I said something nice about Carol Lay

link
I've dumped on Carol Lay a lot. Not because I know she can do better, but because so Salon comics has This Modern World and Tom the Dancing Bug, which I think are great, and the K Chronicles, which I enjoy. Having a day when I didn't go to Salon comics would just be too disruptive to my patterns, as I've mentioned on their site. So, I was dumping on her largely to get rid of her. But, as with Dahlia Lithwick, I'm sort of coming around.

Is this new? Because in the past when I've liked Carol Lay's work, I've found that it's been from the archives. This seems new, though.

Take it as given that we'll have a climate-driven civilization-ending cataclysm. For no good reason, I think of it as losing 999 in every thousand people.

Whatever we want to preserve of civilization will have to leapfrog the time of fast climate changes to a time of slow climate changes, which will allow us to do things like plant crops, predict the movement of animals and define sea lanes. So, we'll do something like this seed store.

And Carol Lay brings up a point which bothers me sometimes. How do we design a store that a nascent hunter gatherer civilization can access, but only when they're developed enough to learn from it and not destroy it? And I think she dramatizes it well; this is great work.

Not to sound Nietzschean, but I love that it's the man's sentimentality that assaults the future. It seems more moral to consume poorly secured seed stores than children. But, he's damaging the future of the entire species with his archaic mortality. I find that poignant.

Obviously, you're going to have to read the comic. It's this dude walking the barren Earth amidst an aeolian barrage of little flakes of mud or ash, wisdom of using 'barren' and 'barrage' in the same sentence aside for the moment. He passes a fire with the bones of a human child, and feels smugly superior, then enters the seed store for the future and chows down. Pretty clever.