The Four Color Media Monitor

Hyperallergic wrote about a webcomic called Rescue Party prepared on Instagram that's meant to emphasize optimism:

Launched in April, Rescue Party offered Desert Island’s followers an exercise: draw a nine-panel comic that explores an “ideal future” or imagines a post-pandemic utopia. Artists were only given a few visual guidelines, but the main point was to “stay positive.”

[...] Diverse and constantly surprising, the comics of Rescue Party are as distinct as the seemingly infinite number of artists who have contributed their work. Like a haiku, the nine-panel comic format offers succinct summations of complex feelings spurred by in this crisis. An ode to the things we miss (hugs, joy) and the promises we now make (to live fuller, to love harder), Rescue Party offers poetic and eternally optimistic renderings of the world beyond our current reality. According to these artists, it’ll be beautiful.

The samples of art they provide look tasteful enough, and they're right about this: we all enjoy hugs and kisses, as part of human nature of love, and optimism is a crucial element in life. So if this is project in good taste, they're to be congratulated for emphasizing something mainstream superhero comics have all but thrown away. Optimism and happiness is something all aspiring comic writers should practice, and now that I think of it, if DC/Marvel refuse to accept such a viewpoint in your story pitch to them, don't be disappointed, because they're already a sinking ship in no small part due to their mistakes. Just stick with the independents if that's what it takes to emphasize optimism, and certainly in a way that's not forcibly political.

Labels: comic strips, science, technology