Thanks for reading.

4/6/06

Recording the creative process The one with the sound effect upside prompted a reader to comment on the message board that Guenevere had struck Arthur twice in a week. My initial reaction was to resolve to back off. She's supposed to be a hero(ine), isn't she? Can't have her beating her spouse. But after a coupla days' thought, I posted this over there, which deserves to be posted over here too: Maybe my views are colored by having read The Once and Future King first - White supposedly having been something of a misogynist - but if you go back to the Morte, Guenevere is abusive. She screams at Lancelot a lot. She refuses to believe his story of his betrayals by Elaine, which drives him into a two year madness or at least is the last straw. Even when she mellows with age she's always sending him away (so that she can get in trouble and he can show up to rescue her in the nick of time). I try to portray Guenevere as a free spirit and not as a stereotypical hysterical female, but really in the sources that's someone she is. White tried to explain the contradictions in her by saying "it's difficult to write about a real person", which I used to think was a cop-out, but if he was a misogynist that might have been the best he could do. Guenevere has always been the character out of the three of them who differs the most from treatment to treatment - compare Parke Godwin to Marion Zimmer Bradley, or Camelot to King Arthur. I never really got the handle on her I have now until I started globally replacing the characters in my Star Trek fanfiction with these characters and she got McCoy; that's who she is to me, the bleeding-heart sensualist cynic, the personification of the hero's heart in the conflicts between his heart and his mind. But to me she's also who she is in White, and White always claimed his characters were Malory's. Maybe I need not to stop her thumping Arthur (and eventually Lancelot) every once in awhile, because that's who she is. The guy who writes Home on the Strange has been blogging this week about making sure all his characters are flawed. I wonder what Arthur's and Lancelot's flaws are in AKOTAS. Anyone got any observations on that? Have I been allowing my characters to be flawed? Yeah, they're supposed to be archetypes, but if I want the reader sticking around for twenty-five years they've gotta be interesting people too.

Webcomics I read mornings: Peanuts, General Protection Fault, Achewood, Newshounds, Scary Go Round, Tux & Bunny, College Roommates from Hell!!!, Todd and Penguin, Real Life, Kevin & Kell

Webcomics I read M-W-F mornings: El Goonish Shive, Theater Hopper, Nukees, Girl Genius, Pibgorn, Ctrl+Alt+Del

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa mornings: Digger, Crap I Drew On My Lunch Break, AppleGeeks, Orneryboy, Striptease, Penny Arcade

Webcomics I read middays: Calvin & Hobbes, Least I Could Do, User Friendly, Anywhere But Here, Starslip Crisis, Questionable Content, Biggest Webcomic Loser, Schlock Mercenary, Narbonic

Webcomics I read evenings: LuAnn, Count Your Sheep, Goats, Pearls Before Swine, For Better Or For Worse, Help Desk, American Elf, Loserz, Dandy & Company, Irregular Comic, Bruno, Shortpacked, Boxjam's Doodle, Sluggy Freelance

Webcomics I read M-W-F evenings: Reasoned Cognition, Two Lumps, Alice!, Order of the Stick, Gossamer Commons

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa evenings: Casey & Andy, Girls With Slingshots, The Green Avenger, Get Out of My Head, Megatokyo

Webcomics I read bedtimes: B.C., Something Positive, The Angriest Rice Cooker In The World, Medium Large, Station V3, Dinosaur Comics, Wapsi Square, Little Dee, PvP

Webcomics I read Sundays: Butternut Squash, Dr. Devious vs Lincoln High, Checkerboard Nightmare, Nemesis, Journey Into History, Tailsteak, Smithson, No Room for Magic, 13 Seconds, The Whovian Observer, Ctrl+Alt+Del, Perry Bible Fellowship

See also The Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge, Talk About Comics, The Belfry Comics Index, The Webcomic List, Mister Bloo, Nth Degree, 100% Originality Theatre, Comixpedia, The Living Comic and Websnark.

Arthuriana sources I use or recommend:
Arthurian Legend
Arthuriana - the Journal of Arthurian Studies; the website of the quarterly journal of the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society.
The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester.
Camelot In Four Colors: A Survey of the Arthurian Legend in Comics
Mystical-WWW - The Arthurian A2Z knowledge Bank which has encyclopedically-arranged entries on the characters of the Arthurian legends.
Le Morte Darthur: Sir Thomas Malory's Book of King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table, Volume 1 and Volume 2.