OLD ART-THE GALACTIC CITY-PART 4More of that embarrassing comic from 8th grade (not high school it&r

OLD ART-THE GALACTIC CITY-PART 4

More of that embarrassing comic from 8th grade (not high school it’s even older than that)…it’s really kind of ridiculous how the black holes live in wooden buildings and have so much organic anatomy.

I wasted a lot of the viewer’s time in those days going into random details of how the black holes had apparently ruminant digestive tracts, and a lot of weird stomach rumbles and other gross bodily functions. However there is a reason for that.

It is perhaps here I should confess that as far back as I can remember, I have had an intense phobia of being swallowed whole and digested alive (I’m not sure why but I blame watching Pinocchioas a toddler.) As a result I hate encountering anything that reminds me of that, like growling stomachs, close ups of throats/uvulas, and belches/farts. I would always end up being pissed off when a TV show I was watching or a book I was reading would have a character’s stomach growl, or worse, had a surprise scene that took place inside a monster’s stomach (needless to say, I hate Finding Nemo.)

However, when Iwas the author/artist, I liked being able to take control of the things I feared. I could decide if a character’s stomach would growl here or not. Iwould decide if there’s a swallowed-whole scene. There was something powerful about that for me, that I could depict the things I hated seeing in others’ work and make it my own. I think it was a kind of exposure therapy, in a way (the tons of comics/writing I do about natural disasters is for similar reasons…I get freaked out even by ordinary thunderstorms…)

Of course I overdid it a lot, which you can see here in the form of me giving the black holes gross organic anatomy. I still do imagine in my current conception of this setting that the black holes have some processes of their space-time that function like a digestive tract, but it’s not a literal gross fleshy thing anymore. The whole “black holes have intense hunger pangs” thing is still true in this world though…I imagine they would be gravitational waves that shake space-time.

To be honest, I think this phobia is why I got so interested in black holes in the first place…because it lets me tangentially approach the concept of being swallowed whole and alive without anything literally being eaten. In real life, I don’t have a lot of interest in predatory animals like some people, because I feel so terrible for the prey. But when a supermassive black hole swallows a star, nothing is *really* being digested and dying, so it feels a lot less scary.