{"id":14730,"date":"2013-11-03T12:26:40","date_gmt":"2013-11-03T20:26:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2013\/11\/03\/14730.html"},"modified":"2013-11-03T12:26:40","modified_gmt":"2013-11-03T20:26:40","slug":"excellent-webcomic-the-secret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2013\/11\/03\/excellent-webcomic-the-secret\/","title":{"rendered":"Excellent webcomic: The Secret Knots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A while back, Jhayne pointed me to a webcomic called The Secret Knots<\/a>, by Juan Santapau. I just finally got around to reading through the archive<\/a>, and I wanted to post to recommend the comic.<\/p>\n

(There've been a total of about 90 strips so far; you can read through the whole archive in a couple hours.)<\/p>\n

Up until this year, it's mostly consisted of one-shot single-page stories, without repeating characters, posted anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months apart. (Though a few of the strips include tiny references-in-passing to past ones.) Recurring topics and themes include relationships, communication (or lack thereof) and language and stories, movies (usually fictional), writers and musicians and other creators (ditto), and a lovely slightly surreal tinge that reminds me of a particular prose author but I can't quite think who. I also like the art, which varies through a range of styles, and the language, which is often nicely poetic, and the tone, which is often a little oblique, sometimes a little nostalgic or elegiac or wistful, sometimes a little spooky.<\/p>\n

This year, the comic has been a continuous storyline, which is interesting so far, but so far isn't my favorite of the stories. So here are some strips from past years that I particularly liked, to whet your appetite if you haven't encountered this comic before:<\/p>\n

\n
Captions<\/a><\/dt>\n
About watching movies in Stryaic (the language of the tiny country of Strye), with subtitles.<\/dd>\n
Casual Reading<\/a><\/dt>\n
A wordless story about strangers meeting on public transit, and a book.<\/dd>\n
Leaving the city<\/a><\/dt>\n
I once planned to write a story based on a similar idea about signs, but never got around to it, and this takes a different approach anyway. Also a bit reminiscent of Rachel Kincaid's 2008 SH<\/cite> story “Tell Her<\/a>.”<\/dd>\n
Novel's ending<\/a><\/dt>\n
Art, life, metaphor.<\/dd>\n
We don't mean the same<\/a><\/dt>\n
Words have different effects on different people.<\/dd>\n
Matryoshka<\/a><\/dt>\n
Stories within stories.<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while back, Jhayne pointed me to a webcomic called The Secret Knots, by Juan Santapau. I just finally got…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14730\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}