The Penguin

This is a little touchy, so let me preface this by saying that I'm opposed to junk science...i.e., anti-vaccination adherents and so forth. Especially in the realm of medicine, junk science is irritating at best, and life-threatening at worst. I could write a whole other blog on the hows, whys and wherefores of culture, vis-a-vis junk science and belief systems. I'm fully confident in the scientific method and a science-based model of the universe - how it formed, how life evolved, the whole nine yards - the current "choose-your-own-adventure" model of science and belief among my fellow Americans has me appalled. "The centre cannot hold", and all that. We need more grounded, reality-based, reasonably skeptical humans in the world. Rather, I'm making a case for the self-fulfilling prophetic power of science fiction. The scientific community, by definition, needs to be skeptical; I'm not faulting them on that...it's just that I get so frustrated

I've been doing a lot of short comics stories lately - usually about 5 pages, although some are quite a bit longer. What I've realized is that certain genres are pretty tough nuts to crack, if you really want to do them right. One of the most difficult is the Time Travel story. Here's the problem: any story that involves time travel faces what I call "existential overload": if, say, an aspect of history can be changed (i.e., killing Hitler), then why not all of them? Why not a slurry of fanatical time-changers going back and changing things willy-nilly? How would this be regulated, except by a quasi-omnipotent order of "Watchers" who somehow ensure that time runs "correctly", whatever "correctly" means? Will only the time-changers know that history - and therefore existence - has been radically altered, or will everyone on earth retain their memories even when reality slips into a different mode? I ask all these questions becaus