The Buddhist monk who became a stripper and other spicy stories

An edition about analogic practices and using self-awareness in fiction

HELLO MY FRIENDS, AND WELCOME TO A NEW EDITION OF MY NEWSLETTER!

I want to thank you for the messages and comments on my previous newsletter. I didn't want to sound too pessimistic but I think that we live in a moment where due to social media, people who are starting out may feel that they are not succeeding fast enough or may fall apart due to rejection. So it’s important to de-romanticize some subjects. This profession is something very nice but it also has its ungrateful parts. Fortunately I can say that I’m one of the privileged ones, but that doesn’t mean that everybody hasn’t ups and downs.

Anyway, let's start now with the usual newsletter with recommendations and even some thoughts.

GALAXY OF MADNESS

Although the release of two of my more personal projects have been delayed, my five-issue run in the Galaxy of Madness series, created by Magdalene Vissaggio and my good friend Michael Avon Oeming is being published now. Mike drew the first five issues, with colors by Taki Soma, and I drew the rest of the series, including colors.

It was a really fun job because the series has a very retro-SciFi vibe, and I'm a devotee of movies like Forbidden Planet or The day the Earth stood still, so if your are a fan too, you’ll really love the series. I had the chance to use a more colorful pop style instead of the usual grim-and-gritty high-contrast I keep for noir stories, and it was kind of a relief to go nuts and draw these crazy aliens and planets and spaceships. Mags is also a wonderful writer of characters and gave each member of the crew a really complex personality.

And I took a new promo photo with some of the (cool) shit I have in the studio.

Some interesting links about the series:
https://madcavestudios.com/series/galaxy-of-madness/
https://popculthq-comics.com/the-crew-of-the-verisimilitude-is-back-in-galaxy-of-madness-6/
https://www.lunardistribution.com/home/search?term=galaxy+of+madness

TURNING ANALOG (TEMPORALLY)

I'm drawing at times a new short story to publish on my Polar webcomic page, where the first three volumes of Polar and the Against Hope OGN began.
Why now? The truth is that since 2019, when I started working in digital, I hadn’t made a comic in “analog” again. I have drawn the Inktober editions and obviously I must do the private commissions with brushes and paper, but in the case of comic pages I had definitely switched to digital inking. As it’s cleaner and faster, I must admit it was a very convenient tool that makes things easier. But recently I felt I had lost something.
So looking to “reconnect” with that part of my process I decided to make this story on paper, just for fun or as an exercise. Going back to the old school.
And like this is something done for fun I can't help but feel the guilt of the freelancer, so I will probably sell the original pages in my store (big disadvantage of digital) to fund this whim.

I decided to do a crazy thing and put together two characters from different books, both created by me: Christy White from the Polar novels and Hope Walker from Against Hope. My own crossover!
The deadly couple will face a group of human traffickers to rescue a teenage girl. I only had this storyline, and from there I’m improvising a silent story like in the good old days of the first version of Polar.
I don't know how many pages I will do yet, probably around 8, and I will link them to you as soon as I finish them.

WHY I HATE SCREAM

(Or why I usually dislike self-awareness in fiction.)

(Or maybe how self-awareness has been used wrongly lately.)

The other day I saw a 2003 movie by my beloved Johnnie To, director of Hong Kong noir classics like Election, Exiled or The Mission, titled Running on Karma. The synopsis must be seen to be believed, because it’s the story of a Buddhist monk who becomes a bodybuilder and stripper due to a traumatic experience in which he learns the ability to see the karma of people, and he knows how they will die depending on the bad deeds they did in their previous life.
Just as I tell it.
I was watching it and although it’s a strange movie and the story completely derails in its third act, I enjoyed it immensely for the simple reason that I literally didn't know what was going to happen the next minute. It went on like that for 90 minutes.

It’s not a comedy. It begins with some silly jokes but it ends up being a very dramatic and transcendent film about how acts of violence have repercussions on others, using a delirious premise to challenge us to get into it.

Which leads us to Scream.

I hate Scream for several reasons. One of them is that it made trendy an innocuous, bland, commercial horror with hardly a trace of blood. But the main reason is how it used the tool of self-awareness to sell us the same shit over and over again.
“Hey, we know this genre has these shitty rules, let’s repeat them again.”
“Hey, we know sequels stink, but let’s do one.”
I don’t hate self-awareness. Nor do I hate metalinguistic stories, and a good example is the brilliant The Cabin in the Woods, which works as both a horror story and a metaphor for the genre at the same time.
But making something obvious does not mask lazy writing, in the same way that Peter Parker using the Alien movie's plan (and quoting the reference) to defeat a villain in Avengers: Infinity war does not make the plagiarism any less flagrant.

Ok, Randy, we all know how clever you are

And speaking of Marvel, I think it's precisely self-awareness that makes their movies not as much fun as they pretend to be. It's a common place that their characters often stop to point out the absurdity of the situations. You know, “This raccoon with a gun is talking to me?” Marvel tries to be faithful to the colorful world of comic-books but I think they betray them because they feel they are doing something ridiculous and want to warn us every five minutes.
The stylized art of comics works so well with superheroes that they don't need to justify themselves. It's when comics started to look like movies that creators started thinking “Hey, seen this way it looks stupid.”
For this reason and without a doubt my favorite Marvel movie is Captain America: The Winter Soldier, because it's a great spy thriller with people in disguise throwing shields at each other and no character has a problem with it.

Honestly, I think Snyder's DC movies, with that grim and ridiculous attitude and the rest of his innumerable flaws seem a little more honest to me because Snyder believes in them in his particular, childish way. Maybe they can be considered idiotic movies for the most part, but at least they are committed to that vision.

That's why movies like Running on Karma rock, or another example you surely have seen: Face/off. This is such an amazing film because they take a completely stupid premise and go forward with it without any jokes about its silliness. Completely committed, all the way to the end, without worrying about the plausibility of the face-swapping process. And it works because of the commitment from the director, writers and actors. Because the fun part of creating a story is making you believe in a world where this happens.

No shame, no regret, even no concern about making a fool of yourself.
Create, after all.

And with this always necessary message of “don't apologize for doing what you love”, I end this edition.

See you soon!
Victor

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