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Positions - 05.21.01
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Fetal Positions
One of the young ladies from the Fetus-X fan club complained to me that ever since joining the club, she was getting IM'd by all sorts of, shall we say, rather forward young gentleman. Well, I suppose that's not entirely true; many of them were apparently far from young, most far from gentlemanly. Now first I was going to come down hard on the male membership of the Fetus-X fan club. Look, if a woman can't feel safe on the hallowed ground that is the Fetus-X Fan Club, then where can she feel safe? And just because a woman has the words "kinky," "bondage" and/or "69" in her screen name doesn't mean she necessarily wants to get into a kinky bondage 69 with you. Sort of like in the off-line world (remember that place?) where just because a girl wears a skirt that shows off her ass doesn't necesarily mean you are the person she's showing her ass off for. But then I thought maybe I was jumping into action a bit too quickly (never done that before, have I?). Who am I to be stifling the romantic interests of young lovers? The Fetus-X Fan Club is after all the social club of the world's most eligible true-love seeking bachelors and bachelorettes. But then I stumbled upon the heinous truth. The harrassing guys aren't even members of the fan club! Now what is it about 42 year old married men that think 16 year-old girls from other countries who are down with Fetus-X are going to get excited about their poorly written e-mailed booty calls? If you are a 42 year-old man who trolls comic strip fan clubs for under-age girls, feel free to e-mail me an explanation of your warped train of thought at dudes@fetusx.com. Then feel free to stop by my house so I can put my boot between your lumbar and thoracic vertebrae. And if you're a young female fan, getting the harrassing IM's and e-mails, feel free to send them on to me so I can post them here and we can all have a hearty laugh at the intense jocularity that is their pathetic ptyalistic existence. Oh, what fun. And speaking of fun, check out this fun letter that ran in our favorite mainstream conservative midwestern farm college newspaper, The State News, reprinted here with absolutely no permission due to my complete lack of respect for the law: SN reviews are living in the past Do you people know what day it is? Sure, you deceptively print the correct date on the top of the front page, but the rest of your paper feels like a time warp. On Wednesday, The State News printed a review of the film "Memento" ("'Memento' gains box office popularity," SN 5/30). "Memento"? That movie's been out for more than two months! Whatever happened to newspapers previewing movies so readers could find out about movies before they see them? Am I supposed to find reviews of movies I saw a month ago useful? Then I pick up what I thought was Friday's newspaper, only to find a review of a U2 concert. When did U2 put out its first album? In 1980? More than two decades ago? Sorry if I expect something a little more edgy from college music critics, but there are probably 100 struggling musicians in the Lansing area creating edgy, current music, not charging people $130 to hear it, and youčre covering those aging guitar geezers who hit their prime before we were born! You'll probably start printing that Fetus-X comic again next year, because it seemed to be all the rage last year. Maybe you should change your name to "The State Old." Really, really old.
Brandon Parker Not only does Mr. Parker do an admirable job of ripping the paper a new ass for not supporting local artists (we wouldn't know anything about that, now would we?) but he also manages to drop the Fetus-X name, describing our presence in The State News as "all the rage last year." Apparently, Fetus-X was so exciting to State News readers last year that they are still writing about it this year. Amazing. Here's a little trick you can try at home. Pick up your local newspaper, and go through every single page, every single advertisement, comic strip, pie chart, crossword puzzle, personal ad, photo, story, retraction and correction. Now, out of every single one of those ink-stains on newsprint, how many of them are so important that they would make you pick up a pencil or sit down at your keyboard, compose your thoughts and write a letter to the editor -- not today, not tomorrow -- but a whole fucking year from now. I'd guess not many, my friend. Because your newspaper doesn't carry Fetus-X. Until of course, you write them that letter to the editor ... Telling them how much you want a Fetus in your morning paper ... OK, mailbag: hi i'm a first time caller, i've never done this sort of thing before. first of all let me just say thank you. your comic has touched me in the deepest part of my soul, your strip speaks to me like no other form of literature ever has. in fact i learned to read for the first time just so i could read your comic. after stumbling across one of your comics in the funny pages of the state news, the imagery really hit home and i had to know what the words said. until that moment i was content just looking at the pictures, but since i felt that i could personally relate to the visual imagery in your cartoon, (as i have a vast coollection of fetus' in jar form) but the point is that i can read now and it's thanks to your creative collaboration, and fetus-x. S. I'm speechless. Eric, I just wanted to let you know that one of the recent Fetus strips was excellent. I am referring to the one with the Pepsi challenge, that contrasted the Pepsi vs. Coke, Ford vs. GM, etc. Well done, my man. Keep up the social comment. M. Glad you dig it. Our new larger format is allowing us to articulate a bit more complex thoughts than our previous small, narrow horizontal shape. In case no one else ever realized this, the standard comic strip format was invented to cram as many comics on a newspaper page as possible. Ever notice how strips just happen to all be coincidentally half the width of a newspaper page? That was decided by newspaper businessmen to help make more money, not by artists to help make better art. In other words, Fetus-X new size = middle finger to comics industry. I very much enjoyed the "My God vs. your God" strip. Not only for the humour but also due to the whole "makes you think" thing. That kind of thing I like. Are there going to be more like it? S. There will continue be much more to think about in Fetus-X in the months to come. Besides continuuing with some of the explorations of our recent past -- from very long horizontals (A Taste of Glass), to animation (From Out of the Darkness), to the big rectangles (My God vs. your God), to silent images (Milk), to interactivity (Cahiers du Cinema du Fetus) -- we'll be hitting you with some incredibly densely-layered, longer-form stories soon (we're working on them right now). But I'd invite you to take a second (or third) look at our older strips. Even when we were charging through three panels everyday, we were putting a bit more into our strips than most people realized. I believe the reason most people didn't know how to read our comics has a lot to do with the format we were using. People are so accustomed to the shallowness of "mainstream" newspaper comics that they were unprepared to give ours a serious reading. I don't know how many times I had some editor tell me "I didn't get the joke," as if it was my fault that he was so narrow minded that he thought I always had to be joking. Anyway, now that we are breaking the supposed boundaries with the form of our comics, maybe more people will realize how we've been breaking their content boundaries all along. Here's a message left in The Fetus-X Fan Club: Alicia drinks the Fetus off the milk carton: http://www.fetusx.com/images/fx052501.jpg then a feew weeks later the boy whose disappearance led to putting kids faces on milk cartons is declared dead: http://www.cnn.com/2001/LAW/06/19/missing.boy/index.html Coincidence? So weird! M. Yeah, that's weird, but, yeah, that's us. Today's letters were brough to you by the letters S&M. Got Words? Send 'em to dudes@fetusx.com. Keep your fetus cool,
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