Welcome back to the snack zone! We are refreshed and semi-ready for 2022, and we hope you’re doing okay too! Here’s a quick and sweet Afternoon Snack to keep you going this week.
We were DELIGHTED to hear last week that the Image Comics union won their NLRB election!!! Could there truly be hope for a future of organized comics workers?
Jane McAlevey, author of No Shortcuts – Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age and strikes correspondent for the Nation, offers us all some good advice on how workers can organize to win in 2022.
Biden clearly doesn’t have the power to move Congress. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema aren’t going to change their votes because of personal pleas from the president or the leaders of the Progressive Caucus. What their ilk do respond to is when the corporate elites whose bidding they do phone them and tell them to switch their votes because profits are being dented by the chaos of too many workers on strike. National legislation that’s good for most Americans passes only when workers create untenable crises that make that legislation seem like a far better option than expensive strikes, pitchforks, or falling bottom lines.
On the creator side of comics, POME fave Nilah Magruder has an essay for the SWFA blog on how brutal graphic novel production schedules are, and how traditional publishers need to face this reality and adjust in favor of artists. SWFA are currently working on criteria to admit comics writers and artists into their guild: let’s hope once that happens, creators have more leverage to get livable schedules!
We really enjoyed manga translator Jocelyne Allen’s recent coverage of Hito no Sex o Minagara Kangaeta by Tabusa Eiko, a humorous exploration of women’s roles in Japanese society, told through the author’s experiences doing research for her erotic manga.
It’s a fun and funny book, but with real anger simmering beneath the surface. It invites the reader to wonder why the world is set up for men’s pleasure in so many ways, and how maybe, just maybe this culture of “boys will be boys” actually sets the stage for the abuse and harassment of women. Tabusa hooks readers with the “fish out of water” premise of a woman in men’s spaces and the promise of titillation, and then takes them on a secretly feminist journey.
Elsewhere in manga… We just found out about Akiko Higashimura’s Webtoon and we are STILL SCREAMING. Have you read it yet? …. Okay, now have you read it yet????
We could not leave the first Afternoon Snack of the year without saluting the very last of the Golden Girls. RIP Betty White, a true legend and a friend to all of our inner crones.
