First!

I’ve got to agree with this, it’s sad that the only music remembered in 50 years will be mostly the stuff not worth remembering

The phrase “too damaged to recognize ambition” is worrying me

I think this is the first time I realized, after reading your comics for years, that the lines scattered around the speech bubbles indicate tone, besides the standard bold for emphasis. And it’s really only with the “MAN” here. Though looking back I suppose it’s rare enough that I can be excused for my ignorance…

I already noticed the speech bubbles, so I decided to look for something else I hadn’t noticed before. It turns out that Girl has an extremely odd haircut.

I’d go so far as to say every sentiment expressed in this comic is worrying. This is some strange anger.

They’re both right to a certain degree.

Aha. Thank you for explaining the knitting craze.

Girl seems to forget how the Calling first stopped being a Career…the Salons and all that. We’re due for another Courbet revolution.

as a knitter busily working away at my knitting olympic challenge, i find the idea that knitting can’t be ambitious a little worrying. oh wait. i meant ‘insulting.’

All those starving madfolks in garrets, even the bad ones, were (and still are) highly ambitious. Having a successful career is a very low, unimaginative ambition.

I think the idea is that ambition has become a disqualifying characteristic in artwork seeking to be seen as authentic. Ambitious knitting has no problem portraying itself as authentic. Nor does ambitious coding. Nor does ambitious teaching. Nor does ambitious entrepreneurship, gardening or amateur soccer playing.

At first, for some reason, I read Grrl’s third panel speech bubble as “Most of those people starving in garretts weren’t very good food”. Then my contact lens realigned itself and I read it again and I was disappointed.

I was going to protest. Those people are extremely good food.

I see. That kinda seems, rather than an intellectual stance, a simple emotional reaction: “She wears too much jewelry. I don’t like it. She must be inauthentic.”

If the self-invention is more important than the self-expression, that is rightly decried as inauthentic. If the self-invention is simply a delivery device, then one simply uses anti-critical sentiment to increase one’s readership in defiance of…

…oh. You’re doing that already. Right.

More importantly, when in the HELL are Cat, Boy, and the Beatnik going to reenact the opening number from “Once More with Feeling?” We have waited long enough.

It’s apparently knitting day in internet comix:

http://www.explosm.net/comics/1965/

Hey Adam, I think this is actually the first time the lines have ever been around the speech bubbles.

That crazy and art go together is an illusion. Yay grrl.

Grrl, being, well, Grrl, would surely not be fooled by the arbitrary and usually sexist/classist distinction between art and craft.

And the moral of the story is… a knitted sweater is not only beautiful and posh, but also warm and soft!

I wanna see what happens when Grrl reads Scott Westerfield – always assuming Dorothy can stand it.