Flight Papers

Scene: the marketing department.

“We should like to advertise our fine retail establishment on the Google!”

“But we sell so many different products! How will we ever register enough ads to cover everything a potential customer could be searching for?”

“A solution! Google will let us advertise with a template that includes anything a user might search for! Surely, then, whatever someone is trying to buy—be it an object, idea, or person—they will be directed to our store!”

“Brilliant! Nothing could possibly go wrong.”

Thank you for your ignorance. Thank you for your apathy.

Thank you for walking on our bodies until we join the sidewalk; thank you for barely noticing. Thank you for shedding a small tear for the tragedy that inevitably ends our lives, and thank you for so efficiently erasing our names and our stories thereafter.

Thank you for letting our families know what manner of things we are. Thank you for helping them let go of us. Thank you for helping them push us into the street. Thank you for helping them kill us. Thank you for helping them forget us.

Thank you for the names you have given us: Abomination. Grotesque. Thank you for telling us these names, on our streets and in our homes. Thank you for helping us erase whatever other names we might have had or foolishly thought we wanted. Thank you for giving us these to take their place: Freak. Monster.

Thank you for helping us realize the value of our lives—how painful they must be, how pathetic. Thank you for helping so many of us find the courage to cut open our own throats.

Thank you for killing us.

Thank you for stabbing us. Thank you for bashing in our skulls, for putting bullets into our organs, for beating us until we could no longer remember how to breathe. Thank you for drowning us in water and in the liquid parts of our own bodies. Thank you for your remarkable efficiency, that the dead should be so many that no single one of us could remember them all.

Thank you for all you have done for us.

Had you done otherwise, we should not have learned what manner of creatures you are.

Because I can look at the characters say, “wow. my body actually kinda looks like that.” (this link contains nekkid.)

That page blew my mind, actually.

Obviously, I was aware that comic art is… not exactly realistic. Not for men, but especially-omg-holycrap not for women. But you kinda get used to it. It knew that the art was depicting this skewed fantasy, but the full implications of that didn’t really hit me in a visceral way until I felt how mind-blowingly refreshing it was to see women’s bodies depicted in all their squishy glory. That’s when I really fully internalized what I, we, practically a whole medium is still missing out on.

(There are, of course, lots of other beautiful reasons to love Dicebox. If you don’t know what yours are, you should really get on that.)