COMPULSIVE LOVE DISORDER

I've been Scanned Daily.

Scans Daily is an ongoing Live Journal community that scans samples of comics and posts them for people to peruse. Yesterday, they featured a bunch of pages from 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, which I discovered via Dirk Deppey's Journalista.

I admit, my first reaction was to be flattered that we had been picked. I've read several things posted to the Scans community before, so the ongoing copyright-vs.-fair-use debate aside, I'm not going to hypocritically climb up on that high horse and complain. (Though, a copyright notice on these things wouldn't hurt, and actually would help defend the ownership on our behalf.)

What does bug me is the choice of pages, which reveals pretty much the entire emotional arc, and the fundamental dismantling of the structure of the story so that pages from Reason 9 come after Reason 11, imposing a chronology and solving the puzzle. It's like that easter egg on the Memento DVD that reverses everything and puts the movie in order. Why would you even want that?!?!

Some of the replies in the comments section typically annoy and amuse, what with the internet being the internet. We expect so much perfection from our fictional characters--is it because we can't achieve it in ourselves? How come people so rarely see the virtue of Evan owning up to his mistake and trying to make it right? And is Gwen so easy to forgive because she's pretty? (Blah blah blah, broken record...)

Oh, and I was surprised to discover my one-pager with Chynna from one of the 9/11 books is on there as an example of wordless narrative.

In other news regarding 12 Reasons, the book is currently out of print in the United States. Oni has zero copies, and Joëlle and I each have only one each of the first print. Amazon only has one copy, and it goes for $25! The original plan at Oni was to reprint the book when we printed You Have Killed Me, but maybe that should have been reassessed when that comic got bumped from Fall to Spring. My guess is people discovering Joëlle for the first time via Token caused a renewed interest in our book, and so they got gobbled up.

Current Soundtrack: Erasure, Storm Chaser EP


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All text (c) 2009 Jamie S. Rich