It’s Been THREE YEARS Since I Opened My Etsy Shop To Boldly Hold, And In Honor Of That I Am Having

I’m just  like my country; I’m young, scrappy, and hungry

-Hamilton

Thank fucking god! After three continuous days of doing nothing else, I have finally triumphed! I can have my life back! 

So I have this fun thing where I can't see out of my left eye so in gym class I got hit in the face with a basketball because I couldn't see it coming. Bent my glasses up pretty badly and gave me this nice bruise-cut-combo. Oh well. Isn't the first time and it won't be the last.

What the ever-loving fuck? 

I just finished watching After the Dark and I am...I am astounded. I think I loved it? But I'm so in shock at present that I can't decide. I certainly loved the plot and the characters were phenomenal...it was incredibly visually effective and beautiful...

But the ending! I have no idea how to handle it!

Please, if anyone has seen it, please please please talk to me about it. Please, I'm begging you. Someone needs to share in this delightful, brain-fucked agony. 

As a huge thank you to all of you who have supported the comic from the very start up to now and bore with the delays and dramas, let’s have a giveaway!

1st place: a FREE commission of any size (see here) as well as any product from my Society6/Redbubble, including shipping.

2nd place: an A5 sketchbook filled with art of the apollocomic gang and also character bios/sneak peeks of upcoming pages.

3rd place: same as 2nd place but in an A6 sketchbook, with storyboards of past and upcoming panels.

- Giveaway will end September 30th, winners will be messaged privately (people can get weirdly jealous and send rude messages so i’d rather leave it as your choice). All postage costs will be covered by me as this is when my student loan comes in, and also because I’m so thankful for all the donations you guys gave for the Gofundme - I’d be in serious trouble with my rent and whole financial situation without you guys and this is the only way i can think to repay your generosity! The Gofundme has ended, but there is a donation link in the sidebar at all times, and anything (even a dollar) is SO appreciated - art doesn’t do much for the bank account, sadly.

- Reblogs count as an extra entry, but aren’t necessary as likes are completely fine :) (If you left your url during the gofundme you get entered three times! also any donations from now until the end of the giveaway will also count as extra entries.) (also, must be following apollocomic!)

THANK YOU SO MUCH and good luck!

Does anyone know where to get a 2014 Sherlock calendar??? I've looked everywhere I can think of online and the only place still selling them is Amazon and they cost over a hundred bucks. If anyone knows, please please please help me out!

my intent is not to be mean but I am sure it will come off that way anyways so I'm sorry for asking, but I am genuinely curious how you, a sighted person, reading braille is any different than a sighted person cosplaying as matt murdock.

wow, i, uh. i don’t really have an easy way to answer this question.

cosplaying matt murdock - or any other disabled character - if you’re nondisabled is taking on a set of experiences that’s associated with a tremendous amount of stigma and systemic oppression for the sake of a costume. it’s approaching the tools and aspects of lived experience and turning them into something fun for a day that can be taken off and cast aside when it gets inconvenient.

 it’s an action that’s totally ignorant of the impact of media, the social and historical contexts of spectatorship and disability, the lack of prominent disabled characters as representation, and the real life accusations of ‘faking disability’ that disabled people face every day (and which severely impact availability of needed resources). it’s disrespectful and harmful. 

so. that’s cosplay. 

now, i’m working in a broad sense to become more knowledgeable about accessibility, alternative formats, and the representation and misrepresentation of disability so that i can explore these things in more formal academic contexts and hopefully work towards more relevant and valuable change. i’m probably going to graduate with a focus in disability studies. 

as far as braille comes in, i’m in the process of writing a 100+ page research paper on the representation of disability in daredevil. i’ve read about 200 daredevil comics, but i realized pretty early on that my paper would be absolutely valueless if my only point of attention was the comics themselves, so i did a lot of really varied reading and study. i am sighted, and the experiences matt murdock has as a blind person aren’t in any way something i would ever feel like i could just like, assume to be able to talk about. they’ll never be something i’ll be fully aware of, ever, but i think research remains important, because a paper like the one i’m writing doesn’t exist in the world and i think it’s valuable. 

i’m working on learning braille because of its inclusion/lack of inclusion in the daredevil comics and its subsequent connection to my research topic, but also because a major part of what i’m working on is making a piece of media that centers so fully on a blind character accessible to blind/visually impaired people. because i think structures of accountability are really really key to representational work, and right now that’s basically impossible. braille is one aspect of a potential ‘accessibility kit’ that i’m working on for comics. 

primarily, though, i’m learning braille because my attention to disability, representation of disability, accessibility, etc. extends well beyond this specific piece of media in a way that’s very distinct from the lack of awareness in cosplaying this character. i think it’s important to effectively address situations of inaccessibility and ableism, and doing so requires being knowledgeable and aware. i don’t know if things are improperly or incompletely labeled if i can’t read those labels. i don’t know how things should be formatted correctly, i don’t know if something’s a valid alternative format, i don’t have a method available to try to help make things suck less. like, many many many of the buildings at my college are incompletely brailled. so i’m working with the office of disability services and independently to try to approach that issue. 

a lot of people accessorize basic braille. in those contexts, braille is stripped of its significance. it’s reduced to a fun thing for sighted people to play with and throw aside. the same thing is true of ASL. those uses of braille and ASL are absolutely in the same sort of vein as cosplaying a disabled character, because they’re disrespectful and unaware. but i don’t think that learning braille and ASL are inherently damaging or thoughtless. learning braille allows me to become a resource for translation and a prompt towards accountability. 

ultimately it comes down to this: i’m working really hard to be aware of my positionality and how easy it is to accessorize experiences of disability. of course i fuck up, and i really encourage you to call me out if you see that happen. but for me, learning braille isn’t like. collecting action figures and t-shirts and reading as many comics as possible. it isn’t about the character. it’s about developing more tools to approach accessibility, accountability, representation, awareness. 

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