You Know What. Im Going To Follow My Heart So We Can Move On With The Wormread And Just Copy-paste What

worm doodles

>be me, pizza guy in shittiest port town on Earth Bet

>terrible tips and get robbed for pizza so often I have honest to god decoy pizzas

>get called to deliver to this weird old warehouse like three times a week and have to roll the dice on how it's gonna go

>there's this whole Burger King Kid's Club worth of diverse teenagers that live there and I never know who I'm gonna get

>worst kid there is the one that answers the door 90% of the time. I hate this little fucking shit

>black haired boy. Dainty little prince pretty boy type. Always the one who calls the orders in, and always gives some stupid ass fake name like he's fucking Bart Simpson. "I.C. Weiner" and "I.P. Freely." That kind of shit.

>like half the time I think I'm delivering a depression-meal since he's dressed like he just woke up, and I'd feel bad except he makes some smartass remark every time, and since I see him every other goddamn day, it's almost always the same joke. Also tries to get free pizza by saying it's 30 minutes or free, except no one has done that program since like 1993, so he's pulling shit from tv. I don't need a fucking comedy routine from a kid in cookie monster pajama pants. Bad tipper. Whatever cash he has in his pocket.

>he's on the shitlist because, and I don't know how the fuck he does this, but every time the pizza is "late", this fucking kid trips me somehow. Or I drop my phone or the pizza bag or keys. Swear to god this kid has Home Alone tripwires or something.

>and every time it happens. Every fucking time. This little bastard says "have a nice trip."

>would say he's a cape, but every cape I've ever met has had some kind of presence, and I'm not giving that much credit to someone with a four-hair teenage mustache

>hate this smug little fucker and I'd have him blacklisted if this fucking building and its weird teenage polycule didn't make up like 50% of our orders for the neighborhood. 0/10, I hope you die

>be me, Brockton Bay pizza man. Deliver to welding building. Name on order is "Dick Hardly." Little prince opens the door. He has a sidekick. Black girl counterpart. They give me matching shit-eating grins. I hate my fucking job.

An alternative way Gillen has described TPF is “as if your idiot clique of friends had to stay civil or the whole world would end”, and yeah it’s hard to imagine, with ours and Tonya’s front row seat, the civility lasting much longer at all

What I like about Tonya in The Power Fantasy is that she's the journalist viewpoint character, right? The character who's asking questions and poking at the same kinds of things that the audience would be poking at. And over the course of the story she's developing the shell shock that any quote-unquote "normal" person from our world or one similar would have, if they got plunged into the deep end. But the thing is that this isn't some mysterious new paradigm shift she's investigating, she isn't new to this and it isn't new to her, she was doing a piece on one of the leading public figures of the last fifty years when she got caught up in this. What's new to her is that she's spent somewhere around a week in proximity to these six people when they're going through a fairly-eventful-but-still-within-parameters week of their own lives- not quite business as usual, but close- and she's getting a front row seat to how the six most famous people on earth are perpetually six seconds away from fucking up and destroying the whole planet, and how much everyone attendant to this messy friend group needs to constantly bust their asses to prevent that from happening. That's the big reveal of the setting, from her perspective, that's what's inculcating her issue-5 certainty that the world is going to end. It's neat.

They're silly

Blue Delliquanti, the creator of one of my all-time favorite comics, did this post a while back about cartooning technique. The quote I want to highlight is:

"A question I ask is who the “viewer” of a scene is intended to be. Adversary is often framed through Curtis’s visual perspective, but not always. There are certain things that he doesn’t see or can’t recognize, and I was very deliberate about what those moments were." (Where Curtis is one of the characters in another comic they created.)

When I first read that quote I found it intriguing, but I couldn't quite make sense of what they meant by it. I got the sense it meant more than just "Is the panel showing what any one character literally sees?" but I couldn't reason through what someone's visual perspective really was.

Now, after spending about a zillion years staring at certain pages of The Power Fantasy, I think I get it. Let's talk about what Tonya sees in this page, versus what she experiences, and how the visual storytelling zig-zags between those two things.

There's two interesting things- okay, there's a bunch of interesting things going on in this page, but let's talk about the shift between panels 1 and 2, and between panels 3 and 4. They're both communicating what Tonya experiences, but not by showing what she sees- in fact, showing the world through her eyes (literally) would probably do a much worse job of putting you in her shoes (metaphorically.)

Panels 1 and 2

While Tonya is being yanked through the air by Heavy's gravity powers, the colors go from "realistic" (full-spectrum) to a limited palette that turns her skin blue. This isn't an indication that gravity powers turn things blue- they never do that any other time, and also it doesn't make sense for gravity to have a color. Heavy's powers aren't blue, Tonya's feelings are blue- it looks weird and unnatural to have blue skin, and it feels weird and unnatural to be sent flying. Also- I think the implication is that in panel 1 of this page, she's already arrived, because the only movement we see is her opening her eyes. She continues to feel like the world has gone all wrong, right up until she opens her eyes and sees that she's arrived.

Panels 3 and 4

Panel 3 is the one panel on this page that could plausibly be what Tonya actually sees- page 4 definitely isn't. But they both communicate how she interprets Heavy in that moment, even if she can't literally see his face from their positions in panel 4. He goes from a friendly, somewhat romanticized figure in panel 3 to sketchy and roguish in panel 4. Heavy's suddenly in shadow (even though he's facing a light source, if you really think about it!) because he's acting shady. (A lot of visual effects overlap with verbal idioms, which is something I could talk about for about a million years if given the change, but I'm trying to stay on topic.)

...so this entire page is fairly strongly from Tonya's perspective, even if only one panel of it is through her eyes. I plan to keep digging into this topic, because I don't think that's always the case- I think there's scenes/pages that switch back and forth between characters, that don't align the reader with any one character, and so on. Updates forthcoming as I learn more.

The following tinkers are all given 2 months to create a basketball team of 5-9 players. These teams have to be entirely made of their creations.

The only limitations are everything has to be bipedal and have a vaguely humanoid shape, cannot have more than 8 limbs (tails count), and cannot be above 7 foot tall.

They then do a tournament. Assume that those that can't explicitly create drones (i.e mannequin) can turn existing stuff into drones. So mannequin could create a drone version of his current weird body as a 'player'.

Directly attacking other players is not allowed but indirectly is. Any damage is repaired between matches. Distorting the field by doing things such as creating acid pools is allowed, so long as the hoop itself is still accessible. Blocking the hoop in any way is not permitted. The ball must be accessible at all times - no teleporting it to alternate dimensions. No teleporting in general, and ball modification is not permitted. Flight or wall climbing is not permitted.

Anything else goes.

These images from J. Michael Straczynski's Rising Stars gestures in the same direction I was gesturing with that Aquaman post- there's a really interesting archetype in superpower fiction consisting of characters who "Step Outside" in the way described here. Superhumans who remove themselves from society- not in a "kneel before me" way, but simply out of recognizing that participating in society in a conventional manner offers them significantly less than it does an average person (though not nothing- insert that MP100 monologue about "can you make a soda can.") Libertarians who fuck off to the moon and carve a Gadsen snake visible from earth, that kind of guy.

Invincible featured the title character gradually sliding into something adjacent to this as he realized that he was just sort of going through the motions by attending college and so on, when his girlfriend can wish a house into existence and the Cecil throws money at him to do stuff he'd do for free. The entire main cast of The Power Fantasy is doing something like this- you're most likely in no danger if you see one of the Superpowers walking down the street but most of them probably haven't paid for a meal in years (unless they insist on paying, which wraps back around to having the same dynamic as not paying.) Superman yo-yos on the topic of how accountable he makes himself to human governments, but I strongly doubt he got a permit for that fuckoff-huge fortress in the arctic. And so on. Obviously not all superhumans can get away with this- Spider-Man is held back from becoming a full-time bank robber by way more than just his conscience. But whether they could get away with this is a great characterization question to ask of any superhuman, and it's a door you can't really close once it's open- any decision they do make from that point forward will be implicitly contrasted against their everpresent option to just Hit Da Bricks.

Okay, so there's an entire a chasm between Farcille and Wolfspider. Because yes, it makes sense to see Marcille as having a crush on Falin, and that reading of her character could even be more enjoyable than assuming otherwise. Its a coherent ship and an enjoyable one. But with Worm, not reading Taylor and Rachel as crushing on each other actively detracts from the story's comprehensibility.

Ward, but it's Dot fighting Amy's Nine Evil Exes.

I have been compiling promotional/cover images and I thought maybe other people would find it useful too, so. Will update it continually.