Uppity-Negro.com

Coincidence, I'm sure, but there's an interview/article up at Bitch with/about Jessica Abel and her current series, La Perdida:

“I wanted to do something that was well outside the area I’d been working in before in Artbabe, where I was writing about sort of middle-class, mid-20s/mid-30s hipster people in Chicago worrying over their little lives,” Abel says. “I felt like people were starting to identify me with that milieu, and they long had thought of my work as ‘hipster stuff.’ I had always felt like I was working on portraying relationships, not on portraying hipster life. I just happened to create those characters because those are the kind of people I hung out with. I definitely wasn’t trying to say anything in particular about being a hipster or being into rock or any of that sort of stuff, but that’s the milieu I was used to, so that’s where I set my dramas.

“After awhile, it was limiting because some people, I know, dismissed me out-of-hand, thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t identify with that milieu, therefore I won’t like these comics.’ And even if they were wrong—in a lot of cases people would write me and say ‘I thought that these comics were just for hipsters and I read them and I was wrong,’ and that’s very flattering—it means a lot of people aren’t picking up the book in the first place. So although that’s a sort of audience-oriented way of making a decision, it really felt like I wanted to prove to myself and other people that I could do something that felt less specific.”

If you hit the link to the article, you'll see why I tried to tie the first actual sentence -- that bit I quoted appears a bit further into the piece -- into a reference to Erika. Couldn't make it work, though, and worried that it sounded vaguely insulting.

Most things sound vaguely insulting when I post them here, apparently. I'd like to think it's the domain name, but it's probably me.

I'd also like to say I'd give it another go after more coffee, but why lie?

Since, as linked over at die puny humans, the brilliant Justine Shaw has Nowhere Girl Part 2: Better World up. Meaning I'll be off reading that rather than editing old posts or creating new ones for a while.

Which is why there's nothing really tying this entry to the zeitgeist one a few days back, which is what the title refers to. Coffee. Right.