links in new windows: threat or menace?

From a brief discussion on the practice of making links in your LJ open in new windows...

[Poll #810323]

Feel free to expand on your opinion in the comments!

classics illustrated

So a couple of grizzled comics vets did an adaptation of the report of the governmental investigative commission on 9/11. Slate is serializing it. It's not all online - I wouldn't be surprised if the last chapter goes up on the anniversary -

I have no comment on the political undertones of things like choices of how far to push caricatures of various people. But damn, the first chapter is a really beautiful use of the medium: a sparse adaptation of the events on each of the four airplanes involved, from boarding to crashes, plays out in parallel, stacked down the page and stretching across the whole chapter. Now and then I've seen similar parallel narratives done in film, but it can easily become a complete information overload; this is a mode that comics uniquely excels at.

And oddly enough, it's a trick that's rarely used. Even when a story consists of multiple, interwoven threads. The only other example I can think of offhand is issue #4 or so of Those Annoying Post Bros., where the titular brothers split up, and one gets the top half of the pages, while the other gets the bottom. It's tough to get all the rhythms to combine and work, I suppose; to manage two separate threads to run at the same length, and recombine.

Note to self: Is there a part of Drowning City that would benefit from this bit of pyrotechnics? I don't think so; the narrative focus is very much on one character's viewpoint. It is by no means a mosaic narrative. I have parts that will use other uniquely-comics trickery. (And I should be making time to work on it. Other things pulled me away from the progress I was making in sorting it all out and making ready to start drawing. I need to just draw.)

whippersnappers!

Father Time: initial design concept. (Final design is very different from this; it's for an interactive piece that goes with a paper card.)

anniversary

Huh. I just realized, thanks to kevinpease making a comment that linked back to the entry about my last normal day in New Orleans. It's a year since Katrina hit the city. Right after I moved there.

My mom and I left the city on the morning of the 27th. On the 29th - a year and a day ago - the storm hit land again, after having ripped through Florida and meandered aimlessly in the Gulf, getting frighteningly large. The eye went right over New Orleans. Enough levees broke that most of the city became part of Lake Ponchatrain for a while.

A year ago today, we were alighting in Lafayette, where I spent a week and a half, and my mother spent two or three weeks.

Sunday after next will be the tenth. The anniversary of when I got to Boston and moved in with Rik, Kin, and Julia. Later Cyn would move in, and then Julia and Cyn would move out, leaving just me and the two people I could definitely call my lovers by then.

It's been a year.

It went as well as I could hope it would. I was lucky; I was about to start doing freelance work for American Greetings when I moved home, and I've been doing that sporadically through the whole year. I could have been luckier - if I and my stuff had all arrived a little earlier, it would've been mostly safe in my mother's second-story apartment, instead of in a shipping container in a flooded warehouse. But nobody I know died in the storm, either.

The city's still a mess, last I was there. There's rebuilding but it's slow. There's still junk everywhere. I heard a second-hand story today that State Farm was discovered to have double books on tons of claims: the hidden ones saying things were ruined by wind damage, and the public ones saying things were lost to the floods - guess which they wouldn't pay out for? International aid was rejected, domestic aid was slow and mostly seems to have gone to graft, from what I hear.

I might still be living with my mother if Katrina hadn't chased me up to Boston. I can't say it was all bad. I've been really happy with how the relationship turned out. But I'd have rather gotten up here in a different way.