Do You Love Me?

January 25, 2012 10:56 AM

My mistake, if I can call it that, was trust - to think a smile was a smile and not a show of teeth. - - - All this week, tor.com is publishing The Situation, a comic based on a story by everyone's favorite Jeff VanderMeer, and illustrated by Eric Orchard.

I can't get the comic to load in explorer, but it works well in firefox.

posted by Think_Long (20 comments total)

I'm loving all the genre fiction FPP today.
posted by Fizz at 10:59 AM on January 25

I thought this was gonna be about that Jersey Shore guy with the abs.
posted by jonmc at 11:05 AM on January 25 [3 favorites]

I'm confused by the HTML here. Does the link behind "a story" contain the story or not?
posted by DU at 11:26 AM on January 25

The "a story" links to an interview on Wired.com with a pdf link to the wired-published story. Sorry, didn't want to directly link to a pdf in the post.
posted by Think_Long at 11:32 AM on January 25

yes, it was the link that is literally eight lines down on the Wired article. You know how you can see the first line, then the second line? Go six more lines. Go down through 3, then 4, then 5, then, 6, then 7. Now there's a small break. Below that is the eighth line. It's a link to a Portable Document Format file. If you click that, it should download, and you can read the story that way
posted by Greg Nog at 11:33 AM on January 25

Great. now I'll never get my 8 hours
posted by MangyCarface at 11:35 AM on January 25

EIGHT? DOWNLOAD? What is this Elvish magic?!
posted by Wolfdog at 11:35 AM on January 25

Oh, I see. I skipped the preface hoping to get to the meat. Turns out the meat was buried in the preface.
posted by DU at 11:36 AM on January 25

I love the Eric Orchard illustrations. I'd never seen his stuff before.
posted by benito.strauss at 11:43 AM on January 25

It is really pretty; thanks for posting this, Think_Long!
posted by Greg Nog at 11:44 AM on January 25

Mushrooms - dampness - shudder - VanderMeer created a whole new landscape for my nightmares.
posted by zeoslap at 11:48 AM on January 25

My god I love The Situation, and thoroughly treasure our little paper copy. It's been a huge influence on me creatively, too. I've got to admit, the art and tone of the comic is pretty far from the way I pictured everything (which is always going to be a hazard with adaptations of anything you really love), but it's gorgeous in its own right. Thanks for the link!
posted by emmtee at 11:54 AM on January 25

Turns out the meat was buried in the preface

I always keep the meat of my face buried behind the preface. I scare fewer people that way. Except when I want to scare people, then I link directly to my face-meat.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:54 AM on January 25 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I clicked on this prepared for the idea that The Situation from Jersey Shore had a surprising dream of writing dark future sci-fi and assumed the blurber was joking when he called The Situation's story “a work of surreal humor, bemused sadness, and meticulous artifice...as if the workplace novels of Sinclair Lewis and Joshua Ferris had been inverted, shaken, and diced until they came out looking like a Terry Gilliam creation.”
posted by steinsaltz at 12:04 PM on January 25

It's worth mentioning The Third Bear and The Journals of Doctor Mormeck (first entry here), which both share things in common.

I can't recommend strongly enough that anyone who's liking this either reads the pdf version of The Situation linked from the Wired article, or picks up The Third Bear anthology. I like the comic but I think it loses so much of the fascinating-horrifying sinister ambiguity, and any depiction of the Company could never be as weird as your imagination can make it. It'd be a shame to have preconceptions about what everything resembles and is.
posted by emmtee at 12:08 PM on January 25 [1 favorite]

I've never heard of Jeff VanderMeer until just now, but since I don't know any other Jeff VanderMeers, he is, by default, my favorite Jeff VanderMeer. Good call.
posted by notmydesk at 12:45 PM on January 25

The story is so much better than this adaptation, it really doesn't do the original justice. The short story version is for office politics nightmares what Eraserhead is for pregnancy/parenthood nightmares. The comic version is just sort of meh and doesn't include most of the disturbing and surreal aspects, or most of the key plot points that hold the story together.
posted by burnmp3s at 12:51 PM on January 25 [1 favorite]

Mefi's own VanderMeer apparently. Hi Jeff, you are my spectral manta ray floating in the corner of my office.
posted by Think_Long at 1:48 PM on January 25

I'll agree the style is very different from what was in my head, but that kinda works for me, in terms of making sure the comic is it's own thing.

Hey! That's just part 1. Wait until you see all three parts before you judge! Then you can rip it apart all you like! I'll graciously host the bonfire, just to show I'm a good sport!

(thanks for posting the link here, guys)
posted by JeffVan at 2:58 PM on January 25 [4 favorites]

Some days I feel like I'm a spectral mantra ray...
posted by JeffVan at 8:42 PM on January 27