Monday, December 15, 2008

Doodle Penance: "wobbly space craft comics"

Oh, right: we have a blog!

Isaac has already explained the idea behind our "Doodle Penance" series. Our latest search term/drawing prompt: "wobbly space craft comics"—which term, Isaac informs me, led an internet seeker to spend a whopping eleven seconds on our site. Perhaps one of these images would have held the seeker for longer:


I like the way Isaac has turned to old-fashioned romance-comics tropes here, though I am a bit dismayed to note that this is our second science-fiction joke involving bad driving by a woman at the wheel (or should that be the helm?). The first such joke, a cheap shot fired obliquely at my beloved spouse's inexperience with manual transmissions, appeared way back in Satisfactory Comics #1, whose heroine's costume and overall anatomy also earned us some dressing-down by readers unhappy with our resort to design conventions of dubious propriety.

What this evidence suggests about my unintentional but unreconstructed sexism is a bit depressing. But I shouldn't hijack Isaac's doodle for my own public second-guessing. Here's my doodle for "wobbly space craft comics":

I had already seen Isaac's doodle when I started mine, hence the predictable "variation on a theme" rather than, say, a four-panel comic strip about wobbly space craft (which thought did occur to me, briefly). Note how I (accidentally) omitted the word "craft" in my title—not the first time I've botched a title that's been handed to me (see my first Mapjam entry, and compare it against the map itself). However, I think the omission is appropriate inasmuch as my design riffs on the logo of the Industrial Workers of the World, who promoted not craft unionism but industrial unionism—in this case, no doubt, that of the aeronautics & space industry. There are a couple more references to the Wobblies, just in case that's what our errant seeker was searching for. Though if it's Wobbly comics that s/he seeks, this would be the place to look.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Synchronicity!

I was watching Star Trek: Generations, where Deana Troi crashes the Enterprise, just the other day!

Isaac said...

I don't think that counts as "women can't drive spaceships," though. When we're talking about Troi, it's more like "Betazoids can't drive spaceships."

Humans all walk like this. But Betazoids, they all walk like this...

Am I right, people?

Or maybe it's just "dumb characters can't drive spaceships."

Mike said...

I never saw ST: Generations, but my lord, I loathed that character when I did see her...

And let the record show that our own Jeanne Photon was not a "dumb character." Or, well, if she was a dumb idea for a character ("space cartoonist"?), at least her character itself was not intended to lack intelligence and sense. (Not in the way of the goons from issue 3, "each dumber than the last.")

Anonymous said...

Um, Deana Troi is half-betazoid, half-human.

And Star Trek: Generations is great. Definitely my favorite Trek movie.

I mean, how could you not love this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZeK1si4kPg