I finally got the wonky Internet at my apartment fixed about a month ago. It was down for a few months not because of a cable modem that went bad like I assumed, but because of a splitter that went bad.
On second thought, maybe I shouldn't have had the Internet fixed. When I prevent myself from using the Internet for a day or two, I'm able to finish drawing much of my webcomic. When I don't prevent myself from using the Internet, I get stuck there for hours (either skimming through other people's tweets, reading
A.V. Club recaps of recent shows I watched or ogling MovieHotties.com photo galleries), and then I can't get any webcomic work done.
That inability to pry myself from the Internet has happened a lot while I was trying to finish the artwork for this
Palace arc, which has been difficult to draw. I started pencilling this damn arc in late June and didn't finish until last week. I'd often get frustrated because of illustrator's block, so I'd go do something else--like log on to the Web--and that's how I'd end up stuck there.
The illustrator's block would arise from having to draw characters in situations or poses I never drew before, like a four-panel sequence in which a female character beats up a guy who's spitting game at her (or "making a pass at her," for those of you who think Urban Dictionary is a book about that country singer Nicole Kidman's married to). As preparation for that sequence, I repeatedly watched clips of Sandra Oh whupping Thomas Haden Church's ass with her motorcycle helmet in
Sideways and Carol Kane swinging a toaster at Bill Murray's face in
Scrooged. I even studied drawings of the Cassandra Cain version of Batgirl beating up adversaries. The skirmish, which takes place behind two characters who aren't paying attention to what's ensuing behind them, is a bit of a homage to those great
NewsRadio slapstick sequences in which the WNYX staffers will be going about their business, unaware that in the background, Matthew is getting his genitals caught in a paper shredder or something.
Like Stuff It, White People is also the first
Palace arc in which I experimented with a process that allowed me to do much less inking. For previous
Palace arcs, I would place tracing pad sheets over my pencil sketches and redraw them with a Micron pen so that I wouldn't have to do so much digital cleaning with the ink tracings after I scanned them. But I got tired of my scanner making the black Micron ink look washed out on the scans of the ink tracings--plus
inking is such a time-consuming process--so I decided to photocopy the pencil sketches this time and scan those photocopies, even though digitally erasing the dirt and pencil residue from those scans does take an eternity. But I like how the copy machine makes the pencil lines look
101 Dalmatians-esque (the
Dalmatians animators decided to break from Disney studio tradition by Xeroxing their pencil drawings instead of hand-inking them, which resulted in a distinctive and gritty look to the character design of
Dalmatians and subsequent '60s Disney animated features that utilized Xerox).
This arc has a title I don't think anybody understood when they first saw it. They must have thought, "Is this webcomic about Borat or something?," so now I'll take the time to explain the title, which is not a Borat-ism.
Like Stuff It, White People is both a play on the blog name Stuff White People Like and a reference to a female
Palace character's tendency to say "like" all the time. To make the meaning of the title clearer to those readers who probably still won't understand it, I had to add a line where that same female character says to a pervy classmate, "Like stuff it, okay?"
Stuff White People Like's tagline is "This blog is devoted to stuff that white people like." This webcomic is devoted to ruining stuff that white people like.
I first started writing the 10-part
Like Stuff It, White People in summer 2009 because I wanted a
Palace arc to address the controversy surrounding movie adaptations of cartoon or video game properties that cast white actors as heroes of color.
Like Stuff It, White People has undergone countless tweaks since I donated a published early draft of its script in February to
the ImaginAsian art exhibit in Lafayette, Indiana (the same exhibit that made a typo online and retyped the arc title without the comma--I don't think they were aware the title is a command, like "Sit on it, Potsie!" or
"Stay out of it, Nick Lachey!"). At first, the arc lacked some punch in its resolution, so I added some business involving a female troublemaker character to provide the punch that was missing from it. The arc's fictional movie
Avarice: The Best Wallwalker--The Evolution of Time went from being an
Avatar: The Last Airbender analog to a mash-up of
Airbender and two other similarly whitewashed attempts at starting big-screen franchises,
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and
Dragonball: Evolution. (Why do these franchise starters often have such clunky-sounding titles?)
It might look like the ineptly handled
Avarice protest in
Like Stuff It, White People is a mockery of Racebending.com's boycott of the
Airbender film, but it's not. I agree with that site that the whitewashing needs to stop, and Asian Pacific Americans have been underrepresented on screen for far too long (I even autographed one of the site's T-shirts). However, I don't think the
Airbender franchise has been worth the protesters' time and energy because like
Motel director Michael Kang once said about the Airbender TV series, "It's an ancient oriental mystical thumb prison that stinks like stinky tofu."
The protest in
Like Stuff It, White People is more of a reference to an older Filipino group's somewhat embarrassing protest against
Desperate Housewives at a Disney Store (WTF?) in San Francisco. Those Filipino viewers were upset over an episode of the Disney-owned show in which the ditzy Teri Hatcher character insulted Filipino medical schools. A klutzy and seemingly brain-damaged upper-middle-class white lady who once locked herself naked out of her house is suddenly supposed to show smarts about race? You're not exactly right in the head if you expect soap opera characters to function as role models for society. Soap opera characters are only useful if the kind of role model you're looking for is the one who lies, cheats, steals, kills or says racist things. The protest to defend the honor of Filipino medical institutions would have made more sense if it were a respected and famous non-Filipino doctor who uttered the insult, not a person who doesn't exist and is the resident retard on her show.
There's a moment in
Like Stuff It, White People where a character says more Asian Americans should "go make their own fucking movies." Fortunately, more of them have been starting to--on the Web. The most talked-about example of this is Wong Fu Productions. For Asian American filmmakers, DIY media is the silver lining in this cloud of shit that's included having to put up with whitewashed movie versions of material that could have been used to showcase Asian American actors.
We Asian Americans are having the last laugh.
Airbender opened to negative reviews, and it's unlikely this overproduced ersatz kung fu movie will make back its colossal budget.
Dragonball (which, like
Airbender, was directed by an Asian guy!) and
Prince of Persia both tanked. No one will remember either of those wannabe blockbusters 10 years from now, while cult favorites like the first
Harold & Kumar and
Better Luck Tomorrow--smaller-scale films that made far greater use of Asian American actors and have nothing to do with martial arts or similar material that doesn't speak to me as an Asian American--will still be on people's minds. The latter category is what we should be fighting for and bringing to the big screen more often, not stinky tofu like
A:TLA.
Anyway, I'm glad I'm finally done with this arc that's taken me a year to write and draw. It will kick off tomorrow and Friday here on this blog with a Chapter 0 and a Chapter 0.5 that will briefly introduce the characters before I post Chapter 1 on Monday.
