All the Ails That Cure Us — Page 15
Bringing the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 into this story was inevitable. I started Otherworldly Goods in 2018 in response to things going on personally and politically, much in the spirit of the origins of the Fetch series, with the intent to tell a story about the tensions between individual conscience and social obligations, whether they were familial, fraternal, or much larger. I made room to incorporate current events as they arose, so long as they fit thematically; and by 2018 BLM was already in full stride, arising from the police murders of Eric Gardner and Michael Brown a few years earlier (not to mention Trayvon Martin among too many others.) The nature of comics production — as well as a few disruptions in my personal life that required changing tack from 2022-23, when I reverted to topical one shot comics before resuming this story in 2024 — created the 5 year lag between the time of the Portland Protests of 2020 and finally rendering it now.
What I didn’t anticipate as I wrote these protests into the story is how the return of the self-anointed “king” and the anti-DEI attack of Project 2025 would induce a certain nostalgia for those times. Don’t get me wrong: the police were out of control, they were gassing neighborhoods where children were sleeping, they were beating protestors viciously, federal vans were rounding people up off the streets — I don’t have a rosy view of those events at all. The nostalgia comes with remembering a mass movement to oppose the police state and to propose alternative methods of addressing crime, punishment, and other problems that policing cannot address without making them worse.
Now we are in the backlash times. Or really Backlash II, since Election 2016 was the first iteration of White incoherent rage in response to the Obama years (not including, of course, the rage directed at Arabs, Muslims, and anyone who in White eyes looked like them following 9/11.) The stuff that gives me hope is the persistence of ordinary people to rise up in opposition to encroaching fascism and authoritarianism. It’s early days in the Second Term, but we don’t have time to waste in pushing back against the destruction of democracy and the social safety net, of protections for consumers, workers, and the environment we live in, and of the modest yet significant mechanisms we have created to expand participation in society to include people who have been historically marginalized.
Discussion ¬