Build-a-Baddie Returns (And It’s Bigger, Badder, and More Chaotic)
The last Build-a-Baddie Poll was such a hit, it spun off not one but two projects — a microfic and a 1,500-word short story!
So naturally… we’re doing it again.
Welcome back to Build-a-Baddie — the crowd-sourced character experiment where you decide:
I take your winning combo and turn it into a brand-new illustration.
There’s also a Wildcard section if you want to whisper your weirdest ideas into the void. No promises… but I will read them.
Voting opens this week on Patreon. Bring your best (and worst) ideas.
Transcript — Evolution Success Stories
A single-panel cartoon shows two bug-like creatures standing on a forest floor surrounded by large green leaves. Both have tall, thin, purple bodies with spindly limbs and antennae. The bug on the right has colorful, symmetrical butterfly wings with orange, black, and white patterns and looks relatively normal — an evolution success story The bug on the left has a strange, mismatched set of wings that resemble bold, graphic signage instead of natural wings. The wings are black with bright orange arrows and large words pointing in different directions, including “TASTY,” “HERE,” and “YUM!” with arrows directing attention toward the bug’s own body. The malformed-wing bug looks uneasy, while the butterfly-wing bug looks on. Beneath the comic, a caption reads: “All I’m saying is… it’s easy to be a fan of evolution if all you hear about are the success stories…”
To the right of the panel is a blue box that reads: “Intermission — The Evil Inc storyline will continue next week.”
On the Katie Couric indignation
Just a thought about the righteous indignation you’re reading in your daily newspaper today (or more likely, on that newspaper’s Web site) from a guy who has spent more time inside a newsroom than is considered healthy.
But first, a little newspaper primer. In a newspaper, there’s a special category of writer in which one is allowed to write using one’s opinion. The traditional rules of objectivity don’t apply to this writer, called a columnist. The manner in which a newspaper alerts you, the dutiful reader, that the piece you are about to read contains subjective content is to present the writer’s photograph next to his or her piece (which is another rant entirely…remind me sometime…). It’s called a “column sig” in newspaperspeak.
Today, almost every newspaper in America will include a columnist expressing wide-eyed astonishment over the fact that a photo of Katie Couric for a magazine cover was doctored to make Couric look thinner and more attractive. And along with these columns will be column sigs made from photos. And in almost every last damned case, the columnist refused to approve the photograph for print until it had undergone a significant amount of retouching.
Now if that doesn’t make you smile today, nothing will.
