The Lives Of Others
Two days off my feet have done wonders for healing the tear in my plantar fasciitis. Not that the issue has disappeared, but it has certainly made sleeping a lot easier on me. Plus several short days at work on my feet allow enough for short bursts of exercise, which I'm hoping is enough to matter in terms of weight loss. I seem to be doing okay so far now that I'm back on Weight Watchers again. Not as fast as it happened last time, but fifteen pounds isn't anything to sneeze at, to be sure. Go, me.
That panel, by the way, is from Bagge's brand new graphic novel Other Lives, the story of four inter-connecting characters whose real lives are often blurred with their virtual lives, whether on the internet, or of their own making. Vadar is a self-loathing journalist hiding secrets about his past from his wedding-obsessed girlfriend Ivy, who is exploring her wild side on a virtual reality online computer world with Vadar's friend Woodrow, an internet gambling addict living out of his car and in complete denial about his divorce. And then there's Javy, a slovenly reclusive with social issues that might possibly have once worked for homeland security. Bagge's story touches on modern relationships, with others as well as ourselves, where living other lives is as simple as changing our names to hide our ethnicity, to creating entire personalities in the alternate reality of the internet to the point where the two blend so seamlessly together it becomes increasingly difficult to draw the line between the two. I find it oddly ironic that the panel above shows Vadar searching Woodrow's Myspace photo album for a photo of the time the two of them first met Javy playing Dungeons & Dragons at Altanta's annual DragonCon back in 1992. To many people, including my own parents, D&D was fraught with dangerous elements, encouraging kids to create alternate identities, live alternate lives, and blur the lines between reality and fantasy that might have disastrous consequences (1992 was also the year of the locally famous Shawn Novak murders, a disturbed D&D obsessed teenager who slaughtered two small children). Other Lives picks up nearly twenty years later, where the ease of leaving our mundane or unsavory real lives is far easier and more accessible than the roll of a 12-sided dice, and a majority of us hardly seem to blink an eye about it at all these days. Bagge's story captures both the bleeding of multi-crossing falsified lives, not knowing what is real and what is fabricated, and most disturbingly, how the characters appear to take it all in stride, as if this is how life is now.... and how questioning what is and what is not is hardly relevant when we live in a world where both can exist simultaneously.
And now on to something that I always, always love...
Peter Bagge's trademark hipster canvas bedroom/living rooms. Knowing how much Bagge despises hipster culture, it still tickles me how much he both ridicules as well as pays homage to the tropes we instantly recognize, from the kitsch of Margaret Keane and the Louvin Brother's Satan Is Real album cover, to the Coop devil logo and the classic Johnny Cash photo by the recently deceased Jim Marshall. Oversized panels such as these make me smile, because as prevalent as they seem to be in Bagge's work I can't help but suspect he more than secretly enjoys drawing them. Possible because he knows hipster schlubs like myself secretly get off on examining them, identifying almost every semi-obscure reference and taking comfort in their familiarity (and yes, I own that Louvin Brother album too).
Peter Bagge's trademark hipster canvas bedroom/living rooms. Knowing how much Bagge despises hipster culture, it still tickles me how much he both ridicules as well as pays homage to the tropes we instantly recognize, from the kitsch of Margaret Keane and the Louvin Brother's Satan Is Real album cover, to the Coop devil logo and the classic Johnny Cash photo by the recently deceased Jim Marshall. Oversized panels such as these make me smile, because as prevalent as they seem to be in Bagge's work I can't help but suspect he more than secretly enjoys drawing them. Possible because he knows hipster schlubs like myself secretly get off on examining them, identifying almost every semi-obscure reference and taking comfort in their familiarity (and yes, I own that Louvin Brother album too).
That panel, by the way, is from Bagge's brand new graphic novel Other Lives, the story of four inter-connecting characters whose real lives are often blurred with their virtual lives, whether on the internet, or of their own making. Vadar is a self-loathing journalist hiding secrets about his past from his wedding-obsessed girlfriend Ivy, who is exploring her wild side on a virtual reality online computer world with Vadar's friend Woodrow, an internet gambling addict living out of his car and in complete denial about his divorce. And then there's Javy, a slovenly reclusive with social issues that might possibly have once worked for homeland security. Bagge's story touches on modern relationships, with others as well as ourselves, where living other lives is as simple as changing our names to hide our ethnicity, to creating entire personalities in the alternate reality of the internet to the point where the two blend so seamlessly together it becomes increasingly difficult to draw the line between the two. I find it oddly ironic that the panel above shows Vadar searching Woodrow's Myspace photo album for a photo of the time the two of them first met Javy playing Dungeons & Dragons at Altanta's annual DragonCon back in 1992. To many people, including my own parents, D&D was fraught with dangerous elements, encouraging kids to create alternate identities, live alternate lives, and blur the lines between reality and fantasy that might have disastrous consequences (1992 was also the year of the locally famous Shawn Novak murders, a disturbed D&D obsessed teenager who slaughtered two small children). Other Lives picks up nearly twenty years later, where the ease of leaving our mundane or unsavory real lives is far easier and more accessible than the roll of a 12-sided dice, and a majority of us hardly seem to blink an eye about it at all these days. Bagge's story captures both the bleeding of multi-crossing falsified lives, not knowing what is real and what is fabricated, and most disturbingly, how the characters appear to take it all in stride, as if this is how life is now.... and how questioning what is and what is not is hardly relevant when we live in a world where both can exist simultaneously.
posted by Melissa at 3:47 PM
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