything that debased. I had one more thought, give me one second.

James Lee: Okay sure.

Evan Dahm: Oh yeah and I've been thinking about what it takes for a thing to materially exist. We're making this work within capitalism. Either I'm compromising in all sorts of ways and trying to make it something that will make me a living, or I'm independently wealthy, or it doesn't get done. I want it to be read. This is how I engage with the world in large part. This is how I understand the world and how I talk to far more people than I will ever talk to as an individual so how do I fit that into the world? I have to make it pop cultural, make it intelligible, and sort of compromise to that extent. And then I have to make a living doing it however, I can. That's the only way that it can exist. Because if I don't think about it like that, then I'm just privileging work made by people who already have the money, basically. I'm not a rich kid. That's not the position I've ever been in. This is my job.

James Lee: Yeah, that's an excellent point that even the works that try to be abstract and removed are made in a context which enable that, and maybe that means coming from a family of wealth which we are not all necessarily privy to.

Evan Dahm: I guess I'm lucky that the sort of thing that interests me is kind of pulpy and a mass audience type thing.

James Lee: Well, we got to work within the system we're born into. Even if you want to change it, we won't change it overnight.

Evan Dahm: Mm hmm.

Closing Thoughts

James Lee: Okay, so home stretch. There are just a couple questions to wrap up. What are you into these days? It could be anything. You mentioned some of the manga you're reading earlier.

Evan Dahm: Oh yeah, I've been thinking a lot about Dragon Ball. I read all of Dragon Ball a little while ago and I can't stop thinking about it. I've been reading a lot about self-publishing. Different, earlier, obsolete areas in comics self-publishing. I've been reading a lot of interviews with Jeff Smith, who made Bone. I've been reading Dave Sim’s big weird argumentative self-publishing diatribe with the caveat that I do find that guy pretty unhinged and despicable, but he occupied a very particular space in self-publishing like periodical self-publishing when the direct market was a new thing for comics. I've been very interested in that.

I'm thinking of maybe doing some sort of limited podcast where I interview people about their approaches to self-publishing in different eras because I know people who have engaged with that at different times and it's interesting to see. I'm really trying to wrap my head around, at least in a big, vague, vibe-oriented way, wrap my head around how working independently works in different circumstances. The sort of thing that I'm doing is very different and it's always been very different from a self-publisher like a Jeff Smith, but a lot of the dynamics are the same on some level, like the culture around the art.

What else have I been into, I've just finished Future Boy Conan, Miyazaki’s early series from 1979 which I just loved it so much.

James Lee: What do you like about it?

Evan Dahm: It's very focused and the pacing is incredible. It's telling one big story basically nonstop continuously and each episode mostly is focused around a simple challenge to be undertaken. It doesn't hugely overreach. It's not trying to do something big and complicated and particularly because it's Miyazaki. I'm used to see his stuff in very expensive opulent motion picture animation. It looks very cheap and limited, but it does it all so confidently and beautifully. I just loved it. You rarely see serialized storytelling that fits together that well, in my opinion. I recommend it.

James Lee: All right, I'll add it to the list. The next question is: what would be your dream project if you had unlimited time and resources? It could be webcomics, it could be anything else. It could be something you're currently working on, or something you want to see down the line, big or small.

Evan Dahm: Unlimited time and resources… If it's literally unlimited, I guess it would be – I don't know – just the same sort of thing I'm doing, but just taking more pop cultural space. I would make a big traditionally animated movie and just make it available in every possible place. Or I would start an animation studio. No, I don't know. In reality, my dream project is probably the thing I'm starting after Vattu, which is a… Well, the reason I'm thinking so much about the material conditions for art and how a thing can't exist unless it can materially exist is because I'm trying to at least understand how I'm going to make it happen in a self-publishing way. And I’m trying to approach the story and the means by which I published the story in a smart and eyes open sort of way. I want to continue to self-publish these big expansive long-term projects in a way that can work and they can continue to exist in the Internet as it is. But that project is a lot of what I am thinking about and I feel like I can approach it in a way, where I am mobilizing a lot of what I’ve learned about serial storytelling and sort of starting over but still building on a lot of the stuff. I’m very excited about it. I've written a lot of a lot of it.

James Lee: And I'll be looking forward to seeing it.

Evan Dahm: I appreciate that.

James Lee: So any words, in closing, you want to convey to let's say people who want to express themselves through our but feel intimidated or overwhelmed in terms of figuring out where to even start.

Evan Dahm: It feels like the most important thing is that you know what you want to make. It might be kind of difficult to figure out what that thing is in the most personal and honest way but hold to that and don't worry too much about what people will say about it, or how it'll fit into the world or whatever. The main thing, the engine, that all makes it happen is just doing the thing that they intensely want to do and not really giving a shit about how feasible it is, or if people like it or whatever, to an extent. And that to me is the value of working in comics, in particular, because you can do it with one person or a very small team for no money and it's a visual medium. You can do fucking anything.

James Lee: So basically, to make comics you got to make comics.

Evan Dahm: Yeah, and everybody has their thing. Everybody has their own angle. I guess that's it.

James Lee: Okay, so that's all the questions I have. Let me stop the recording here.

Evan Dahm: Cool, thank you for having me.

Celebrating Rice Boy and Vattu: An Interview with Web Comic Creator Eric Dahm (Part Two)

Fans and Community

James Lee: Let me shift gears a little bit. The following questions fall under this umbrella of “finding your own people,” about community and audiences. So, to start off, is there an audience in mind when you were in which you tell your approach towards with your work?

Evan Dahm: I try to be extremely clear, and I try to make the storytelling engaging and have a “pull you forward” sort of way. I like working with extremely dense big ideas but part of what is appealing to me about storytelling is that I want to do that in a way that basically anybody can understand and that pulls you through it in an exciting sort of way. I'm trying to make it as entertainment effectively so that is kind of a way of having an audience in mind, but I don't have a particular audience in mind.

With The Island Book trilogy that I did for First Second Books, those are ostensibly for a middle grade audience, which is, I think, from 10 to 14. I guess I kept it kind of intentionally superficially simple, but I didn't think about that terribly much, and I don't really know how to think about that terribly much.

My sort of tastes don't tend to go in the direction of intense gore or violence or sexuality in terms of storytelling. So, though there's not a lot, I haven't had to think about it very much. And with most of the stuff that I want to do, part of the creative challenge to me is taking the big, complicated ideas I want to work with and making them work in a pop cultural register. That's as much as I think about it.

James Lee: I think those are good considerations, because when you start crafting towards your audience, then perhaps that changes how you think about the story and maybe compromises your own vision for it. With that in mind, though, there's this idea in business and media about the long tail.

In comics it often came up a while back as “1000 true fans” – that you only needed a thousand people who really support you to have you be able to do to work you want. How do you feel that kind of idea holds up especially after all these years with crowdfunding platforms and other shifts in the field?

Evan Dahm: I imagine that the numbers on that have changed somewhat, but that was exactly the sort of thing that made sense around when I was starting before Web 2.0. I have this experience a lot now over the past several years going to comic conventions and stuff where an awful lot of people tell me that they came to my work around 2010 or before 2010 which is great to see that people have been interested in what I'm doing for so long.

But the fact that it's a big percentage has a feeling of inertia or decreased momentum or something as if I got in with a certain type of world and now nobody else finds me so I've been trying to keep that in mind. But I want a big pop cultural footprint. I want people to read this stuff.

James Lee: I was one of those 2010 people.

Evan Dahm: Hey exactly. Did you go to a convention that I signed that or a show?

James Lee: I think it was maybe Comic-Con.

Evan Dahm: Cool.

James Lee: I don't know I lost track over all these years.

Evan Dahm: That's a very long time. Yeah the solution for independent people doing lo-fi art like comics is I think it's always going to be a small number of people who are very invested, especially if you're really doing your particular thing in the way that comics allow you to do more than other more expensive media, then your dream should be that you connect with the probably pretty small number of people who are totally on board with what you're doing now. Maybe that's not enough in every circumstance to support a career but that seems honest.

James Lee: Yeah, I'm starting to think maybe there's about X amount of people that supports the work which makes it sustainable and then maybe there's a smaller amount of people who really support it in a way that makes you feel motivated to keep doing it, let's say as like a community.

So, with that said, maybe to build on that, so something you raised in your documentary was that the actual work of making comics is quite depressive. You stare at a screen or paper all day alone oftentimes kind of get something out of your head. We can joke about this, about how long it actually takes to make comics and all the different skill sets you kind of need to do them as well. So, the question would be then what keeps someone going in comics work? Especially doing it independently. Why comics over something else like let's say the novel?

Evan Dahm: Working in a novel is appealing to me sometimes because it's so much more efficient. But for me the answer to that question for me is different from somebody starting out or whatever because what keeps me going is that first of all I've been doing it for so long that it feels like a native language in a way. But also, I know that I'm talking to an audience and that I'll hear something from somebody, and that people will read it. That's a big part of what keeps me going.

But also there's this trick you have to do where you become clear enough on what you want to make and have a sort of internal motivation to do it in exactly the way that you want to do, and then you have to sort of fool yourself into having faith in it and thinking that it's possible and thinking that you'll do it well, even if you're disappointed in every single step of it or whatever. There is a part of my brain constantly doing this sort of imposter syndrome, or down talking, or that sort of stuff. There's always a million ways to talk yourself out of doing something. But well first of all it's my career so I have to but also, I just sort of built the way that I think of this stuff around just not giving that any oxygen, I guess. And just sort of trying to look at it objectively like obviously you could talk yourself out of doing it. Obviously, all the things that I see wrong with a page that I've drawn in a certain light, those are objective faults, but I'm fucking doing it. This is the way it's going to get done, with these faults. I'm making a 1300-page comic book. It is what it is.

Would you mind if I disappear for one second?

James Lee: Okay sure.

Evan Dahm: We're back. Alright hello.

James Lee: Okay welcome back. Thank you, if this is running long just let me know and we can wrap things up.

Evan Dahm: I'm good.

James Lee: Okay, all right because I still got a bunch of questions here. So, I want to say that there are definitely people who support your work, so I think imposter syndrome will always be rearing its head, even if it's not warranted.

Evan Dahm: Yeah and it's the sort of thing where what is the circumstance in which it's warranted? I understand it as it's just a sort of narrativization that my brain does to talk about an anxiety thing. There is no reality that it could point towards so why give it any attention?

James Lee: Okay, so building on some of these themes, are there any communities you feel that you're a part of? Groups of friends not necessarily let's say webcomics like a webcomics community, though you can point to one if you feel like you are part of one, but in general as well.

Evan Dahm: Yeah, I don't know, I have a couple of a couple of good little sort of crowds that I'm a part of in my social world outside of being a comics person. I'm not extremely social. I'm becoming more comfortable at that fact as being at the age that I am or whatever. Within comics world I do feel very close to the sort of cohort of people that I met through webcomics who were all kind of around my age and started all around the time I did. Basically, we just sort of would see each other all the time and it became a little scene. It's funny how locked in time that is because people aren't doing the same thing now and the way that I was publishing then and the way that I met those people just doesn't really exist anymore.

James Lee: Yeah, how do you even meet people, especially at conventions now? It's all very chaotic and strange these days.

Evan Dahm: Yeah, I’m not good, I don't think I’ve ever been really good at that. I need like an intro, or I need like an angle to approach or something. I can be like a charming professional person, but I don't think I'm extremely social.

James Lee: Yes, all kinds of troubles we have to deal with as introverts. So, here's a question. You run a stream, The Ambiguity Program, in which you regularly curate and show different kinds of animated cartoons, mainly strange and off the beaten path things. So, what was the motivation for doing this?

Evan Dahm: I’ve always been sort of interested in that stuff, but I hadn't learned terribly much about it, or found very much of it. It was kind of a premise to do that, and it was fun to build a little space and do the trade dress and just have a show. I don't know. I started it shortly after the pandemic just as having a thing to do that was sort of abstractly social. And it's been exciting to learn more about the cartoons and stuff and it's been cool to talk to people and meet a lot of people by means of the Twitch chat or whatever, meet a lot of meet a lot of people there. That was fun. It's been fun. I feel like it's been good for my passive visual education, just to see so many different ways that drawings can look. That's good for me.

James Lee: Yeah, some of that clay animation stuff – I remember dropping into a few of them - it's really bizarre but interesting.

Evan Dahm: It feels good for you, doesn't it?

James Lee: Yeah, it's like “oh people did all sorts of crazy things and maybe I can be a little inspired by that too.”

Evan Dahm: I love that feeling.

James Lee: How is Twitch, by the way? When we think about different platforms. Do you feel it's new and strange? How has that experience been running a Twitch channel and engaging with people there?

Evan Dahm: There's a lot of it that I just haven't learned how it works. I feel like there's a whole culture of Twitch that I don't understand. There's all these different things that people can do with their streams that I haven't learned, but as a very straightforward way of just “I'm putting a thing on the stream and there's people in the chat that I can keep up with and talk to them,” that works great. I run the sound through a physical soundboard so I’ve tried to make as much of it as possible physical and outside of the computer just so I can wrap my head around it a little better, I guess. It's been pretty cool, I guess. Years and years ago I used to livestream drawing. I would have the webcam on my laptop aimed at the paper on some precursor streaming service to Twitch but that sort of thing has been just easy to do for 14 years or something.

James Lee: Yeah, it's like one of those things I feel a lot of artists kind of do, I guess to add some more variety to let's say their social media presence.

Evan Dahm: I haven't done streaming drawing in a while. It’s kind of stressful.

James Lee: Yeah, you got the live audience component, and you have to perform in a way.

Evan Dahm: Even if you're not performing, you're still kind of performing.

Celebrating Rice Boy and Vattu: An Interview with Web Comic Creator Evan Dahm (Part One)

Evan Dahm is an independent artist and longtime webcomic creator. In 2006 he began Rice Boy, a surreal fantasy webcomic and has since self-published several fantasy epics set in the same universe. His body of work also includes published works such as the Island Book series, a high seas adventure, with First Second and The Harrowing of Hell, a retelling of the time between Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, with Iron Circus Comics. In 2010, Dahm began Vattu, a story about a young girl’s conflict with an expanding empire. 12 years and nearly 1,300 pages later, he completed Vattu on September 12, 2022. As a longtime webcomic creator, Dahm has been on the frontlines of the changes in independent webcomic production. From the early days of small, personal websites to the rise and concentration of large-scale social media and aggregator platforms such as Webtoons, Dahm continues to create his own unique work. Even as he adapts, Dahm retains his personal voice in his art. In this interview, Dahm discusses some insights into his approach to storytelling, his experiences with making webcomics, and the current state of and issues in the field with fellow comics artist James Lee. Dahm’s next project, 3rd Voice, begins in December 2022.

 Here’s the audio version of the interview. Passcode: &AYyWw7*

James Lee: I thought to start off maybe we could start at the very beginning with Rice Boy, your first webcomic. Something you mentioned in previous talks and videos you've done is that you mentioned how your start in webcomics had an element of luck involved. What kind of factors do you think made that time when you self-published rice boy the right moment?

Evan Dahm: I can only really determine this in a kind of a loose retrospective way, but the big transition that I’ve lived through in my adulthood, the big transitions in my life, have been the Internet emerging and becoming more and more accessible and then the really strikingly rapid boxing out of everything into corporate social media platforms, the Web 2.0 shift.

In retrospect, it feels like there was this window of, I don't know, probably under two decades when there were enough people on the Internet, and there were enough people aware that they could sort of take charge and just make a place of their own on the Internet, that it was a sustainable thing to self-publish your idiosyncratic little thing in that particular model.

But then, as the Internet has gotten more of a thing that everybody is on, what the Internet is to everybody is just Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or whatever. It's just funny that it doesn't even seem to occur to people that you can have control of any space there, that anything can exist outside of these corporate platforms.

James Lee: It's definitely been interesting to observe.

Evan Dahm: How old are you? Do you mind if I ask?

James Lee: I'm 34 right now.

Evan Dahm: Exact same.

James Lee: I’ve observed the same kind of shift from the hopes and dreams of the early Internet to where we're at now.

Evan Dahm: Yeah.

James Lee: I want to continue that line of questioning soon in a bit so hold that thought. Before we get there, though let me ask you a little bit about your process. You primarily use a brush in your work, which has a great expressive quality to it, and it really reflects the human hand behind the work itself. In your documentary, Making Vattu, you spoke about the improvisatory quality of the brush. Can you talk a little bit more about that, and maybe perhaps how it informs your own values and approach to art?

Evan Dahm: I try to sort of be reasonably pragmatic about it. I'm very aware that it's easy to slip into being a little bit precious or superstitious about technology and stuff. The way that people unfairly valorize work in physical media over digital illustration, I just don't think that's the right way of looking at it. But I do have a strong sort of automatic revulsion towards a lot of technology. It takes me a while to acclimate to it.

I like traditional drawing skills, feeling in touch with tools and aesthetics of drawing that have been in places like commercial illustration for 100 years. I like feeling in touch with that. I like learning skills where I can sort of understand the history of them. And just on the granular level I figure any physical tool is going to just produce more randomness and imperfection in a way that I like. It takes an enormous amount of muscle control to use any kind of brush in a way. It's a very particular type of skill and I don't want to lose it.

While I'm working on a tablet or whatever there's pressure sensitivity, there's a lot of subtlety and range that can be done with those lines, but I haven't really learned how to do that. I can draw competently on a tablet because I can draw but it's dry. With a brush at such an intensely high resolution and degree of muscle control, you can do literally an infinite number of lines. It's important to me to maintain practice in that.

James Lee: At some points it's as if it's a little too liberating and a little bit of constraints can sometimes help define your work.

Evan Dahm: I think so because if you're constrained in some sort of way, then you can more fully understand the huge range of possibility within that constraint, I think.

World Building and Storytelling

James Lee: This might be a good opportunity to talk more about world building and storytelling. So, to start off, you have a wide range of works now, from Order of Tales, The Island Book series, things like The Harrowing of Hell, and the illustration series you did for Moby Dick and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Can you talk a little bit about the motivations for these different kinds of works you've pursued?

Evan Dahm: Yes, do you mind if I turn my camera off because I think my computer gets overloaded.

James Lee: Okay that's fine no worries.

Evan Dahm: Basically, I just latch onto something and get obsessed with it. A lot of those projects, I did concurrent with Vattu which I've been working on since 2010 so a lot of it is trying to judge how much I can do it once. I feel like I've gotten a little better at understanding the sort of work, the sort of interest, that I have in a project that will actually propel me through it in a way that is not too grueling.

There's the money thing, like if a publisher is interested in working with me and I have something that I can make work with them. Then at certain points I'm kind of obliged to go through that but I'll just latch on to some idea and sometimes it'll stick in my head for a couple years until it can materially happen.

The Harrowing of Hell book with Iron Circus was an idea that I had probably two or three years before I actually started working and actually signed the contract on it. It seemed like an interesting way to work through Christian anarchism. And it occurred to me years and years ago that with books that are in the public domain, you can just do whatever you want with them so I had this rolling idea in my head of “Oh, I should think about what old book I like that'll be fun to draw.”

James Lee: I got my copy right here.

Evan Dahm: Oh yeah.

James Lee: That's interesting. The public domain stuff. Those are good points you raised in terms of having the freedom to explore with these things that are in the public domain. With that line of thought, what do you think about Disney's dominance of in this field of copyright?

Evan Dahm: I think Disney is the enemy basically. I'm very interested in old animation, and this is the thing I just learned. Back when full color film printing was being developed there was this window of a few years where it was not technologically possible to do full color film animation, but Disney had the exclusive rights to use that technology for five years or something in the 30s. So, there's this window of time where the only color cartoons coming out in America were from Disney. I don't know, it's just a horrible anti-art thing to do to close off this technology from the whole rest of the world, what was this obviously booming and exciting new medium.

But yeah, they've always been doing that. Their main project is to, in the way that capitalism delineates and commodifies all physical space available to it, the project of I guess any corporation like Disney is going to be to expand and commodify all the intellectual property space. Bleed dry the theoretical fictional universes of Star Wars or whatever and just extend copyrights so that they can maintain control of their stupid little mouse cartoon that nobody who worked on it is even alive.

James Lee: Recently I saw that Winnie the Pooh finally entered public domain. That was a bit of big news at the moment.

Evan Dahm: The book at least. It's the same deal with The Wizard of Oz where derivative works can refer to the book but not to the adaptation because the adaptation is still under copyright.

James Lee: Little nuances in that which can complicate the picture.

Evan Dahm: Pretty cool though. I love the public domain.

James Lee: There's lots of great ideas there and why not explore some of these things in a different way as well.

James Lee: I want to get back to the corporate stuff because I think it'll tie into the current issues and trends but let me ask a little bit more about your approach to world building and storytelling.

You started Rice Boy with improvisation with those first few pages, which had a dreamy quality to them, and by the end of it there was this very big sprawling history of a world in which you set subsequent stories, such as Order of Tales and Vattu. So with that said, how do you manage this tension between planning things out and letting things flow more freely, specifically the big picture stuff and the small steps need to take to get there?

Evan Dahm: I’m trying to think about that lately, because I have approached that in different ways for everything. I can identify in retrospect that that my working solution to that problem was to have a big clear template for the story that I could always refer to, and I could improvise, but it was always in connection to that template. Rice Boy in particular was very, not totally, pretty significantly improv but it's such a clear and straightforward riff or parody on the normal epic quest, the hero's journey thing, that I had that to hold on to as I was meandering around. Order of Tales was planned very, very tightly so that's a different question, I think.

Vattu has ended up having a lot of sort of improv space within it, and it hasn't been modeled on a clear template story. But what has ended up happening is that I've just had a very clear sense of like a few guiding principles for Vattu like the thematic arguments of it, the trajectories of the central characters, and the physical space of the story takes place in. That being like extremely consistent is a helpful thing, I think, to keep it all sort of tied together.

James Lee: Yeah.

Evan Dahm: Go ahead sorry.

James Lee: I was going to mention how, in your documentary you had gone through some of this in terms of how you actually used modeling software to craft the location and use that as a frame of reference, which I thought was a very interesting and detailed approach to world building.

Evan Dahm: Thank you, it was very fun obsessive little project. And the main thing is that it yields something that feels pretty consistent throughout the book, which is I imagine generally pretty difficult to do in something that takes that long to make.

But I am really trying to think about this improvisation versus planning thing lately because I'm reading a lot of manga and comics that are a little more comfortable wearing on their sleeve the fact that they've been originally serialized and sort of improvised. I love that and it feels so true to the nature of how comics are generally made unpublished. There's some disservice being done to the medium I think when we when we impose the standards of a perfectly planned out and self-contained novel on it so I'm trying to think about that in regards to how I'm approaching the next stuff I'm doing.

James Lee: Maybe we can think of the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe interconnected world approach here. I want to get to a point you raised about world building as well in your documentary. Basically, the argument you made was that, at the end of the day, the setting, the world that you craft, all these things must work in service to the story. And building on that, you also note that the characters in these worlds don't have their whole cosmology defined, let alone understood. Could you speak a little more about what informed this approach and maybe challenges with this, especially when you navigate these tensions between improv and structure?

Evan Dahm: I don't mean it to be as dogmatic as it probably sounds in that this is just my approach and I'm prioritizing certain things. It is important to keep in mind that you're not making an objective thing and that a lot of the premises of world building in the secondary world fantasy traditions that I’m into are on the premise that you're observing a story objectively – you're observing a world objectively and being described totally objectively to you. I don't think such a thing is possible in the same way that pure objective journalism is a kind of politically regressive impossible idea, I think.

You're always making some sort of statement, so I think it's important to keep in mind that it can be a productive tool to build in this sense of a consistent world, but you can really get sort of stuck, I think, because the thing will never be detailed or objective seeming enough. And you can go in the direction of nailing down all those little details but for what? I'm doing this stuff because I like stories and I like drawing basically. If the literary tool of an invented setting, which is a tool that I love and I like how it works, if that tool is not conducive to the story, then I'm just going to break it. Why not?

I've been interested in the world building thing and part of why I'm interested in it is because that's been consistently the biggest single thing that people want to talk to me about in my work. It always comes up in relation to my work, I guess, because my stuff is so visually, at least, totally invented-seeming.

I'm interested in it and I'm interested in how it's talked about. I look at a lot of media about how to do it, how to world build, and it just doesn't… This idea that you can objectively build a real believable world, that you can like have a strong feeling of escapism into it, just feels like a dead end to me and it feels ideologically and creatively limiting. Yeah, I got a little abstract there but that's basically what I think.

James Lee: I think it really ties into the corporate approach to world building. You have the Star Wars films and then they make a reference to a planet which is their theme park in one of their cities which you can go to experience another facet of this, which you know goes on and on. Basically, it’s a very ruthlessly cynical way of approaching world building perhaps.

Evan Dahm: Absolutely but it's interesting too. It's fun and interesting to see all the detail worked out or whatever. But I think that's exactly the comparison, I think Star Wars is the best possible example to talk about with that stuff I was thinking about. There's a useful parable for this – you have all these weird random background characters in the first Star Wars movie in 1977 that were mostly reused costumes from other movies, or whatever they had on hand in that cantina scene. But then, after the movie came out and George Lucas was leveraging, trying to do this really unprecedented thing with merchandising and making little action figures every single character, all those characters have to be named because now they're action figures. That's the exact same logic by which every single detail that serves a story begins to seem to demand expansion into further elaborated media product. I haven't watched any of the new Disney stuff, but it seems like filling in all the little gaps or whatever. Maybe the shows are good, but the approach is just so as cynical, as you say yes.

James Lee: Yeah, I don't want to downplay the love and effort that goes into these productions, and also the people who enjoy them and then subsequently are inspired by them. But you can't help but feel a little bit of ambivalence towards them as well.

Evan Dahm: Yeah, and you don't want to be rude to people for liking a thing that's utterly dominant in pop culture, but it is utterly dominant so there's no foul in giving the product shit, I don't think.

James Lee: Yes, we can think of it as some healthy critique.

Evan Dahm: Sure, yes.

James Lee: I think Star Wars is a good example to talk about this next question here. So, in recent times, or actually maybe it's been going on much longer, there seems to be a tendency among audiences to rigidly equate media consumption with political activism and morality. That what you watch on screen will inform their moral compass. And likewise, they feel that these works and the people who make them must reflect righteous view of the world or what have you. Could you give your impressions on this idea that stories can be used as a way to inform or explore real world issues and maybe some of the twists and turns that has taken?

Evan Dahm: Yeah man that's a huge part of the discourse I think that's been a pretty striking increase over my adulthood over the course of my being aware of it and it's coincided with a general increase in political literacy, which in myself and in you know other people of my generation, or whatever, which is good. But it's an interesting problem because I think that culturally – generally – we're better equipped to, as creators and readers, think about what work is saying politically. But we're doing that within a world where we are increasingly politically disempowered lately. I feel like we default towards a really legislative or punitive way of looking at this stuff. So, we can look at and we can pick apart the initially invisible political premises of a certain work. But if our conclusion is to say that this work is bad and if you like anything about it then you're bad that's against the spirit of the critical apparatus that brought us there in the first place, I think.

And it's silly. I don't engage with a lot of it publicly, but it is silly watching all this culture war stuff where people are trying to make supporting this or that media a political act when it's all just Disney stuff. They don't care about you. There is probably some good happening when works of fiction make a liberatory argument or represent people and ways of life that aren't habitually represented. But it just feels like we're just otherwise disempowered so we're fixating on what's happening in pop culture.

James Lee: To be honest, this was my pet theory too. That people feel they lack control in real world politics and situations so these fantasy worlds that they find comfort in become their way of asserting control and also thinking through these issues.

Evan Dahm: Yeah. All this talking around the abortion thing this last day, the ways that the mainstream of the culture has to think about political agency are very, very limited. People will talk about “you have to vote.” And I voted. We voted. Democrats have an enormous amount of power. So, what else? I feel like we don't have a lot of political imagination and we can't even really understand the world, or at least the mainstream of the culture in America can’t really understand what political power is or how to exert pressure or something. I'm part of that. I'm a defeatist about all this stuff too a lot but… I imagine I made that connection a little better.

James Lee: It's complicated to navigate these issues and be working in let's say crafting stories, making fiction, and comics, media, entertainment.

There is an interesting case to get at some of these complexities – the Harry Potter series.

Famously there was youthful activism around the series, the Harry Potter Alliance from a while ago and the premise of this organization was put into action the kind of spirit of the characters in the real world.

Evan Dahm: I'm familiar with this.

James Lee: Yes, so you probably know that they made some headway on some issues like Fair Trade chocolate things like this, other social issues, but as most of us are familiar with the author of the series, J.K. Rowling, has expressed a lot of negative views about certain communities, which has resulted in tensions in terms of how do you draw inspiration from a work made by someone who does not necessarily share the viewpoints or support of the audience. And the organization rebranded a couple years afterwards, kind of to distance themselves. But I think it's a good case to think about how fiction can be used as a vehicle to motivate people but also it is wrapped around in these issues of does it reflect on the author? Can the audience just run with it in their own way?

Evan Dahm: Yeah, that's interesting. I like stories that are by one person. There was part of it that was exciting to me to see Rowling wrote these books herself and they're her thing. I was exactly the age to be into them when they were coming out. It's just wild to see something that is all about one person's project become this huge global media thing, and it wasn't some created-by-committee intellectual property. What are you going to do? She's so just out there and despicable but I don't know how to engage with any of that.

James Lee: She's not making it easy to keep liking the books.

Evan Dahm: Yeah.

James Lee: But people try to separate the two.

Evan Dahm: Since I read those as a kid I've gotten deeper into the sorts of fantasy writing that I feel like those books are a pale imitation of. So there's that too, but even if the books were could be great and she would still be who she is. Yeah, I don't know, what's the question there exactly?

James Lee: I think the original question was about using stories as a way to inform real world issues. Oh, and something else that I've read is that oftentimes people they don't necessarily just consume media in one direction. Sometimes the media itself is a vehicle for them to express certain things which means that what the author is saying matters less than what they want to express through however they critique or consume it.

Evan Dahm: You mean in a fandom sort of sense?

James Lee: Yes, in a fandom sort of sense, where they see something and interpret it or use it for their own purposes.

Evan Dahm: Yeah, that generally seems cool to me. I've never been in that sort of world and I've never really understood the impulse. But generally, I like seeing people take ownership of this stuff that’s so aggressively owned by somebody else.

James Lee: Yeah, I mean I think there's kind of a thread here in terms of also copyright and ownership to in terms of when we think about fan output, like fanfiction or other kind of fan productions in terms of what are the fans free to do with this work. Can they do something more interesting or something more valuable for themselves with it? But the law lays its heavy hand at times and shuts down somebody’s fan production.

Evan Dahm: Yeah and then in some circumstances, the creator is incentivized to shut it down so that they can be shown to be defending their ownership of a thing or something. It has not really come up as a thing for me to think very much about, I guess.

James Lee: Yeah well, I suppose maybe if we can make the Overside extended universe a thing perhaps this will come up.

Evan Dahm: I don't see why they wouldn't be fine and cool with me.

James Lee: Yeah, I guess there are some legal issues, especially with fanfiction if companies choose to pursue them. I think most people just fly under the radar which I think is fine.

James Lee is a graduate of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. He likes comics, art, and popular culture related topics.