jwaneeta

I was deflected by a deadline, but I finally finished my doodles for Christine, who bought A Proper Funeral for WriterCon.

See the holy cards for Angel and Spike here

I'm also intrigued that Joss imagined his square-jawed lead as a ruined Southern gentleman in the post-Civil War American west. I knew that Firefly was supposed to be a Western, but the choice of protagonist opens up angles I didn't expect. Historically, there's a theory that modern American culture runs in a direct line from the Civil War, to the dispossessed Confederate survivors who drifted west after it ended, and so down to the present day, to the "cowboy" mentality that's so commonly derided by all the countries we piss off.

The idea is that these ex-Confederates -- habituated to a code of firearms, touchy honor, dueling and self-governance -- influenced and informed a mindset that eventually spread back from the lawless frontier and touched most levels of society, including entertainment and government. The whole thing might have died a natural death as the Wild West became more settled and civilized, but frontier diaries reprinted in newspapers became the seed of novels, and then movies happened in the 20s before the last cow towns died out, fixing the image of the gunslinger and his gang in the national psyche.

- Cyn (Thu 2004.07.15 at 10:16 pm EST)