Tim Lieder

12. Mob Psycho 100 book 1 by One - This was recommended because it's a cartoon now and it might be on Netflix so I'm going to check it out. I suspect this will make up the first two episodes as it gives us the character of Shigeo or Mob and fleshes out his world as the assistant to a bogus exorcist with the twist that he actually has psychic powers. Then we have two stories where Mob is forced to interact with people. Those are the more interesting ones because they reminded me that I really need to research autism spectrum since I think I'm guilty of learning about autism in a passive way of "I think I got it" where I know that Autism Speaks is terrible, vaccines don't cause it, many less extreme cases get chalked up as social awkwardness, creepy assholes claim to have it, I think that some of my friends have it but I don't know, something about not getting social cues automatically but being able to train themselves to recognize social cues and the robot boy from AI being a pretty good metaphor for autism (at least according to an article on The Dissolve when that site was viable).

So Shigeo has two major stories. First he is being induced to join an after school group, but he doesn't really want to do it. He even tries to get his boss to get him out of it. Eventually he joins the other group of jocks because that seems better for actually improving his lot in school. The major story, however, is about Shigeo getting involved in a cult that is based on everyone smiling and laughing. They are forced by each other to smile and laugh.

This is where the autism really kicks in (as far as I know from my holy fuck I got to research this) as everyone else is highly influenced by the smiling and laughing part of the cult. Even the people who were originally suspicious of the cult are sucked into it. Only Mob is unmoved. In fact, he doesn't even understand why he's supposed to be moved. He gets that other people are making the faces, but it doesn't really work with him. In fact, it all just makes him more uncomfortable. And then when the counter at the edge of the page gets to 100% he destroys everything.

I think that means that the author is placing autism in the context of a super power. Not that autism is a super power, but that the super powers resemble autism - I think. I might be reading this in the best way possible because I think that I like it and I don't want to get too enmeshed in the "disabilities = magic" debate. I think this version does fall on the decent side of that line, but I don't have autism so I think I should definitely listen to people who are more affected by autism more.

13. The Walking Dead Compedium one by Robert Kirkman and artists - HOLY SHIT! They killed Lori by shooting her through the baby. That's just fucking evil. I read that story before but this is my attempt to just catch up on all the Walking Dead because I'm hooked now, more than I was when I was reading random comics that I picked up and watching most of the episodes but I don't think that the death of Lori was quite as devastating when I read it as a fairly short comic story ending with Lori's death. As something that happened at the end of a collection of 49 issues, it was fucking evil. Because even though I didn't like Lori as a character, I got to know her more over the long story and what she meant.

I think that Lori for all of her nasty decisions and anger was a symbol of the hope that things could get better. Babies are pretty symbolic especially in zombie books but really symbolic in The Walking Dead which is an attempt to truly delve into the collapse of society that comes with zombie movies and does it by skipping over most of the zombie movie plots (except for 28 Days Later which pulled the same coma trick) and going straight to the ending where most people are dead. The army is useless and the zombies are just part of what is going on now. Hell, most of the story line comic books had the same blurb on the back cover which came down to a libertarian fantasy of the world falling apart and no one having to pay taxes or expecting good roads.

So I read the original huge arc that ends with the Governor and Lori is just fucking dead. There are a lot of deaths on Walking Dead and it's kind of interesting to see that Carol is just gone in the comic. Like she just gets very sad and suicidal and lets a zombie bite her. On the other hand, Sophie is still alive according to the Walking Dead wiki. But the differences between source material and adaptation is a discussion that Game of Thrones is practically a cottage industry.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I see a lot of the same faults with the book as the show - Rick is too much the focal point, minority characters die faster, don't get too attached. I also think that it's more interesting now that we see where its going with the ways that people get together and put society together. In this case, the Governor is the first attempt to show that there is a bigger world out there beyond Rick and the survivalists outside Atlanta and he's fucking awful. Negan on the other hand is much more nuanced - more evil than the Governor, but also more beneficial to the social order as a whole. Governor is a shitty warlord who is stopped by his own hubris. Negan is practically the Chin Dynasty, nasty but bringing everyone together.

Still I am reading this book and this book is the foundation of the series where Rick and friends are trying to just survive and find safety. In that early part of the series, a prison makes sense. Later on it would be a terrible base.