Tag Archives: Amanda

Oct 30 2018

Futility in Days of Hate 9

by Patrick Ehlers

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

“All we do is sit in rooms and wait.”

Arvid, Days of Hate 9

The scariest thing about the rise of fascism in the United States is the immeasurable apathy it has been met with. While people on the left have donated and volunteered and campaigned and protested, there’s nothing that won’t send us back to our couches like a little tongue-clucking about civility. We still expect the old tools work, but leverage and hypocrisy and blackmail only work if your opponent lets it work. In Days of Hate 9, writer Ales Kōt and artist Danijel Žeželj show the futility of protest, blackmail, and scheming against the unstoppable juggernaut of cruelty that is Agent Freeman. Continue reading →

Aug 27 2018

The Ruin of Structure of Days of Hate 7

by Patrick Ehlers

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

The very first image in Days of Hate 7 is New York City at at night from a distance with the text “Seven Weeks Later.” While the apocalypse-in-motion setting for this series will sometimes lean in to ruined urban landscapes–and there is plenty of that later in the issue–for the this introductory moment, the city skyline seems relatively intact. This skyline is the exception; the sterling faux-beacon for civilization in a world where all other structures, be they physical, societal, social or psychological, have collapsed. Continue reading →

Jun 26 2018

The Poetry of Days of Hate 6

by Drew Baumgartner

Days of Hate 6

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

en·jamb·ment
/inˈjambmənt, enˈjam(b)mənt/
noun

  1. (in verse) the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza.

Comics has its share of unique jargon, but much of the vocabulary we use when analyzing it is borrowed. More often than not, we’re borrowing language from the world of film and photography, where we might understand issues of the relative location and sizes of images within the panel as matters of placing a camera in a physical space. We’ll also draw parallels to prose, as the language — and especially narrative modes — of comics can often resemble that of a novel. But prose isn’t the only literary media, and while it’s lamentably rare, comics can draw from the world of poetry, as well. Aleš Kot and Danijel Žeželj’s Days of Hate has always lent itself to elegant turns of phrase, but canny use of the decidedly poetic device of enjambment turns issue 6 into a goddamn love poem. Continue reading →

May 30 2018

“Why?” in Days of Hate 5

by Patrick Ehlers

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

Why am I watching this scene?

Screenwriter Advice, Traditional

While the “who,” “what,” and “where” of a scene is crucial to the audience’s understanding of what they’re experiencing in the moment, it’s the “why” of a scene that ends up being the most meaningful. If there’s no reason for the scene, then it doesn’t belong in the piece. This is one of those pieces of writerly advice that’s actually kind of intuitive, and readers and audiences feel it without having to be told. If we start reading about a man climbing a tree, then we assume something happens to him in that tree. Writer Aleš Kot and artist Danijel Žeželj take the conflict inherent the mere existence of a scene — three scenes, actually — to tease out a slowly burning tension-inferno in Days of Hate 5. Continue reading →

May 7 2018

Harbinger Wars II Prelude 1: Discussion

By Patrick Ehlers and Ryan Mogge

This article contains SPOILERS for both this issue and Avengers Infinity War. If you haven’t read the issue or seen the movie yet, proceed at your own risk! 

Patrick: Every big superhero event story needs to kick off with some kind of world-altering, morality-testing incident. A kind of “what did you just do?” moment that our characters will spend the next however-many-issues sorting out. Hell, the climax of Avengers Infinity War happened like 15 pages into the first issue of Jim Starlin’s The Infinity Gauntlet. Where writer Eric Heisserer distinguishes his story is in giving that catastrophic action to our hero, and making damn sure we understand why. Continue reading →

May 2 2018

Days of Hate 4: Discussion

By Patrick Ehlers and Drew Baumgartner

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

Patrick: Aleš Kot and Danijel Žeželj’s Days of Hate is the story of a future chillingly extrapolated from our social and political present. It’s an authoritarian hellscape where liberal and conservative are less policy preferences and more tribal banners. Ideologies are buried under the methodologies of success. Our characters are tools of either the regime or the revolution, so it’s tempting to say that their motivations are obvious: do whatever it takes so their side wins. But… that’s incomplete. People are more than just their beliefs — they are also the places and people they love. Days of Hate 4 shows how love anchors our heroes, but it also shows how it puts them in very serious danger of drowning.

Continue reading →

Apr 3 2018

A Glass Half-Full of Pessimism in Days of Hate 3

by Drew Baumgartner

Days of Hate 3

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

Drew: The heuristic we use for optimism and pessimism — whether a glass is seen as half full or half empty — focuses on the language we use to frame a description. But that’s not necessarily the difference between an optimist and a pessimist. If we could construct some kind of neutral description of an amount of water in a glass, you could still have disagreement about whether that is good or bad, whether it will improve or get worse, and what exactly caused this state in the first place. Moreover, in this day and age, you might have people disagreeing about the facts of how much water is in the glass at all. These are the distinctions Aleš Kot and Danijel Žeželj make between Amanda and Xing’s accounts of their relationship in Days of Hate 3. Continue reading →

Mar 6 2018

Normalcy in Days of Hate 2

by Patrick Ehlers

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

Patrick: After a first issue that went out of its way to show how drastically the world has changed in the not-too-distant future, Days of Hate 2 slows way down to emphasize just how normal the lives of its main characters are. This is every bit as terrifying as a country openly at war with itself. Issue 2 is also much more illustrative of the times in which we currently live. We don’t recognize ourselves as “in-crisis” because we can still call our parents and make plans to go to that lobster place with them on Wednesday. Writer Ales Kot and artist Danijel Zezelj double down on normalcy, shortening the narrative distance between “what if I was in this situation” and “I am in this situation.” Continue reading →