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This page is also a study of a Kazeki panel layout; I was going off of the arc towards the middle, which deals with what Gilbert Cocteau was like as a preadolescent child. I couldn't figure out how to color the floral patterns, so I kept them monochrome. An earlier study which I conducted provided methods for drawing reflections in water which I am using here.

The reflections of the people who are being talked to are, well, rich white people from the South. I've been using signifiers of "Southern" culture, namely seersucker suits, as symbols of hypocrisy and self-delusion for a while.* Rich white people from the South are congenial, eccentric, and quaint to the point of active hostility. When you live off of fortunes established by Antebellum Slavery and the Genocide against the Indians, your conscience is, at all times, attacking you and making you know that. Rich white people from the South are very keen and very skilled on repressing this feeling of conscience, not only through the Lost Cause and their seeming denial that Racism ever existed, but through their manner of speech, their manner of dress, their hobbies, and their preoccupations, all of which prize being "quaint" and "eccentric", really meaning "harmless". The most popular compliment in the South, describing someone as "a real character", embodies all three of these incantations within the Self at once.

And so, when one's whole life is spent escaping the feeling of Conscience, the indication of a scruple being held becomes an existential threat, hence what in America is called White Fragility (extreme, often panicked or even violent reactions to being reminded that Racism is real, exhibited by persons who implicitly participate in racist exploitation, or are at least complacent in it, and want to repress the knowledge that they do within themselves). A second force active within the sociopolitical world of Rich White People in the South, that being the fetishization of adolescent youth as a method of authoritarian social control (despotic obsession with the next generations of Stacies and Todds living exactly as every generation of Stacies and Todds had before) was my main preoccupation with this part of the comic.

*Cowboy Bill doesn't count because he's more an archetype of the American Southwest; out New Mexico and Arizona way.
Here's the weblink: sites.google.com/view/23cdelta…

Description

This page is also a study of a Kazeki panel layout; I was going off of the arc towards the middle, which deals with what Gilbert Cocteau was like as a preadolescent child. I couldn't figure out how to color the floral patterns, so I kept them monochrome. An earlier study which I conducted provided methods for drawing reflections in water which I am using here.

The reflections of the people who are being talked to are, well, rich white people from the South. I've been using signifiers of "Southern" culture, namely seersucker suits, as symbols of hypocrisy and self-delusion for a while.* Rich white people from the South are congenial, eccentric, and quaint to the point of active hostility. When you live off of fortunes established by Antebellum Slavery and the Genocide against the Indians, your conscience is, at all times, attacking you and making you know that. Rich white people from the South are very keen and very skilled on repressing this feeling of conscience, not only through the Lost Cause and their seeming denial that Racism ever existed, but through their manner of speech, their manner of dress, their hobbies, and their preoccupations, all of which prize being "quaint" and "eccentric", really meaning "harmless". The most popular compliment in the South, describing someone as "a real character", embodies all three of these incantations within the Self at once.

And so, when one's whole life is spent escaping the feeling of Conscience, the indication of a scruple being held becomes an existential threat, hence what in America is called White Fragility (extreme, often panicked or even violent reactions to being reminded that Racism is real, exhibited by persons who implicitly participate in racist exploitation, or are at least complacent in it, and want to repress the knowledge that they do within themselves). A second force active within the sociopolitical world of Rich White People in the South, that being the fetishization of adolescent youth as a method of authoritarian social control (despotic obsession with the next generations of Stacies and Todds living exactly as every generation of Stacies and Todds had before) was my main preoccupation with this part of the comic.

*Cowboy Bill doesn't count because he's more an archetype of the American Southwest; out New Mexico and Arizona way.
Here's the weblink: sites.google.com/view/23cdelta…