Here we are at the last page of Culture Clash. Tomorrow begins — ta da! — the program book for The Desert Peach musical!
I realized where I got the name of the 469th; while at Fort Lewis, Dan was attached to the 369th Construction Engineer Battalion. Or 364th, or something; he’s trying to remember back over 30 years.
It’s almost Hallowe’en. Nobody will tell me the ghost stories I know they have up here, so I may have to write my own ghost experiences, such as they are.
Once a writer gets on the villain’s side — or the villain is redeemed — it’s like having a pet dragon.
“I got a dragon and I’m not afraid to use it!”
It’s the real reason girls like horses: “Go ahead, tease me, make fun of me, and I’ll have my big friend here walk all over you.” Power, not sex. Or a different kind of power, anyway.
More with a writer letting the former villain ad-lib all over the scene.
This little crap-head has so fucked up; Winzig is nobody to mess with. Just because he can be a political clown doesn’t mean he has a scrap of fear in him, or that he isn’t a perfectly able soldier. Or that he’s stupid. He’s definitely not stupid, or gullible. As the series goes on, he’ll display his most dangerous quality — his utter and absolute and truly fearsome honesty.
Or as much honesty as a human being can manage to hang on to over the years.
Write what you know: this is the reaction I got when I tried to stop someone from hurting the people around me.
Yeah, like I really want grist for more scenes like this one. I was trying to express through the Peach how I was feeling: “Will this please stop? Can you just go away? If you have to lie to me I wish you would just disappear.”
There’s no use lying or having secrets — it’s all going to come out anyway.
This character is based on somebody a long time ago who was using the people around me to threaten each other — which was particularly cruel because some of the people who tend to gravitate toward me are fragile and damaged and looking for help (and if you don’t think I run when I see them coming now, you haven’t seen the Olympics). I don’t understand what was going on there, unless that person was trying to get my attention of something. Weird. Anyway, Maultier here is another part of the reality writers use. Never insult a cartoonist. Especially one on the lookout for all the greasy little traits of human nature, because she, in her own twisted way, thinks they’re funny.
More than any of my other books, this one really does look like the woodcuts so many of my readers and reviewers have compared it to.
I’m trying to remember what I used to draw it. It looks like some kind of nib, I think. Or was it a medium Rotring.® Whadaya think?
Somebody writing a thesis (I’ve put a link on these pages somewhere, before this one, I think), dragged arguments in by the short hairs to prove that Moore, Spiegelman and me were …. what? — on different sides of the “Good German” or “Is the holocaust modern?” question.
Yeah, THAT’s what this page is about.
All I can figure my books are about is how poor schlubs manage to survive when the world goes mad. Kind of a blueprint for staying alive if there’s any chance when people get violent as well as stupid — or at least more so than usual.
The only argument I have with Spiegelman is that Germans are HORSES, not cats. I know, when the horses burn down the stable and stampede, from the mouse’s point of view that must look like feline hunting. You’ve probably all discovered, by now, how much respect I’ve got for horses, regardless of how much I love them.
Some of my Jewish readers say they appreciate what I’m writing in that, if you’re not the whole point of the exercise, you can stop blaming yourself — which is exactly what a victim does if they can’t see any reason for their persecution. This running around teaching Jewish kids the Germans just up and killed all the Jews with no examination of how this shit REALLY happens, does no good for the kids — or so they’ve told me.
I’m just a writer, remember, You can’t tell me ANYTHING without me blabbing it out somewhere.
I think the Taureg slave culture is one of those in which slave = poor relative, at least to treatment and status, if not to bloodline or tribe. Kind of a patriarchal caste method.
I didn’t follow up this girl’s history because I don’t know it. Like so many people in a war, she just disappeared from Winzig’s life, when what was left of the unit was scraped together and sent back to Europe, before the Afrika Korps was captured.
Sometimes when nice people try to be bad, this is as far as they can go. Winzig talks a good Nasty, but he don’t walk the Nasty (okay, those of you who love his hips can argue, but we’re not talking about his bones and meat).
I wonder if Dobermann ever got married.
The Peach is a nice drunk. Better than being the other kind.
We all know somebody like Maultier.
Winzig isn’t being noble here. He’s just trying to stay out of this mess, for once. He’s usually in the Maultier role, but even he has more sense than to mix up this stew.
This story just got more and more fun to draw and write as I went along.
Among some cultures — the Japanese and German among them — it’s perfectly all right to get happily drunk in public. None of these people are booze-hounds; they’re just Germans enjoying themselves.
