Fleen: The Awkward Christmas Dinner Of Our Obligation To Existence

The Act Itself Is A Joke

Girly makes me uneasy.

Six comics in sexual harassment becomes a joke, in the form of an unwanted suitor who believes his penis is his only redeeming quality. The â€œjokeâ€? is reoccurring.

Girly makes me angry.

In the first part, the main plotline is both how Winter and Otra (â€œGirlyâ€?) come to be leader and sidekick, and then friends, and then lovers â€“ as well as the downfall of El Chupacabre. Chupacabre is described as a lover, pleasurer, eater, and penetrater of women.

The first time a woman walked onscreen and then down a dark alley, I was expecting rape. Rape is defined as â€œsexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against the will usually of a female.â€? The woman was grabbed, and for all her scream of surprise or terror (most likely terror) turned into pleasure, as indicated by the hearts around the sound effect, it was rape.

Winter and Otra obviously donâ€™t see it as a problem â€“ they go after the elephants. The news doesnâ€™t see it as a problem; Women being found naked runs as the secondary story.

I could dismiss this all as a satire if at the conclusion of the story the lesson didnâ€™t fall so flat.

Winter says heâ€™s been doing the right thing, in the wrong way. She proclaims that he has been practicing sexuality haphazardly, leading to guilt and resentment. But what about the common feeling of violation? Of shame? Of disbelief? Of fear and self-blame?

And then there is the statement that Chupacabre never attacked anyone. He was irresistible, and so they just submitted. Does this excuse him? Consider real life attacks â€“ could a rapist claim that they just submitted? Could it be true? Would it make it any better?

Chupacabre was finally driven out of town by Winter and Otra. And I stopped reading.

The entire first part of this comic is a giant thumbs up to sexual harassment and rape. Joking about rape makes the act of rape a joke. Make a joke about murder, and youâ€™re not likely to be patted on the back in the bar for doing it. Make a joke about rape, harassment, etc., and you may just be a local hero.

Or a webcomic creator successful enough to have a book published.

I love the Girly art style, but I hate their comics. Frankly, I think its all in very poor taste, and each strip becomes more banal.

This is the most idiotically under-researched and ill-informed article I have ever read on the internet.

ON.
THE INTERNET.

Ohhhh I mean it.

The thing with El Chupacabre is that he just shows up, and the women sex HIM. It is MUTUAL, they don’t say or indicate no. They scream because they’re startle, and then they have sex. If they ever fought or said no, he’d be confused but he’d leave. In fact, if there’s any connotation of rape in the story, in the later arcs, the women practically rape him!

And that’s just if the story is taken seriously. It’s not. It’s a silly lighthearted satire that has as much perversity as a Loony Tunes cartoon.

I’d like to respond to SniperGirl’s comments, but I figure I’d best leave that to the William G she made up in her head, should he decide to come around. Silly fanfemme…

As for you Josh: I offered a probable reason for why people sometimes have trouble with your comics. It’s quite obvious that this perception of your work exists, and while you don’t like the perception being there.. well, you lashing out at me for offering it is simply not my problem.

What you should be doing is taking criticisms and trying to figure out how to keep future misinterpretations of your work from happening… Or, you can return to the protective womb of your fanbase telling you how great you are.

It’s really up to you.

But Will, it’s a totally BOGUS interpretation. Even if you are right, you’re saying that people are reading themes into Josh’s work that aren’t there, simply because they’ve seen those themes in OTHER work that they consider similar in style.

“This comic doesn’t have rape in it, but it kind of REMINDS me of comics that have rape in them, so I don’t like it,” is not a criticism that any author should be taking seriously. That kind of “baggage” belongs to the reader, not the artist or the comic style.

And anyone who draws a comic that discusses sex can expect to see that baggage expose itself through reader interpretations, because man, EVERYONE has some kind of baggage about sex.

Well I think Girly’s unfair to eggplants.

Josh had better try to keep me from being a complete idiot and thinking that!

… And what the F does that opening line, “Six comics in sexual harassment becomes a joke” mean, anyway?

Ah but there are no bogus interpretations. Whether it’s writing, painting, sculpting, or (insert medium here); you make your art public, you deal with how individuals read it. Interpretation is subjective. Subjectivity is derived from personal experience. One person’s bogus is another’s truth.

Disagree?
… ’twill be the grout.

“They scream because theyâ€™re startle, and then they have sex. If they ever fought or said no, heâ€™d be confused but heâ€™d leave.”

Oh, that’s okay; so if he grabs a woman and starts trying to have intercourse with her, and she fought back, he’d stop ? WHAT A GENTLEMAN.

Seriously, this comic is unusual. The woman is found lying in the street afterwards, naked, and everyone’s response is “wow, she must have had an awesome time !”

I get that it’s a joke. But it’s an odd joke. Does anyone here think it’s romantic to be followed through an alley by a stranger ? It may not be rape. But it doesn’t seem to be entirely consensual either.

Please try to see where Kate is coming from- if this were a scene in any other movie or comic, if this were DC, we’d be scratching our heads. I understand that the comic’s creator is anti-violence and anti-rape, but the message has to carry in the medium.

My two cents.

Hehe, fanfemme. Unoriginal AND sexist all in one!

I LIKE IT!

Alright, assuming this was supposed to be a review of Girly, it wasn’t a very thorough one. The reviewer only read one story arc, then wrote about it. How the hell is that a review?
This would be similar to if someone only read Something Positive’s Nerdrotica story arc, then wrote an enraged article about how SP exists soley to promote porn.

If this was indeed supposed to be a review of the comic as a whole, it might help to (GASP) actually read the entire comic. As a webcomic reviewer, you should be going through the entire archive of a comic before committing to an opinion of it and the idea of writing an article even crosses your mind. Yes, it’s time consuming and tiring, but without doing that how can the article be accurate? As we see here, for example, it can’t.
Assumptions and not getting the whole story make for inaccurate tripe like this.

For some reason I have a feeling that this article was an attack on Josh’s choice to use porn (Slipshine) as a means of income. Of course if someone uses an alternate means such as that to support themselves he MUST be a sex obsessed freak!
Although I do not have any solid evidence that Josh is not a nympho (except that from what I’ve heard he’s a really nice guy), I do feel that both his Adult and “Clean” work is in good taste, and I have yet to be offended by them (because I’m female so my chance of getting offended by sex and nudity is 100x more likely than a male, amIright?).

Of course, there’s a chance that you either don’t know about Slipshine or have no problem with it. In which case, this was just one poorly executed article in a sea of brilliance (which I have yet to read) and it will never happen again.

Baaaaaw! This comic presents what I consider to be rape in what I consider to be an insensitive manner! This comic doesn’t submit to my own unique and reactionary viewpoint on the world!

Why won’t everyone just agree with me all the time? Why is everyone else so wrong about everyting? Baaaaaw!

I think girly is awesome, i guess people just worry too much about whats acceptable anymore.

I think we shold all just take a review as a comment which effectively it is, and just accept that everybody has varying opinions.

Just don’t stop making girly Josh because its amazing.

…. I’m sorry, did you even -read- Girly? I’ve been reading it from the start and am still hooked. If maybe you’d looked a little further than your knee-jerk misunderstanding of El Chupacabre, you’d have seen that he develops and evolves as something complex, sensitive and -gasp!- FUNNY. Girly is clever, endearing, and off-the-wall. It’s cute and it’s rude and it’s great. It’s definitely -not- an apologia for rape? Any more than it’s an apologia for shooting people into space, huh. And just because everyone else is doing it, I’ll mention that I, also, am a GIRL and that I ENJOY Girly muchly. Girl. Enjoying. Not offended. Not creeped out. But then again, I’ve read the damn thing through.

I mean, really. Why even “review” (the word scarcely applies here) a comic if you’re going to emit something like the above? Beyond misreading the (small part of the comic you read) entirely, I’d say your greatest sin is almost one of omission. Not a single mention of the artwork – a tenet of Girly, in my opinion. Bold, boppy and savvy, reflecting inventiveness and borrowing elements from comics’ long tradition, the art is what makes me go back again and again.

Oh, and… MARSHMALLOW CAT. Come on. A review of Girly needs a mention of Marshmallow Cat!

I mean… This is just a ridiculous un-review. Got something against Mr. Lesnick personally or something? Tease you in grade three? Dated your sister? Because whatever this is, it ain’t a review of Girly – one of my favourite web (or any!) comics out there.

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