UPDATING OCCASIONALLY (FOR NOW)

6 thoughts on “542 – Catching Up”

  1. Keith

    Some friction, but yeah. IRL, I’d like these two…they should have kids. 😉

    1. Dawn

      I might have to draw out what their kid would look like. First thought is that their kid would look like Ongo Gablogian from “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia”

    2. Scarsdale

      He’s pushing 60, she’s maybe 30, more likely less. Chuck is most likely shooting blanks, and besides, he’s talking to her like a baby sister than a love interest.

  2. ConcordBob

    It is really hard to have a favorite character, as there are so many good ones. But I think Rosa is my favorite. Chuck is a good accomplice in sneaking work, but not much for romance. Uugh.

  3. Otaku

    I mean, if they don’t have at least an inkling of what’s going down, I’m actually disappointed in Clearstream. If anything, I’m starting to wonder if they caught on and realized “Wait, we can use this.”

    Because of course they can. 😉

  4. Dr. Norman (not a real doctor)

    I’m way ahead of you – I’ve been waiting for you to catch up. From November 2020:
    I would hope for nothing less – her and Chuck have the potential for a great deal of positive mischief.
    Speaking of which, I received the email notifying me that my order for the NSFW “Chuck and Rosa Finally Do It” (age verification required) limited edition hardcover is going to be delayed due to the pandemic. I think it’s really cool that you’ll be adding some additional stretch goal goodies when it ships – thanks for all your story and art.
    As for the inscription, ” We owe it all to you ” will be sufficient.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

 

542 – Catching Up
Posted on April 9, 2025 by Dawn

From Hunger?

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Clint
220px-HungerGamesPosterThere’s a slang phrase you don’t really hear anymore, so much so I’m pretty sure most people have forgotten its meaning: “From hunger”. In fact the last time I can recall hearing it recently wasn’t technically recent, since it was a line of dialogue from the 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard. In that film, a potential movie script is rejected by its reader as being “from hunger”. Modern audiences have to guess at that from its context… or you could do a quick search and find this explanation from The Free Dictionary: “very mediocre; acceptable only when nothing else is available”. The suggested etymology is that of the idea of food you would only choose to eat if you had no real other choice, save starvation. So I watched The Hunger Games. And before you draw too many conclusions from the first paragraph: I liked it. It’s not a new idea; but then, what really is? The writers of the Book of Ecclesiastes of The Bible were already considering the well of human imagination to have run dry almost 3000 years ago, and they certainly weren’t referring to the prior existence of Battle Royale. The author of Hunger Games is on record as saying she never heard of Battle Royale until she submitted her manuscript for publication, and you know what? I believe her. If you wanted to claim rip-off you could point both properties to The Running Man, but I’m sure The Running Man has its own parallel ancestry to deal with. This is why you can’t copyright ideas, only the specific way those ideas are executed. And that’s also how you have to judge a work… it helps of course if the premise isn’t one that’s been done to death in recent memory, but even an idea which seems like a true breath of fresh air to the audience of the day still has to succeed as a story. We retell stories because our memories aren’t perfect, even in this day and age where even our humblest drunken ramblings are recorded for posterity. We also retell them because, while certain themes and types of stories remain universal, the way it’s delivered to us changes, and that can matter more than we perhaps like to admit. Beethoven and Trent Reznor both use the same 12 note scale to make music, but although Reznor does have a classically trained background, his industrial, computer-assisted compositions spoke a lot more viscerally to my teenaged self. I realize I still haven’t said much about Hunger Games itself, beyond saying I liked it. I did see a lot of Running Man in its presentation, which brought me to the curious realization that unlike many other sci-fi movies of my youth (Total Recall, Robocop) it hasn’t been remade. Maybe now it doesn’t need to be? I think I can happily christen Hunger Games as a Running Man for the millenial generation, and if I had a teenage daughter I’d much prefer she be a fan of it than Twilight. Jennifer Lawrence is a fine young actress and Katniss as a character spanks Bella Swan on pretty much all counts. Lest this sound like faint praise, it’s not. I’m of course predisposed towards post-apocalyptic settings with an overbearing media aspect, and there were many fine moments and places where I thought the director made some ambitious choices. Not all of them work, but some do, and the ambition is to be appreciated in a time when a lot of what’s coming out of Hollywood has a mucky sameness to it, particularly in action movies. Hell I can’t even remember an instance of “shakycam”, and for that I am *profoundly* grateful. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s definitely worth a watch. Is it mind blowing? No. Is it a classic for the ages? No. But it at least engages your brain a bit, looks pretty, and it can’t be overstated that a young woman is there as the competent, complicated, and (most importantly) non-fetishized action hero, even though that’s not the central message. It can’t help but be a message because we just have so few of those in our larger mass media, but that’s perhaps a discussion for another day. In the meantime, I’ll just sum up by saying that from hunger, Hunger Games is not.